Epstein Data Wiki

J. Stanley Pottinger

Properties2
tagsperson, plaintiffs-counsel, sdny, giuffre-v-maxwell, epstein-estate, 2016, 2017, 2019
aliasesJ. Stanley Pottinger, Stanley Pottinger, Stan Pottinger, Pottinger, J. Stanley

18 min read

J. Stanley Pottinger

⚠ what this page is about, and what it is not

This page records instruments he signed and messages he sent that are in the released files: filings in two federal actions, correspondence with prosecutors, and one subpoena directed at him by name. It is not a biography, and it deliberately does not tell the story of his clients. Two of them are protected here: a non-party witness whose name is barred on every sheet she appears on, and a plaintiff who asked the court for leave to proceed anonymously. Neither is named, described or reconstructed anywhere on this page.

Role hereLawyer for people suing in the Epstein matter, and for a non-party witness resisting discovery in Giuffre v. Maxwell1
Signed instruments in the releaseAt least twelve, across two federal actions in the Southern District of New York, each bearing /s/ J. Stanley Pottinger2
Earliest act recorded here29 February 2016, a meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan3
Latest7 September 2021, when Ghislaine Maxwell’s counsel moved to subpoena him4
Former office”Former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division”: ⚠ as printed on a single invitation in the release, not from any Justice Department record in it5
⚠ Signature typeThe court filings carry a conformed electronic /s/, not ink. One of them is nonetheless sworn under penalty of perjury1
Firms named on his filingsJ. Stanley Pottinger PLLC; Edwards Pottinger LLC2

The document to read first

On 22 February 2017 he swore and filed a four-page declaration in Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433 in the Southern District of New York. It is headed “DECLARATION OF STAN POTTINGER IN SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER FOR NON PARTY WITNESS”, and it opens:

I, Stan Pottinger, declare that the below is true and correct to the best of my knowledge as follows:

  1. I am a lawyer and duly licensed to practice in New York before this Court pursuant to this Court’s Order granting my Application to Appear Pro Hac Vice.

It closes: “I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.”1

Its substance is two sentences, and both are blacked out. Paragraphs 3 and 4 describe what is attached as Sealed Exhibit 1 and Sealed Exhibit 2, and on this copy the descriptions are covered by solid bars. So is the plaintiff’s name in the caption, and so is the name of the client after the words Counsel for. What the sheet establishes is the act, not the content: he put his own sworn statement on the record to keep a non-party witness from having to produce documents and sit for a second deposition.1

⚠ A trap on that sheet. The electronic filing stamp reads Case 1:15-cv-07433-LAP and the caption beneath it reads Case No.: 15-cv-07433-RWS. The same case, two judges’ initials: the caption is from when the case was before Judge Robert W. Sweet, the header stamp from after reassignment. A date or a docket taken from one and attributed to the other will be wrong.1

Eight instruments in nine weeks

The declaration is not isolated. Between 13 February and 26 April 2017 he signed a connected run of papers, all of them about one question: whether a non-party witness could be made to produce more documents and be deposed a second time.

DateInstrument
13 Feb 2017Non-party’s Responses and Objections to the defendant’s subpoena requests, 27 pages2
22 Feb 2017ECF 640, Motion for Protective Order for Non-Party Witness. ⚠ The filed sheet is a sealed placeholder reading “PAGES 1-7 / FILE UNDER SEAL”, with his certificate of service behind it6
22 Feb 2017ECF 641, the sworn declaration above1
7 Mar 2017ECF 700, reply in support of the protective order and opposition to the motion to compel, 29 pages. ⚠ Later struck from the record under a sealing order2
7 Mar 2017ECF 701, a second declaration2
13 Mar 2017ECF 709, the reply re-filed with further redaction, and ECF 710, his letter to the judge saying the added redactions “do not affect the original un-redacted reply … submitted to the Court”2
13 Mar 2017ECF 719, the letter motion described below7
26 Apr 2017ECF 871, response opposing a renewed motion to compel, 17 pages2

A judge’s hand, on a letter he signed

ECF 719 is worth seeing rather than summarising. It is a one-page letter of 13 March 2017 to Judge Robert W. Sweet, asking for a one-week continuance so that the non-party’s motion for a protective order would be heard at the same time as the defendant’s motion to compel. His reason is precise:

While at the hearing on March 9, 2017, the Court addressed and resolved the ore tenus motion requesting the redaction of the non-party’s witness name, that did not address the substance of the Non-Party’s Motion for Protective Order which seeks relief from requiring the non-party to sit for a second deposition or produce additional documents.

