Epstein Data Wiki

Richard M. Berman

Properties2
tagsperson, judge, sdny, 2019-indictment, mcc, court, bail, nolle-prosequi
aliasesRichard M. Berman, Richard Berman, Berman, Richard, Hon. Richard M. Berman, Judge Richard M. Berman, Richard M. Berman, U.S.D.J., Richard Berman (judge)

42 min read

Two different men named Berman run through these documents

Richard M. Berman is the United States District Judge who tried the 2019 federal case against Jeffrey Epstein. He is the subject of this page. Geoffrey S. Berman was the United States Attorney who prosecuted it. He has his own page. They are not the same man and they held opposite roles in the same courtroom. Where both appear on one sheet they are told apart by position, not by name: the judge’s name sits in the address block at the head of a letter and after the words “SO ORDERED” at its foot, and the United States Attorney’s sits in the signature block. The government’s letter of 19 August 2019 carries both, one above the other.1

OfficeUnited States District Judge, Southern District of New York. The commercial law report of his decision in this case describes him as a Senior District Judge2
The caseUnited States v. Jeffrey Epstein, 19 Cr. 490 (RMB). The docket records it filed 2 July 2019, terminated 29 August 2019, and assigned to him3
What he signedThirteen orders, each dated and listed on the court’s own docket, from a sealing order on 11 July to the dismissal on 29 August4
The rulingBail refused. A thirty-three page Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, 18 July 2019, reported at 425 F. Supp. 3d 30652
In his own words”No matter the answer to this question and no matter what has been said in Court in analyzing the matter, this is a criminal case and the Defendant, Jeffrey Epstein, is innocent of the Federal charges alleged against him now and until such time, if it comes, that a jury or the Court finds (after fair and thorough consideration of the facts and the law) that he is guilty.”5
The question he askedTwo days after the death he wrote to the warden: “To my knowledge, it has never been definitively explained what the BOP concluded about that incident.”6
The answer he gotThe same day: “Accordingly, I cannot divulge any information about the prior investigation at this time.”7
The hearingHe refused to dismiss the indictment on the papers and ordered a public hearing instead, over an argument in print that he should not89
His markOn one order and one letter he signs his full name in ink. On three other orders he writes only the initials “RMB”. All five marks are read at the page image10
Reach in the released files427 documents on his own name forms, and that is a floor. The bare surname reaches 1,993, most of which is somebody else1112

Richard M. Berman was the federal judge who had the 2019 Epstein prosecution and lost the defendant before he could try it. In the eight weeks between the indictment and the dismissal he refused Epstein bail in a thirty-three page opinion, set a trial calendar running into the following summer, wrote to the warden of the jail where Epstein died and was told he could not be answered, held a public hearing on the government’s motion to dismiss over an argument in print that he should not, and then added a sentence to the dismissal order by way of a last word.

Almost everything on this page is the paper a judge generates about the conduct of a proceeding: orders, endorsements, scheduling, the docket, and what he said from the bench. That body of material records what he decided and why, and it can be read in full without reproducing anything said in that courtroom about any complainant. Nothing of that kind appears here.

The case, and the thirteen things he signed

The docket records the case as filed on 2 July 2019, assigned to Judge Richard M. Berman, and terminated on 29 August 2019. The docket number carries his initials: 19 Cr. 490 (RMB).3

The court’s own docket records thirteen orders signed by Judge Richard M. Berman in those eight weeks.4 They run from the routine to the decisive, and several of them are the only record of what he thought about a request put to him:

DateEntryWhat it did
11 July 20199Granted a defence motion to seal: “Defense motion granted. Materials to be hand delivered to Chambers (and opposing counsel) by 9:00 AM, July 12, 2019.”4
12 July 201910Refused the government more time: “Application for extension of time denied. (Hard to imagine it would take the Govt extra time to review submission.)“4
15 July 201914”The Clerk is respectfully requested to docket the enclosed documents which were discussed at today’s bail hearing.”4
16 July 201916Granted a speedy trial exclusion: “Application Granted. SO ORDERED.”4
16 July 201917Admitted Martin G. Weinberg to appear for the defence4
17 July 201926Moved the next day’s conference from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.4
18 July 201932Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, thirty-three pages45
25 July 201938Entered a protective order governing confidential material4
29 July 201941Directed counsel to “meet and confer prior to Wednesday’s conference and to devise a mutually acceptable schedule for the balance of the case, including discovery, motion practice, and trial.”4
21 August 201948Ordered a public hearing on the government’s motion to dismiss48
26 August 201950Moved that hearing to a larger courtroom413
27 August 201951Denied an application to intervene: “Application respectfully denied. SO ORDERED.”4
29 August 201952Entered the order of nolle prosequi dismissing the indictment414

Ten days before the death, the schedule he had ordered counsel to produce was on the docket and ran to the following summer. At the conference of 31 July the court set a motion schedule with defence motions due 13 September 2019 and argument on 28 October, a second round of pretrial motions due 10 January 2020 with argument on 12 March, and a conference for 8 June 2020.15

Bail, 18 July 2019

The bail hearing was held on 15 July and the ruling came three days later as a thirty-three page Decision & Order Remanding Defendant. It opens by saying what the ruling is not:5

This ruling follows the Court’s bail hearing held on July 15, 2019. The issue before the Court is whether the Defendant should continue to be remanded (incarcerated) pending trial or whether he should be granted release while the case proceeds. No matter the answer to this question and no matter what has been said in Court in analyzing the matter, this is a criminal case and the Defendant, Jeffrey Epstein, is innocent of the Federal charges alleged against him now and until such time, if it comes, that a jury or the Court finds (after fair and thorough consideration of the facts and the law) that he is guilty.

