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Survivor testimony in the Epstein record

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tagstopic, court-records, testimony, depositions, victims

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Forms of complainants’ evidence in the documents cited hereDepositions in civil actions brought under pseudonym; a written disclosure summarising the substance of testimony to be offered at trial; sworn statements given to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents123
Designations usedNumbered Jane Doe pseudonyms in the Southern District of Florida actions, and initials for the witnesses summarised in the 2010 disclosure14
Limit on the length of a depositionPresumptively seven hours, the court holding that Rule 30(d)(1) and the local rule applied notwithstanding the consolidation order5
Order on the conduct of depositionsEntered December 3, 2009: defence counsel to refrain from repetitive questioning in all future depositions of the plaintiffs, with additional time allowed to the defendant and sanctions refused67
Volume recorded for one plaintiffTen depositions taken relating to her by April 2010; her own over two days, running to 595 transcript pages8
How the two actions cited here endedBy stipulation of dismissal with prejudice, on June 25 and July 20, 2010, all pending motions denied as moot910
Status of the items aboveOrders of the court and entries on its docket, except where a statement is marked as an assertion in a party’s own filing111

This page reports what the released documents show about the forms in which complainants’ evidence entered the legal record, and about the procedural conditions under which that evidence was taken and given. It identifies no complainant, reproduces no account of what was done to anyone, and takes from the documents cited no detail that would narrow to a person.

The subject is dangerous in a particular way. The passages that make the process of obtaining testimony concrete are often the passages that expose the person who gave it. Where a document cited here contains such a passage, this page reports that it does and stops.

Neighbouring material is elsewhere and is not restated here. The pseudonyms, the prosecutors’ separate witness designations and what the record says about how many people are involved are at Victims in the Epstein record. The contemporaneous 2005 and 2006 interviews and what that department found are at the Palm Beach Police Department investigation. The statements made in open court in New York in August 2019, and the compensation programme’s own process, are at the CVRA litigation and the Victim Compensation Program. What the documents say about the method of recruitment is at Recruitment methods in the Epstein record. The evidence at the 2021 criminal trial in New York is at Ghislaine Maxwell.

Depositions in the consolidated Florida actions

A motion filed in March 2009 describes the action it was filed in as “one of six (6) related cases in this Court against Defendant Jeffrey Epstein, each alleging that the Defendant sexually assaulted the plaintiff when she was a minor”, each brought under a numbered Jane Doe pseudonym.1 The court consolidated them for the purposes of discovery by an order of May 14, 2009.5

Consolidation made each plaintiff a potential witness in the others’ cases, and the first recorded dispute about testimony is about that. The defendant sought the deposition of one plaintiff as a witness in a different plaintiff’s case while not, at that time, seeking her deposition in her own; her counsel moved to quash, writing that the defendant “apparently intends to take Jane Doe No. 3’s deposition at least twice, and as discussed below, most likely three times”, and that to require her to sit more than once “would be unduly traumatizing, burdensome, annoying, harassing and, most importantly, unnecessary.”1 Those are her counsel’s words in a motion. The motion asked the court to limit the defendant to a single deposition covering her own case and any other, and to consolidate the six actions for pretrial discovery.1 Epstein opposed the motion.12

The volume is recorded in a later motion. By April 27, 2010 the defendant had taken ten depositions relating to a single plaintiff, and her own deposition had been taken over two days and ran to 595 transcript pages.8 That motion sought to prevent further depositions of non-party witnesses whom the plaintiff said had no knowledge of the matters in the case; the motion describes who they were, and this page does not.8 It was opposed the following day.13 Neither it nor a related motion to compel was decided: both were withdrawn on a joint notice, and the court entered an order recording the withdrawal on June 14, 2010.14

The order of December 3, 2009

Two plaintiffs applied for protective orders against being deposed a second time, or for longer than seven hours in the aggregate. Magistrate Judge Linnea R. Johnson decided both applications together in an omnibus order entered on December 3, 2009 and signed by her.1115