Across the foot of that same sheet, in ink, the judge wrote “So ordered”, signed it, and added “USDJ” and “3-15-17”. The page carries the request and the answer to it in one image: a chambers receipt stamp of 13 March at the top right, the filing stamp of 15 March beside it, and the handwriting between them.7

⚠ This is the only place in this material where an act of his and a judge’s response to it are on the same sheet. Everywhere else the two are separate documents, or the answer is missing entirely: no order granting or denying ECF 640 appears in the release at all, though the same docket abstracts do print other orders from the same period.8

Before the litigation: the approach to the Southern District

On 29 February 2016 he was one of three lawyers who met an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan about Jeffrey Epstein. The Government’s own later brief records the meeting and names the three.3

On 3 May 2016 he sent that office an e-mail naming a man he said had been described to him as a recruiter. The message and its handling are already set out in full on Daniel Siad, which was published before this page; it is not re-narrated here, and readers wanting the document and its date questions should go there.9

On 29 December 2018, over an Edwards Pottinger LLC block naming him a partner, he sent two messages within four hours supplying a correspondent with routes to the identities of Epstein’s Florida-era victims and their counsel, noting that “there are 40 names attached to the NPA”.10

In mid-January 2020 he forwarded a large victims’-counsel distribution about the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General’s complaint against the Epstein estate, adding a line of his own: that since the person in question “claims to have worked on the USVI attorney general’s complaint for the last 4 months, presumably he has some knowledge of the underlying facts. We will make contact and inquire.”11

The 2019 action, and how it ended

Five days after Epstein died, on 14 August 2019, he signed and filed a 26-page complaint in the Southern District of New York against the co-executors of the Epstein estate and three Epstein entities, demanding trial by jury. He filed an amended complaint on 20 August, and on the same day moved for leave to let his client proceed anonymously. On 27 August he filed his own application for admission to that court, attesting: “I have never been convicted of a felony. I have never been censured, suspended, disbarred or denied admission or readmission by any court.”12

The action ended on 8 December 2020 by joint stipulation, so-ordered, reciting that “due to Plaintiff’s resolution of her claim(s) against Defendants via the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, this action shall be DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE.”13

⚠ That last document is signed with the firm’s block and not with his own /s/. The outcome belongs to the case; this page does not put it in his hand.13

And then a subpoena, directed at him

On 7 September 2021, as the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell approached trial, her counsel moved for authority to serve a Rule 17(c) subpoena on him by name. Among the things it demanded were any contingent-fee or engagement agreement, and any submission he had made to the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program.4

⚠ The release contains the motion papers and nothing after them. No response of his, and no order, was found.8 ⚠ The attachment also recites physical evidence he is said to have viewed at a survivor’s home in 2016, and it prints her town. That recital is a defence lawyer’s quotation from a memoir, not a finding, it is already carried at that tier on Maria Farmer, and neither the description nor the place name is reproduced here.4

”Who’s Stan Pottinger?”

On 16 June 2021, two prosecutors in the Southern District of New York preparing for a suppression hearing in the Maxwell case put the question to each other in writing. One asked: “Another Q: who’s Stan Pottinger?” The answer came back: “Pottinger was a lawyer at Boies Schiller who represented the plaintiff in the civil action.”14

⚠ The same sheet carries a trap. It also attaches two letters about an All Writs Act application, and those letters are not his: the message says “the two letters we submitted in connection with our All Writs Application”, and the “we” is the U.S. Attorney’s Office answering a different question in the same thread.14

What this page does not carry

No deposition of him, and no sworn oral testimony by him, was found in the release. Against a live control the same queries return 80 documents for another lawyer in the same litigation and 121 for the oath formula itself, so the search reaches what it is looking for.8

Almost nothing about his career before this matter is in these files. A search pairing his name with the Justice Department division he once led returns one page, and it is a film-screening invitation.5

⚠⚠ Two bodies of third-party material in the release name him and are deliberately excluded. Both are written by people presenting as survivors. This desk could find no disposition of any kind for either: no charge, no suit, no finding, and no denial. Under this wiki’s rule, material of that shape is recorded as existing and not summarised: no allegation is stated, nothing is quoted, and no identity is resolved. The Kessler page excludes documents from one of the same bodies for the same reason and explains why.15