It adds, in the same paragraph, “It should also be borne in mind that the Court has not (yet) been presented with a motion to dismiss the Indictment.”5

The order makes two independent findings. On dangerousness: “In sum, based upon all of the proffers and evidence set forth at pp. 10-21 above, the Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Epstein poses a danger to other persons and to the community.” On flight: “The Court finds that the Government has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Epstein is a flight risk.”1617 It notes that either finding would have been enough on its own, quoting the rule that “[A] finding of either danger to the community or risk of flight will be sufficient to detain the defendant pending trial.”16

What the court asked for and did not get

In the same section the order records a request the court had made and an answer that never came:

The Court requested from the Defense all application materials that Mr. Epstein may have submitted to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, believing that the Department would not initiate the waiver of Mr. Epstein’s sex offense registration on its own. No such materials have been received by the Court as of this date.

It goes on: “It has received no materials from the Defense regarding sex offender applications or proceedings in those two jurisdictions”, meaning the Virgin Islands and Florida.16 The court put the request on the record, recorded that nothing came back, and ruled anyway. A fuller account of the registration question is at the New Mexico registration page.

Why the bail package failed

The order’s closing pages go through the defence’s own proposal point by point.1819

The Court finds that the Defendant’s proposed bail package is inadequate. Among its deficiencies are these:

(1) The bail package is not accompanied or supported by audited or certified financial statements, including details of income and expenses and debt obligations. There is no affidavit from Mr. Epstein.

What the defence had filed instead, the order records, was this:18

As noted, Defense counsel submitted a cursory one page “Asset Summary - June 30, 2019” on Mr. Epstein’s behalf in which he discloses several categories of assets totaling $559,120,954.

The order goes on to record that counsel had proposed at the hearing “that it would take a few days to prepare accurate financials for Mr. Epstein”, and “also suggested that he would do so (only) if the Court were agreeable to granting bail.” The court’s view of that:18

This “offer” appears disingenuous for a person as wealthy and experienced in financial matters as Mr. Epstein.

On the proposal that Epstein be confined to his own house under private guards, with trustees living there to supervise him: “(2) The defense bail package proposes excessive involvement of the Court in routine aspects of Mr. Epstein’s proposed home confinement. This is not the Court’s function.”19 On the offer to waive extradition: “(3) The Defense proposal to give advance consent to extradition and waiver of extradition rights is, in the Court’s view, an empty gesture. And, it comes into pay only after Mr. Epstein has fled the Court’s jurisdiction.”19

The last page carries the order itself in two lines, over his initials: “Based upon the forgoing, the Government’s motion for remand (detention) is granted and the Defense motion for pretrial release is denied.”20

Epstein appealed. The appeal was withdrawn before the Second Circuit ruled on it: after his death the parties filed a stipulation withdrawing it and the mandate issued on 21 August 2019.21

The death, and the letter the warden would not answer

Epstein died at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on 10 August 2019. The warden notified the court the same day, writing jointly to the Chief Judge and to Judge Berman that Epstein “had been found unresponsive in his cell in the Special Housing Unit at around 6:30 am”, that an autopsy was pending, that the FBI was investigating and that the Attorney General had asked the Department’s Inspector General to look into the matter as well.22

Two days later Judge Berman wrote back on chambers letterhead, over his full signature in ink, and asked one question:6

Thank you for your letter of August 10, 2019 regarding the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Epstein’s death is a tragedy to everyone involved in his case.

One open question, among others, is whether the investigations referenced in your letter will include the incident at MCC involving Mr. Epstein on or about July 23, 2019. To my knowledge, it has never been definitively explained what the BOP concluded about that incident.

The warden replied the same day, and the reply is a refusal:7

I can confirm that, although an internal investigation was completed regarding the July 23, 2019 incident, the current investigations by the FBI and OIG will include this incident as well. Accordingly, I cannot divulge any information about the prior investigation at this time.

So the record holds a judge asking what had been concluded about an incident in his own defendant’s cell on 23 July, and the Bureau of Prisons answering that an internal investigation had been completed and that he could not be told what it found. Both letters were docketed on 14 August, two days after they were written.23 The 23 July incident, and what the Inspector General later found about it, are covered at the page on the death at the MCC.