The defendant argued that the consolidation order, which said that “Local Rule 26.1K (limiting deposition time to one day of seven hours) is waived so as to allow each party an adequate opportunity to develop fully the record as it may relate to that party”, had lifted the limit on the length of a deposition.5 The court disagreed with that reading and held that Rule 30(d)(1) and the local rule, which “absent agreement or court order, presumptively limits depositions to 7 hours”, applied.5 It then found that the defendant had shown sufficient and reasonable grounds for further time.5

Having read the transcript of one of the depositions, the court found that it “reveals numerous instances of Jane Doe 4 being subjected to repetitive questioning about exceedingly sensitive issues”; part of what follows is covered by solid redaction and the rest is not reproduced here.6 The court added: “Counsel for Defendant must be mindful that the depositions of the Plaintiffs in these cases covers the most intimate and private details of their lives and if not handled correctly may serve to needlessly revictimize, embarrass and humiliate them.”6 It ordered that “in all future depositions of the Plaintiffs in these cases, including the re-depositions of Jane Doe and Jane Doe 4, Defendant’s counsel is ordered to refrain from repetitive questioning”, while making clear that follow-up and related questions remained open to him.6

The same order went the defendant’s way in part. It allowed the defendant three further hours with one plaintiff and two with the other, against the four he had sought for the second; it warned that the allowance was not “authority to take the depositions of these Plaintiffs for any longer time than is necessary, and in no event will the Court tolerate questioning of an abusive nature”; and it denied the plaintiffs’ request for sanctions.7 The order names no counsel, and this page does not supply one.

The 2010 disclosure of similar-acts testimony

The fullest single statement in the documents cited here of what testimony had been assembled is a plaintiff’s own notice, filed in a related action on July 2, 2010, that she intended to offer evidence of other acts under Federal Rule of Evidence 415.2 The rule required her to disclose “a summary of the substance of any testimony” she planned to offer, and the notice is that disclosure.2

It states that she had “discovered more than 40 girls that could easily provide similar fact evidence”, that the list of witnesses had been “reduced” to 15, and that at trial she intended to call approximately seven to ten of them; each of the fifteen, it says, would testify to having been at Epstein’s house while a minor between 2002 and 2005.16 Those are the plaintiff’s assertions in her own filing. The notice records the defendant’s own recorded position: that he had filed an answer denying all of her allegations and had raised affirmative defences including consent and a reasonable belief that she was over eighteen, and that while he had “not denied any of these charges directly”, having asserted a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, he had not admitted them either.17 It also records that two women whose evidence the plaintiff hoped to obtain had each invoked the Fifth Amendment at her own deposition; invoking the privilege is a constitutional right and is not evidence of anything, and what each of them has said publicly is at Sarah Kellen and Nadia Marcinkova.18

The individual summaries that follow are not reproduced here in any form. The notice explains its own handling of them in a footnote: “To preserve the privacy of these girls, they will be identified by initials. Epstein is well aware of the full names of these girls, which will be provided to him by Jane Doe’s counsel.”4 The initials are themselves blacked out at image level, at the head of each summary.4

Testimony the plaintiffs sought and did not obtain

The docket record for the lead action shows the plaintiffs litigating for access to their own earlier accounts. On March 17, 2010 they moved to compel production of the sworn statements that six of them had given to Federal Bureau of Investigation investigators; the motion was opposed on March 31, 2010.3 It was never decided. It was withdrawn on the same joint notice as the protective-order motion, and the court’s order of June 14, 2010 records the withdrawal of both.14

How these actions ended

Neither action cited here was tried. The lead action was dismissed with prejudice on June 25, 2010 on a stipulation of dismissal, with all pending motions denied as moot, and the case closed; the docket record gives its closing date as that day.919 The action in which the Rule 415 disclosure had been filed was dismissed with prejudice by a final order of Judge Kenneth A. Marra signed on July 20, 2010, eighteen days after the disclosure, which again denied all pending motions as moot and retained jurisdiction to enforce the parties’ settlement.10

So the fifteen summaries were disclosed and that action ended before any of the testimony they summarised was given in it. Epstein contested both actions and denied the allegations in his answer, and the order and the docket record his responses in opposition to the applications described above.5313 The final order records that the court retained jurisdiction to enforce the parties’ settlement.10 He died in August 2019.