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Declaration of Stan Pottinger, Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), ECF 641, filed 02/22/17, 4 pages. EFTA02802253 p.1, read at the image at 400 dpi. Quoted from the opening and the jurat. ⚠ The signature is a conformed electronic /s/ J. Stanley Pottinger, not ink, and this page does not call it one; the declaration is nevertheless sworn under penalty of perjury, which is a separate thing from how it was signed. ⚠ The plaintiff’s name in the caption, the descriptions of both sealed exhibits, and the client named after “Counsel for” are all covered by solid bars on this copy and none is supplied. ⚠ The two case numbers (-LAP in the electronic stamp, -RWS in the caption) reflect the reassignment of the case and are both correct for what they label. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. The count, and why it is stated as a floor. Every sheet carries the ECF stamp Case … Document N Filed MM/DD/YY Page x of y, and that triple is an exact deduplication key. On it, the release holds fourteen distinct instruments bearing /s/ J. Stanley Pottinger across the two actions. This page says “at least twelve” because twelve are ECF-header-verified and the pre-verification pass image-checked only four of the headers; the conservative figure is used until the rest are confirmed. ⚠⚠ A METHOD WARNING. The desk’s usual greedy 8-gram containment dedup over-merges on this subject and returns 13, fusing ECF 641 with ECF 701 at 0.62 and ECF 871 with ECF 709 at 0.45: two pairs of genuinely separate filings that read alike because he reused his own form and his own citation strings. A reported “13 instruments” would be wrong. Use the ECF header here, not containment. Individual filings: 13 Feb 2017 responses and objections at EFTA02789569; ECF 700 at EFTA02789678; ECF 701 at EFTA02802619; ECF 710 at EFTA02802753; ECF 871 at EFTA02804315. Read from the text layer except where a footnote says otherwise. ⚠ Firm-block signatures are not his: several filings in the 2019 action carry a firm block listing three attorneys, and the /s/ on those is not demonstrably his hand; none is counted here. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. The meeting of 29 February 2016. Recorded in the Government’s own brief, EFTA00095067 p.88, which states that an Assistant U.S. Attorney “met with three attorneys — Peter Skinner of Boies Schiller, Brad Edwards, and Stan Pottinger — regarding Jeffrey Epstein”; an investigative memorandum of the same account is at EFTA00090426 p.1. ⚠ Read from the text layer; not image-verified. ⚠ This is the weakest item on the page: it is two later narratives of a meeting, not a contemporaneous record he made, and it is presented as such. ↩ ↩2

  4. Motion for authority to serve a Rule 17(c) subpoena, 7 September 2021, in the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell. EFTA02832984 pp.2 and 5. ⚠ Read from the text layer. A DOJ-OGR-* copy of the same document exists and returns HTTP 403 and cannot be rendered, which is why the EFTA copy is cited. The subpoena is directed to him by name and demands, among other categories, a contingent-fee or engagement agreement and any submission to the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program. ⚠⚠ Attachment A prints a survivor’s town and recites physical evidence he is said to have viewed at her home. Neither the recital nor the place name is reproduced here. That material is a defence lawyer’s quotation of a published memoir, it is an assertion and not a finding, and it is already carried at that tier on Maria Farmer. ⚠ Attachment A also names six prosecutors in its definition of “United States Attorney”; nothing turns on that here and they are not listed. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. EFTA01196917 p.1, an invitation to a film screening on which “David Boies and Stan Pottinger, Former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division” invite guests. ⚠ Read from the text layer. ⚠ This is the only page in the release that connects him to that office, against a live control of 470 documents for the phrase “Assistant Attorney General”, and it is an invitation, not a Justice Department record. The infobox states it as what it is. Searches pairing his name with the matters he is publicly associated with from that period return 0. ↩ ↩2

  6. ECF 640, Motion for Protective Order for Non-Party Witness, filed 22 February 2017. EFTA02802248 pp.1 and 3, read at the image. ⚠ The filed sheet is a placeholder, not the motion: it reads “PAGES 1-7 / FILE UNDER SEAL”, with the certificate of service behind it. The argument itself is not in this copy and this page does not describe it. ↩

  7. ECF 719, letter motion of 13 March 2017 to the Hon. Robert W. Sweet, filed 15 March 2017, one page. EFTA02802793 p.1, read at the image at 400 dpi. The judge’s disposition is handwritten in ink across the foot of the sheet: “So ordered”, a signature, “USDJ”, “3-15-17”. The sheet also carries a chambers receipt stamp of 13 March 2017 and the court’s electronic filing stamp of 15 March. ⚠ His personal e-mail address is printed in the letterhead and is not reproduced here, nor is any other contact value from this or any other sheet cited on this page. ⚠ The client is referred to throughout as “Non-Party” and “her” and is not named on this page. ⚠ A curiosity of the redaction: the middle name of the courthouse itself is blacked out in the address block. ↩ ↩2