Both letters were copied to the Chief Judge, the district executive, the United States Marshal, an assistant United States attorney and Epstein’s own counsel. The judge’s letter was copied to the jail’s supervisory staff attorney as well.67

The hearing he was told not to hold

On 19 August the United States Attorney’s office asked the court to approve an attached proposed order of nolle prosequi, on the ground that the death abated the prosecution. The letter went out over the United States Attorney’s printed name, signed by three assistant United States attorneys; the proposed order attached to it carries the United States Attorney’s own signature in ink. The order’s “SO ORDERED” block was left empty, and its date line gave the month and the year with the day left blank on a printed rule.2425

The court did not sign it. On 21 August it entered an order of two short paragraphs:8

The Court will conduct a brief hearing on Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 10:30 a.m. in connection with the nolle prosequi order proposed to the Court on August 19, 2019 by the United States Attorney.

The Court believes that where, as here, a defendant has died before any judgment has been entered against him, the public may still have an informational interest in the process by which the prosecutor seeks dismissal of an indictment.

It directed that counsel for the government and for the deceased defendant “will be heard”, and that “Counsel for the victims and the victims will also be heard, if they wish to be.” The hearing was set for Courtroom 17B.8 Five days later he moved it: “The hearing scheduled for Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 10:30 a.m. will be held in Courtroom 110 of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse located at 40 Foley Square.”13

The argument in print, and the answer from the bench

The same day he moved the courtroom, the New York Law Journal carried a piece headed “The Judge in Epstein’s Case Should Not Turn the Dismissal Into a Drama for the Victims”, by Bruce Green and Rebecca Roiphe, dated 26 August 2019. It quoted his order back at him and said that normally “the court would simply grant the request. The judge would not schedule a hearing and he definitely would not allow the victims to speak. And if he did hold a hearing, whatever informational interests the victims may have would be served by affording them a chance to attend the hearing, not by giving them a speaking role.”9 It was circulated inside the prosecutors’ office on the morning of the hearing.9

On that morning the court read it into the record and answered it from the bench at length.26

Incidentally, while I’m on this subject, I got some help today from the New York Law Journal from two professors who write that a hearing is — let me tell you exactly what they said. They say, in part, that this is an odd moment for transparency in a criminal case. I think that is an odd sentence to hear about, transparency in a criminal case.

They go on to say that normally, if a prosecutor seeks to dismiss an indictment for such an obviously worthy reason, the court would simply grant the request. As to that statement, I respectfully say it is incorrect as a matter of law.

Of the rest of it, including the passage about a speaking role, his reply was: “I read it. It was incredulous. I’m still incredulous. I don’t quite understand at all.”26

He put his own view of what a hearing is for:27

A few may differ on this, but public hearings are exactly what judges do. Hearings promote transparency and they provide the court with insights and information which the court may not otherwise be aware of.

Earlier in the same remarks he had made an observation about the article’s authorship, hedged in his own words and said on the public record:27

On a somewhat more serious note, don’t quote me on this, but it is my understanding that one of the authors of that article is himself counsel in one of the Epstein-related cases. I was surprised to learn that very recently. I’m certain it is true. I was also surprised that that aspect was not disclosed in the Law Journal.

The court did not say which author it meant, and this page does not settle that. An assistant United States attorney who was in the courtroom wrote to colleagues the same afternoon, in a message the released files carry, with the same account of the remark in slightly different words:9

The judge addressed it in his first ten minutes of addressing the court. He also mentioned that one of the authors — though not disclosed in the article— is counsel in one of the civil cases.

The rule he was proceeding under

On the same morning he set out the authority for what he was doing, and the point he took the dismissal rule to turn on:28

The government in its motion concludes that Epstein’s death abates these proceedings. In accordance with Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 57(b), I determined to hold a public hearing and I notified the victims that they would be given the opportunity to be heard before any final action on the motion. That is the purpose also of today’s proceeding. I would do that every time.

On Rule 48(a), which allows the government to dismiss an indictment only “with leave of the court,” he noted that the leave requirement “was added as an amendment to the original draft of Rule 48, which had originally provided for automatic dismissal upon the motion of the government”, and concluded: “This proviso, in my judgment, is clearly directed toward an independent judicial assessment of the public interest in dismissing the indictment.”28

The hearing ran to eighty-six transcript pages. The court’s minute entry records that it “addresses audience re: proposed nolle prosequi”, then “hears argument/statements from attorneys”, then “hears statements from counsel for victims and from victims.”29 Near the end the court asked whether anyone who had not been heard still wished to be, and then said:30

Well, OK then. All I have to say, really, is thank you, all of you, for your participation in today’s remarkable hearing.

It then thanked the attorneys on both sides and those representing the others who had been heard. On the final sheet he closed with these words:31

Finally, we’re also grateful to the press for their very diligent coverage of seemingly every detail of this case. That concludes our work for today and we stand adjourned.

The dismissal, and the sentence he added

The order entered on 29 August is the government’s own proposed order with three things added to it.1425

The proposal the government filed on 19 August left the court’s block blank: the day not filled in, and no mark at all above the rule printed over his name and title.25 The version entered ten days later as docket entry 52 fills the date, adds the initials “RMB” in ink over that line, and carries a typed sentence that is on no earlier copy of the document:14

The Court incorporates by reference the transcript of the hearing held on 8 /27 /19 in its entirety and underscores the significance of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3771.