Footnotes

  1. Motion for Protective Order and to Quash Subpoena for Deposition of Jane Doe No. 3, Motion to Consolidate Cases for Purposes of Discovery, and Incorporated Memorandum of Law, Jane Doe No. 2 v. Jeffrey Epstein, No. 08-CV-80119-MARRA/JOHNSON (S.D. Fla.), Document 66, entered March 26, 2009, EFTA00221676, pp. 1 and 6. Read from the page images. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Plaintiff Jane Doe’s Notice Regarding Evidence of Similar Acts of Sexual Assault, Jane Doe v. Jeffrey Epstein, et al., No. 08-CV-80893-CIV-MARRA/JOHNSON (S.D. Fla.), Document 197, entered July 2, 2010, EFTA00222648, p. 1. Read from the page image. This is a civil plaintiff’s filing, not a prosecutor’s. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Same docket record, EFTA01660040, p. 33, entries 489 and, for the response in opposition, p. 34 entry 512. Read from the page image. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Same notice, EFTA00222648, p. 9, footnote 1 and the head of the summaries above it. Read from the page image. The summaries themselves, on that page and on those following it, are not cited for anything. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Same order, EFTA00723522, p. 28 (order folio 3). Read from the page image. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  6. Same order, EFTA00723522, p. 30 (order folio 5). Read from the page image; the redaction on this page falls in the passage after the quotation above, not inside it, and none of that passage is reproduced here regardless. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Same order, EFTA00723522, p. 31 (order folio 6), which carries the decretal paragraph. Read from the page image. ↩ ↩2

  8. Plaintiff Jane Doe No. 4’s Motion for Protective Order as to the Depositions of Certain Non-Party Witnesses, same case, Document 534, entered April 27, 2010, EFTA02749139, p. 2. Read from the page image. Nothing else on that page is reproduced here. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Same docket record, EFTA01660040, p. 37, entries 571 and 573. ↩ ↩2

  10. Final Order of Dismissal with Prejudice, Jane Doe v. Jeffrey Epstein, No. 08-CV-80893-MARRA-JOHNSON (S.D. Fla.), Document 211, entered July 20, 2010, EFTA00310529, p. 1, signed and hand-dated the 20th day of July 2010. Read from the page image. Nothing else in this run is cited here. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. Omnibus Order, Jane Doe No. 2 v. Jeffrey Epstein, No. 08-CIV-80119-MARRA/JOHNSON (S.D. Fla.), Document 433, entered December 3, 2009, EFTA00723522, p. 26, which is the order’s own folio 1 and carries an Exhibit 7 stamp. The order is one document inside a longer exhibit run, so the page numbers given here are the run’s, with the order’s own folio noted beside each. No other document in that run is cited here. ↩ ↩2

  12. Same docket record, EFTA01660040, p. 10, entry 79: response in opposition to Document 66, filed by Jeffrey Epstein, entered April 17, 2009. Read from the page image. ↩

  13. Same docket record, EFTA01660040, p. 35, entry 535. Read from the page image. ↩ ↩2

  14. Same docket record, EFTA01660040, p. 37, entries 561 to 564. Read from the page image. ↩ ↩2

  15. Same order, EFTA00723522, p. 32 (order folio 7), the signature page, rendered to confirm the order was executed. ↩

  16. Same notice, EFTA00222648, p. 8. Read from the page image. ↩

  17. Same notice, EFTA00222648, p. 6, which describes the defendant’s answer at Document 131 in that case and quotes two of his affirmative defences. Read from the page image. The answer itself is not among the documents cited here. ↩

  18. Same notice, EFTA00222648, p. 17. Read from the page image; the two police officers named in the passage below are redacted there and are not identified here. ↩

  19. United States District Court civil docket for Doe v. Epstein, No. 9:08cv80119 (S.D. Fla., West Palm Beach), a commercial docket retrieval dated March 4, 2015, EFTA01660040, p. 1, which gives the assigned judge, the magistrate judge and a closing date of June 25, 2010. ↩

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