  8. Absences, each established against a live positive control, and each stated as a floor rather than a certainty. No deposition of him in the release: the three name-form queries return 0, against a control of 80 documents for the deposition of another lawyer in the same litigation. No sworn oral testimony: his name with “having been first duly sworn” returns 0, against 121 documents for that formula alone. No order resolving ECF 640: every occurrence of that docket number on both docket abstracts in the release was read, and no order, denial, grant or termination appears; the same abstracts do print other orders from the same period, so the abstracts are legible and complete enough to have shown one. No engagement or contingency agreement of his exists in the release as a document, though a declaration in the Giuffre case describes one as a sealed exhibit, EFTA02789500 p.2. No response to the Rule 17(c) subpoena and no order on it. ⚠ Each of these says what was not found, not what does not exist. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. The e-mail of 3 May 2016 and the questions about its exhibit dating are set out on Daniel Siad, published and reviewed before this page. EFTA01324971 p.1. ⚠ This page deliberately does not restate that page’s findings as though they were new, and does not set any second copy of the message beside the one that page cites. ↩

  10. Two e-mails of 29 December 2018, timed 12:48 and 16:04. EFTA00068264 pp.1-2. ⚠ Read from the text layer. The quoted fragment is his. ⚠ Nothing identifying any victim is reproduced, and the routes he describes are not described here: the page records that the messages supplied them, and stops. ⚠ The signature block carries the firm’s address and contact values; none is reproduced. ↩

  11. E-mails of 15-16 January 2020. EFTA00104340 p.1 and EFTA00096367 p.1. ⚠ Read from the text layer. The added line is quoted in full. ↩

  12. The 2019 action. An action filed 14 August 2019 in the Southern District of New York against the co-executors of the Epstein estate and three Epstein entities, brought for a plaintiff who moved for leave to proceed anonymously. Complaint, 26 pages, signed By: /s/ J. Stanley Pottinger: EFTA02845999 p.26, read at the image. Civil cover sheet signed as “SIGNATURE OF ATTORNEY OF RECORD”: EFTA02846025 p.2. First amended complaint, 30 pages, 20 August: EFTA02846045 p.30. Notice of motion and memorandum for leave to proceed anonymously, 20 August: EFTA02846083 p.1, EFTA02846075 p.7. His own pro hac vice motion, 27 August: EFTA02846088 p.1. ⚠⚠ THE CAPTION OF THIS ACTION IS TWO INITIALS AND THEY ARE NOT PRINTED ON THIS WIKI, HERE OR ANYWHERE. The action is cited by court, year, parties sued and identifier only. ⚠ The first word of the firm block on the complaint is blacked out by the producing party and is not supplied. ↩

  13. Joint Stipulation for Dismissal, so-ordered, 7-8 December 2020. EFTA02846454 p.1. ⚠ Read from the text layer. ⚠ Signed with the firm block, not with his own /s/, which is why this page attributes the outcome to the action and not to him. ↩ ↩2

  14. E-mail exchange between two Southern District of New York prosecutors, 16 June 2021. EFTA00032757 p.1, second copy at EFTA00015277 p.1. ⚠ Read from the text layer. ⚠⚠ A MISATTRIBUTION TRAP ON THIS SHEET: it also carries two attached letters concerning an All Writs Act application, and the surrounding message reads “the two letters we submitted in connection with our All Writs Application”. The “we” is the U.S. Attorney’s Office, not this lawyer. The pre-verification pass nearly attributed them to him and flagged it; they are not his and are not counted among his instruments. ↩ ↩2

  15. Two bodies of material, excluded. Both are authored by people presenting as survivors, both name him, and no disposition of either could be found in the release — no charge, no suit, no finding, no denial. This page records that they exist and does nothing else with them: no allegation is stated, nothing is quoted, no identity is resolved, and no identifier is listed, because listing the identifiers would be a route to the material rather than a notice about it. The practice follows the Kessler page, which excludes documents from one of the same bodies and explains the reasoning at length. ⚠ Whether anything further should be done with this material is an editor’s decision and is recorded as one; it is also an external-records question rather than a corpus question, because the corpus contains no resolution. ↩

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