Read against the government’s two-page draft, the added sentence does two things. It puts the whole of the hearing, rather than the order, on the record as the court’s reasons for the dismissal; and it ends the case on the name of the statute under which the court had insisted the hearing be held.

Higher up the same sheet, the United States Attorney’s ink signature sits above his own printed name and title, over a paragraph directing the dismissal “with leave of the Court”. Two men named Berman appear on that sheet, one above the other, on the document that closed the case.14

After the case ended

The docket does not stop at termination.

A transcript of the 27 August hearing was filed on 3 September.21 On 4 September the docket records a letter to the court from Professor Bruce A. Green of Fordham University School of Law, dated 30 August, written because, as the docket puts it, “Yesterday, I was provided a partial transcript of the August 27, 2019 hearing in the above-captioned case, and I am writing to clarify the record.” The court answered the same day: “Thank you for your letter of August 30, 2019. I appreciate your taking the time to clarify the record.”32

Bruce Green is one of the two named authors of the article the court had criticised from the bench three days earlier.9 Neither his letter nor the court’s reply is in the files read for this page, and the docket does not say what the record was that needed clarifying. The sequence raises the question of whether the clarification concerned the court’s remark about the article’s authorship; nothing read for this page answers it, and this page does not assert that it did.

Two further entries are worth recording. On 8 October 2019, six weeks after the case was terminated, the clerk recorded twice in succession: “SEALED DOCUMENT placed in vault.”33 A third such entry had been made on 22 July, four days after the remand order and dated the same day as Epstein’s notice of appeal.34 The docket says nothing about what any of the three contains, and this page draws no inference about it; what the record shows is that three documents in this case were sealed, one during it and two after it was over.

How much of the released files is actually about him

His name reaches 427 documents in the released files, counted over the two full forms of it that occur there.11 Four things have to be said alongside that figure.

The bare surname is not a key for this man. “Berman” alone reaches 1,993 documents. Those partition cleanly, and the partition is the reason this page is careful: 427 of them name Richard M. Berman, 982 name Geoffrey S. Berman, 125 name both, and 709 carry the surname with no forename at all.11 Geoffrey Berman’s population is more than twice the size of his, so a page built on the surname would be substantially about the other man.

“Judge Berman” is not a key either. The phrase reaches 363 documents. Of those, 187 also carry Richard M. Berman’s forename, 62 carry Geoffrey Berman’s, 53 carry both, and 167 carry neither, which means that on nearly half of them the phrase alone does not settle who is meant.11

And most of his own 427 is paper addressed to him, not paper he wrote. Of the 427, 173 carry a signature-block form of his name and 213 carry an address-block or salutation form; 116 carry both, which is exactly what a party’s letter with his order attached looks like, and 157 carry neither.35 Neither figure is a count of his acts. The count of his acts in this case is the one the court kept itself: thirteen signed orders, listed above.4

And the 427 is not pure. Fifty-six of them are reached only by the bare form “Richard Berman”, which other men also answer to. Twenty of those fifty-six were drawn at random with a fixed seed, the draw repeated to confirm it reproduces, and each was opened and read for bearer alone: nineteen are this judge and one is a different man entirely, in an arbitration case name that has nothing to do with this matter.12

What this page does not cover

This page is about the conduct of a proceeding. It does not reproduce anything said in that courtroom, or written in any filing, about any complainant: not a name, not an initial, not an age, not a circumstance, not a count. Nothing of that kind is quoted, summarised, characterised or counted here. Where the court’s own orders and remarks refer to those who were heard, they do so as a class and name nobody, and they are quoted as the court wrote them.

Nor does it cover his career before or outside this case. The released files read for this page carry no appointment record, no biography, and nothing about any later assignment; the one biographical fact in them is the law report’s description of him as a Senior District Judge at the time he signed the remand order.2 Searches of the released files for his sitting by designation on any appellate court returned nothing: four separate phrasings returned no document in his population, against a control on his own judicial title returning 109.36

Notes

On the citations below. Documents in the DOJ-OGR series were read at the page image at their native 300 pixels per inch, and the Bates stamp printed at the foot of each sheet is named. Documents in the EFTA series were read at the page image at their native 96 pixels per inch; the foot of every such sheet cited here was measured and carries no printed Bates stamp, so those are cited by document and by the page number the sheet itself prints. No stamp has been derived from any identifier.

Where the machine-read text and the paper disagree, this page follows the paper, and says so. Seven places where that happens are disclosed in the footnotes below. In every one the paper is plainly right and the released text has simply misread it: a word loses a letter, a full stop comes out as a comma or disappears, a stray dash appears. None of these is anything a producing party withheld, and the point of recording them is that a reader checking this page against a text search rather than against the sheet will find words that do not match.

Footnotes

  1. Letter of the United States Attorney’s Office to the court, 19 August 2019, docket entry 47. DOJ-OGR-00000627, the single sheet, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000627, read at the page image. The address block at the head of the sheet sets the judge’s name on its own line, with “United States District Judge” and “Southern District of New York” stacked beneath it; the salutation reads “Dear Judge Berman:”; and the signature block at the foot sets the United States Attorney’s name on its own line above “United States Attorney”, over a “By:” line signed in ink above the printed names of three assistant United States attorneys. Each of those blocks is stacked on the sheet and none of them is run together into a single quoted line here. The structural test used throughout this page is that one: the judge is in the address block and after “SO ORDERED”, and the United States Attorney is in the signature block. ↩

  2. United States v. Epstein, 425 F. Supp. 3d 306 (S.D.N.Y. 2019), the published report of the remand decision. EFTA00066191 p. 1, read at the page image at native 96 ppi; the running head “425 FEDERAL SUPPLEMENT, 3d SERIES” and the page number 306 were read as ink. The synopsis on that sheet reads “Signed July 18, 2019” and “Holdings: The District Court, Richard M. Berman, Senior District Judge, held that:” before listing the holdings. That description of his status is the reporter’s editorial synopsis, not the court’s own words, and is attributed accordingly. A second copy of the same reporter pages is at EFTA00076815. The released machine-read text of one of the two renders the volume number as “423”; the image reads 425, and the image governs. The sheet is a bound reporter page carrying the end of an unrelated case in its left column, which is not part of this record and is not used. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Criminal docket, USA v. Epstein, 1:19-cr-00490-RMB, printed from the court’s electronic docket on 29 October 2021. EFTA00058418 p. 1, read at the page image. The header records “Date Filed: 07/02/2019”, “Date Terminated: 08/29/2019”, “Assigned to: Judge Richard M. Berman” and “Appeals court case number: 19-2221”. ↩ ↩2

  4. All thirteen are docket rows on the same printed docket, EFTA00058418, read at the page image: entries 9, 10 and 14 on p. 5; entries 16 and 17 on p. 6; entries 26 and 32 on p. 7; entries 38 and 41 on p. 8; entry 48 on p. 9; entries 50, 51 and 52 on p. 10. The figure of thirteen is a count of the rows on this docket carrying the string Signed by Judge Richard M. Berman, taken over all eleven sheets, with a positive control on the same text returning 82 occurrences of the defendant’s name and a planted negative control returning 0. It is a count of what this docket records, not a claim about any other case. Quotations in the table are taken from the docket’s own text of each endorsement as read at the image; the underlying instruments for entries 32, 48, 50 and 52 are separately cited below and were read at the image in their own right. The producing party has blacked out names in several rows and in the minute entries on this docket, and nothing is supplied for any of them. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16

  5. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, docket entry 32, filed 18 July 2019, thirty-three pages. EFTA00039383 p. 1, read at the page image at native 96 ppi. The foot of this sheet was measured against a within-sheet control on its own body text and carries no printed Bates stamp (0 dark pixels in the foot band, lightest pixel 201, against 3,704 dark pixels over body text), so it is cited by document and by the page number the sheet prints. Further copies of the same thirty-three page order are at EFTA00073990, EFTA00081947 and EFTA02824354; no comparison between copies is drawn or published. The passages quoted in the body are verbatim, including the order’s own parentheses. One point where the released machine-read text and the paper disagree is disclosed because the page follows the paper: the released text of this sheet renders the hearing date as “July IS, 2019”, and the sheet prints “July 15, 2019”. That is a reading error in the released text, not anything a producing party withheld. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Letter of Judge Richard M. Berman to Warden Lamine N’Diaye, 12 August 2019, docket entry 45. DOJ-OGR-00000625, the single sheet, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000625, read at the page image. On chambers letterhead whose upper left corner sets, on three stacked lines, “CHAMBERS OF”, then his name, then “UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE”, all in capitals; signed in ink over his printed name. The three lines are described rather than run together into one quoted line. Quoted whole apart from the salutation. The copy list reads: Chief Judge Colleen McMahon; Edward Friedland, District Executive; Adam Johnson, Supervisory Staff Attorney MCC; Michael Greco, U.S. Marshal; Alison Moe, Assistant United States Attorney; Martin Weinberg, Counsel for Mr. Epstein. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Letter of Warden Lamine N’Diaye to Judge Richard M. Berman, 12 August 2019, docket entry 46. DOJ-OGR-00000626, the single sheet, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000626, read at the page image. Sent by e-mail and addressed to him at the courthouse. Its copy list repeats the judge’s, less the jail’s own staff attorney. Quoted verbatim; the paragraph quoted is the whole of the answer. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Order of 21 August 2019, docket entry 48. DOJ-OGR-00000630, the single sheet, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000630, read at the page image. Quoted entire apart from the caption. The released machine-read text of this sheet misreads three things the paper prints clearly: “a.m,” for “a.m.”, “prosegui” for “prosequi”, and “Attomey” for “Attorney”. The quotation above follows the paper. Bears the court’s electronic filing stamp dated by hand 8/21/19, and the initials “RMB” in ink over a rule printed “RICHARD M. BERMAN, U.S.D.J.” A copy of the same order is also at EFTA01687983. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  9. Internal message of the United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, “Re: The Judge in Epstein’s Case Should Not Turn the Dismissal Into a Drama for the Victims”, header dated “Tue, 27 Aug 2019 14:58:16 +0000”, forwarding a message of the same morning that carried the article itself. EFTA00018867 p. 1, read at the page image at native 96 ppi; the foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. Beneath the forwarded article’s headline the sheet sets three stacked lines: “NY Law Journal”, then “By Bruce Green and Rebecca Roiphe”, then “8/26/19”. They are described here rather than run together into one quoted line. The article’s own text follows, and the sentence beginning “Normally, if a prosecutor seeks to dismiss” is quoted from it. The released machine-read text of this sheet loses the full stop after “grant the request”; the paper prints it, and the quotation above follows the paper. Every name and address in the message’s own From, To and Cc lines is blacked out by the producing party, and none is supplied here from this or any other source. The description of the writer as an assistant United States attorney who was in the courtroom rests on the office block in the header, which prints, and on the message’s own first sentence; the writer is not identified. The quoted body sentence reproduces the sheet’s own dashes; the sheet sets the second dash hard against “article” and leaves extra space before “is”, and that spacing is not reproduced here, but no word is changed. The sheet wraps the sentence after “authors” at the right margin. The header is zoned and the forwarded preamble “On Aug 27, 2019, at 10:35 AM” is not, so they are two different clocks and no interval between them is derived. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  10. Read at the page image on five instruments. Full ink signature reading “Richard M. Berman”: his letter to the warden of 12 August 2019, DOJ-OGR-00000625; and the order of 26 August 2019, DOJ-OGR-00000632. Initials “RMB” in ink: the remand order of 18 July, EFTA00039383 p. 33; the order of 21 August, DOJ-OGR-00000630; and the dismissal order of 29 August, DOJ-OGR-00000637 p. 2. All five marks are manuscript, not printed names over blank rules. This page makes no claim about any instrument it did not open. ↩

  11. Document counts over the released files, taken from this project’s full-text index on 4 November 2026, with that index file’s size asserted at 10,982,875,136 bytes before any count was taken, a firing control returning 371 documents and 885 sheets and a freshly generated null control returning 0 in the same run. Counting convention: a document is identified by its production identifier with any sheet suffix stripped explicitly; a sheet is identified by that identifier together with the sheet number, because the identifier alone is not a sheet key. His own forms: “Richard M. Berman” 371 documents / 885 sheets, “Richard Berman” 67 documents / 96 sheets. The two overlap on only 11 documents and 6 sheets, so neither contains the other and the union is 427 documents. Forms that add nothing: “Hon. Richard M. Berman” (108), “Honorable Richard M. Berman” (138) and “Judge Richard M. Berman” (109) are all wholly inside the 371. Forms tested and empty or near-empty: “R. M. Berman” 0, “Berman, Richard M.” 0, “Rich Berman” 0, “Dick Berman” 0, “Richie Berman” 0; “Berman, Richard” 1; “Rick Berman” 1, whose bearer is not established and which is excluded. Damaged spellings tested: “Richard Bcrman” 1, inside the union, and “Richard M. Bennan” 1, outside it and not counted; “Berrnan” 0, “Bcrman” 2, “Bennan” 13, “Bermari” 0, “Bermaan” 0. The partition of the bare surname, computed as document sets: 1,993 documents carry “Berman”; 427 carry one of his two full forms; 982 carry one of seven forms of Geoffrey S. Berman’s name; 125 carry both men; 709 carry the surname and neither forename. 427 + 982 − 125 + 709 = 1,993, and both his set and Geoffrey Berman’s are wholly contained in the surname set, which was checked rather than assumed. `people/geoffrey-berman` reports his own reach as 982 documents on the same seven forms, which is the figure re-derived for this page. That page printed 986 until 4 November 2026, when the four-document surplus was found to be arithmetic rather than a document: the three forename-damage forms return 32 documents of their own, but 12 of those 32 already sat inside the 962 reached by the other four forms, so the increment is 20 and the union is 982. Those counts were re-measured for this page in a separate run on 4 November 2026, with the index file’s size asserted beforehand, the same firing control returning 371 documents and a freshly generated null control returning 0. Two of the routes to 982 are not independent of each other: the production identifier with any sheet suffix stripped and the bare identifier return the same 982 and differ on no row of this population, so they are one key and not two. “Judge Berman” reaches 363 documents: 187 also carry Richard M. Berman’s forename, 62 carry Geoffrey Berman’s, 53 carry both and 167 carry neither; 187 + 62 − 53 + 167 = 363. The 427 is therefore a floor and not a convergence: “Judge Berman” alone reaches 176 documents outside it whose bearer this page has not settled, and they are not used. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  12. Same index, same controls, 4 November 2026. The 56 are the documents matching “Richard Berman” and not “Richard M. Berman”. The sample was drawn with random.sample over a list sorted on a total key, seeded, and the whole draw was run twice and asserted identical before any document was opened, because a seeded draw over an unordered collection is not reproducible. Each of the twenty was opened and the sentence carrying the name was read: nineteen name this judge, in news reports, prosecutors’ summaries, court filings and notices describing his rulings or his courtroom; one, a schedule of publicly available arbitration awards, carries an unrelated case name in which both parties share the surname. A nineteen-of-twenty sample is a measurement of the sample, not of the 56, and the remaining 36 are not individually settled. Nineteen of the twenty were read to establish who the name refers to and are used for nothing else on this page. The twentieth is the exception and is named, because it is used: the sample turned up the forwarded New York Law Journal article at EFTA00018867, which the page then opened at the image and cites at 9. ↩ ↩2

  13. Order of 26 August 2019, docket entry 50. DOJ-OGR-00000632, the single sheet, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000632, read at the page image. Quoted entire apart from the caption. The released machine-read text drops a letter from the courthouse’s name; the paper prints “Marshall” and the quotation above follows the paper. Signed in ink with his full name over a rule printed “RICHARD M. BERMAN, U.S.D.J.” ↩ ↩2

  14. Order of nolle prosequi, docket entry 52, filed 29 August 2019. DOJ-OGR-00000637 p. 2, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000638, read at the page image. The sheet carries the earlier filing header of docket entry 47-1 above the court’s own, which is how an entered proposed order prints. Three things distinguish it from the version filed on 19 August: the day is filled in on the previously blank date line and is heavily inked, so this page does not assert it from the glyph and takes the date from the court’s own electronic filing header, which reads “Filed 08/29/19”; the initials “RMB” appear in ink over the rule above his printed block; and the quoted sentence appears above those initials. That sentence is typed, in a heavier typeface than the body of the order, and this page describes it as typed rather than handwritten on that ground. At the page image the letterforms repeat identically. The spacing in “8 /27 /19” is the sheet’s own. The released machine-read text of this sheet inserts a dash before “of the Crime” and sets “U.S.C,” with a comma; neither is on the paper, and the quotation above follows the paper. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  15. Minute entry for the status conference of 31 July 2019. EFTA00058418 p. 9, read at the page image. It records a motion schedule with defence motions due 13 September 2019, government response 4 October, reply 11 October and oral argument 28 October 2019 at 10:00; a pretrial motion schedule with defence motions due 10 January 2020, response 10 February, reply 24 February and argument 12 March 2020 at 10:00 a.m.; and a conference set for 8 June 2020 at 9:00 a.m. Names in that entry are blacked out by the producing party and are not supplied. ↩

  16. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, EFTA00039383 p. 21, read at the page image. Carries the dangerousness finding, the sentence about the New Mexico application materials, the sentence about the Virgin Islands and Florida, and the quotation that a finding of either danger or flight risk suffices. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  17. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, EFTA00039383 p. 22, read at the page image. The released machine-read text renders one cited case name as “Pones”; the sheet prints “Portes”. That span is not quoted on this page. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩

  18. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, EFTA00039383 p. 29, read at the page image. The figure $559,120,954 is the total the order attributes to the defence’s own one-page asset summary of 30 June 2019, not a valuation by the court. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  19. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, EFTA00039383 p. 30, read at the page image. The phrase “it comes into pay only after Mr. Epstein has fled” is quoted as the sheet prints it. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  20. Decision & Order Remanding Defendant, EFTA00039383 p. 33, read at the page image. “forgoing” is the sheet’s own spelling. Beneath the two quoted lines the sheet carries the initials “RMB” written in ink over a rule printed “RICHARD M. BERMAN, U.S.D.J.” The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩

  21. Criminal docket, EFTA00058418 p. 10, read at the page image. Records the Second Circuit’s mandate of 21 August 2019 in appeal 19-2221, issued after the parties filed a stipulation withdrawing the appeal, and the filing of the hearing transcript on 3 September 2019. The appeal is also covered on the indictment page. ↩ ↩2

  22. Letter of Warden Lamine N’Diaye to Chief Judge Colleen McMahon and Judge Richard M. Berman, 10 August 2019, docket entry 44. DOJ-OGR-00000623 p. 1, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000623, read at the page image. Quoted words are verbatim from that sheet. ↩

  23. Criminal docket, EFTA00058418 p. 9, read at the page image. The warden’s letter of 10 August (entry 44), the judge’s letter of 12 August (entry 45) and the warden’s reply of 12 August (entry 46) are all docketed on 14 August 2019. ↩

  24. Letter of the United States Attorney’s Office to the court, 19 August 2019, docket entry 47. DOJ-OGR-00000627, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000627, read at the page image. It states that “In light of the death of the defendant prior to a conviction becoming final, the Government must request the Court approve the attached proposed order of nolle prosequi.” Its contents are set out more fully on the page on the death and are not re-derived here. ↩

  25. Proposed order of nolle prosequi, docket entry 47-1, filed 19 August 2019. DOJ-OGR-00000628 p. 2, printed Bates stamp DOJ-OGR-00000629, read at the page image. On that sheet the “SO ORDERED:” block carries a date line printing the month and the year with the day left blank on a rule, and the rule above the printed block setting his name, “United States District Judge” and “Southern District of New York” on three stacked lines carries no mark at all. That is the comparison on which the statement about what the court added rests: the same two-page document in two states, ten days apart, both read at the page image. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  26. Transcript of the hearing of 27 August 2019, United States v. Epstein, 19 Cr. 490 (RMB), eighty-six pages. EFTA00019994 p. 4, read at the page image at native 96 ppi. The foot of this sheet carries the court reporter’s own imprint and no printed Bates stamp, so it is cited by document and by the page number the sheet prints. The double hyphen in the first quoted sentence is the transcript’s own. The court names neither author from the bench, and the court’s own characterisation of the article is what is quoted here. The article itself was separately located and read, and is cited at 9; where the body gives the article’s own words rather than the court’s account of them, the citation says so. ↩ ↩2

  27. Transcript of 27 August 2019, EFTA00019994 p. 5, read at the page image. Both passages are quoted verbatim and in full, including the words “don’t quote me on this”, which the court said in open court on a public record. The court’s claim about one author’s role is his own, hedged in his own words as “my understanding”, and is reported here as that and nothing more. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩ ↩2

  28. Transcript of 27 August 2019, EFTA00019994 p. 6, read at the page image. Quotations verbatim. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩ ↩2

  29. Minute entry for the hearing of 27 August 2019. EFTA00058418 p. 10, read at the page image. The three quoted phrases are the clerk’s, in the order the entry gives them. Several names in that entry are blacked out by the producing party and are not supplied here. ↩

  30. Transcript of 27 August 2019, EFTA00019994 p. 85, read at the page image. The quoted sentence is the court’s own. Nothing else from that sheet is quoted, summarised, characterised or counted here. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩

  31. Transcript of 27 August 2019, EFTA00019994 p. 86, the final sheet, read at the page image. The court’s closing words run across the boundary between p. 85 and p. 86 and are printed here as two quotations rather than joined into one, because they are on two sheets. The foot of this sheet carries no printed Bates stamp. ↩

  32. Criminal docket, EFTA00058418 pp. 10 and 11, read at the page image. Entry 55, 4 September 2019, is a letter to the court from Bruce A. Green of Fordham University School of Law dated 30 August 2019, described on the docket as written because “Yesterday, I was provided a partial transcript of the August 27, 2019 hearing in the above-captioned case, and I am writing to clarify the record.” Entry 56, the same day, is the court’s reply. The quotations are the docket’s own text of each letter; neither letter itself was read for this page. ↩

  33. Criminal docket, EFTA00058418 p. 11, read at the page image. Entries 58 and 59, both 8 October 2019, both reading “SEALED DOCUMENT placed in vault.” The sheet records nothing about what either contains, and nothing is inferred here. Apart from the court’s reply of 4 September, quoted at 32, no other row on that sheet is used, quoted, described or counted on this page. ↩

  34. Criminal docket, EFTA00058418 p. 7, read at the page image. Entry 33, 22 July 2019: “SEALED DOCUMENT placed in vault.” Entry 34, the same day, is the defendant’s notice of appeal from the remand order. ↩

  35. Same run, same controls. Over the 427 documents: 173 carry a signature-block form of his name, measured as the union of “Richard M. Berman, U.S.D.J.”, “Richard M. Berman USDJ”, “Signed by Judge Richard M. Berman” and “Richard M. Berman, United States District Judge”; 213 carry an address-block or salutation form, measured as the union of “Honorable Richard M. Berman”, “Hon. Richard M. Berman”, “The Honorable Richard M. Berman”, “To the Honorable Richard M. Berman” and “Dear Judge Berman”; 116 carry both; 157 carry neither. 173 + 213 − 116 + 157 = 427. These are measurements of the shape of a name on a sheet, not of authorship: a party’s filing with his order attached carries both shapes, which is what the 116 mostly are, and the warrant for any particular document is reading it. The project’s own index classifies the 427 as 181 court filings, 75 e-mail headers, 30 memoranda, 30 hearing transcripts, 20 news clippings, 17 letters, 13 state court filings, 11 court orders, 1 indictment and 49 others, with every one of the 427 found in the index. ↩

  36. Same run, same controls. “Berman sitting by designation”, “Richard M. Berman, Circuit Judge”, “Judge Berman of the Second Circuit” and “Richard M. Berman, Second Circuit” each returned 0 documents, against a control on “Judge Richard M. Berman” returning 109 and a null control returning 0 in the same invocation. One document in his population does contain the phrase “sitting by designation”: it is a Second Circuit opinion in an unrelated appeal, and the judge sitting by designation in it is somebody else. That is what a search of the released files under these terms returns; it is not a statement about his career, which these files do not record. ↩

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