The Kessler video claim, 2019


The story	”Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’”, The New York Times, 30 November 2019
The claim	A man who identified himself as Patrick Kessler told the lawyers David Boies and John Stanley Pottinger he held videos secretly recorded at Epstein’s residence
What the release holds	No video and no contract. It holds the reaction — four communicative events inside the U.S. Attorney’s Office over 32 hours — and the litigation consequences: two separate uses of the story in court on one day, the office’s written answer to one of them, and a subpoena record six months later¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹¹⁰
The office’s private reading	”the apparent con man Patrick Kessler”; “The story sure makes it seem like the guy (Kessler) is a scammer”; “I spoke to Julie Brown about this guy. Even she was skeptical.”³⁵⁴
2 December 2019	At 9:06 a.m. counsel for Alan Dershowitz raised Kessler before Judge Preska; the same day, counsel for Michael Avenatti demanded the material from the prosecution as Giglio evidence⁹⁷
5 December 2019	The U.S. Attorney’s Office answered in writing over the printed name of Geoffrey S. Berman — and did not answer the demand to disclose whether Boies was under federal investigation⁸¹¹
Excluded from this page	Five 2024 documents reaching the same searches, totalling about 2,136 pages, from a self-described victim; described below and not quoted

The released files contain no video and no contract. What they contain is the reaction to a newspaper article and the uses made of it in court: how the story travelled through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York over one weekend, what the prosecutors said to each other about it, and how two different sets of defence lawyers, in two unrelated cases, put it in front of two federal judges within three days of publication.

The most useful thing on this page is the exchange of letters. A defence lawyer demanded that the prosecution disclose whether David Boies was under federal investigation over the conduct the article described, and asked, in bold and with the last four words underlined, “And if not, why not?” The office replied within three days, answered the discovery-timing point and the admissibility point, and said nothing about the investigation question at all.¹¹⁸

The article

The Times published “Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’” on 30 November 2019. The paper’s own summary, as it reached readers through its share-by-email service and thence into the release, was:

A shadowy hacker claimed to have the financier’s sex tapes. Two top lawyers wondered: What would the men in those videos pay to keep them secret?²

The two lawyers were David Boies, founder of Boies Schiller Flexner, and John Stanley Pottinger. The man was known to them as Patrick Kessler.

The weekend inside the U.S. Attorney’s Office

Six documents in the release carry this story, and they are six distinct messages, and none is a duplicate copy of another. But they are not six people forwarding one article. Read at the image they resolve into four communicative events: an excerpt pasted into an unrelated thread, an automated newsletter share, one three-message thread, and one unattached forward.¹²

Saturday 30 November, 15:03 UTC

The earliest document is not a forward of the article but a fragment of it pasted into a thread about something else, a thread whose own subject line is partly barred and reads “RE: ▮ MTD Opposition”.¹ A prosecutor wrote:

Buried in a much longer (and interesting) piece about Epstein, is the following which may be of interest for ▮ (particularly since David Boies is involved):¹

Beneath it the writer pasted the article’s account of two settlement structures Pottinger had described. The article frames them as hypotheticals, saying “He described two hypotheticals, both of which were consistent with what had been discussed with The Times at the Harvard Club”, and the framing is part of the record.¹ In the second, the article reports Pottinger saying “No client is actually involved in this structure,” and, in the same sentence on the same line, “noting that the arrangement would have to be ‘consistent with and subject to rules of ethics.’”¹

The same extract carries the correction the article records: that Pottinger “later said that the scenario would have involved him representing a victim, settling a case and then representing the victim’s alleged abuser. He said it was within legal boundaries. (He also said he had meant to type ‘No client lawsuit is actually involved.’)”, with lawsuit set in italics on the sheet, the emphasis being the entire point of the correction.¹ All of that is quoted here because the first half of any of those sentences, without the second, is not what the sheet says.

Sunday 1 December

Three messages then move inside the office. At 13:26 UTC the article was circulated with a one-sentence characterisation:

Lengthy tale about the apparent con man Patrick Kessler and his attempts to convince David Boies and Stanley Pottinger he had video evidence of sexual abuse by well known figures associated with Jeffrey Epstein.³

At 14:42 UTC, a reply, from an iPhone:

I spoke to Julie Brown about this guy. Even she was skeptical.⁴

Julie K. Brown is the Miami Herald reporter whose 2018 series reopened public attention to the case. The sentence records a contact with that reporter about Kessler and dates the office’s scepticism to before the article was circulated internally.

At 16:08 UTC, a further reply in the same thread:

The story sure makes it seem like the guy (Kessler) is a scammer.⁵

⚠ The thread shows two participants, not three. The sender fields carry a [Contractor] marker, and the signature structure matches across messages; the three messages are an exchange between two people, and the page’s arithmetic should not be read as six officials weighing in.¹²

Separately, at 02:49 UTC that morning, an automated NYTimes.com share-by-email had entered the files, and at 23:33 UTC a forward went to a different recipient carrying no assessment at all:

With apologies, I suppose I’m the millionth person to have sent this to you.⁶

That forward carries the same subject line as the thread, but its body is a bare URL rather than a quoted message, so it is not a forward of any of the three.⁶

The span from first to last is 32 hours and 31 minutes. What it shows is an office noticing a story about lawyers and videotapes, one participant checking it with a journalist, and both concluding the source was a fraud. It is not a cascade of officials.

⚠ What the scepticism is and is not about. Every assessment quoted above concerns Kessler, and whether the man had the videos he said he had. None of them addresses whether Boies and Pottinger did what the article described. On that, see the letters below, where the office does take a position, though not a factual one.

2 December 2019: two courtrooms, one day

9:06 a.m.: before Judge Preska

Two days after publication, at a hearing in a defamation action against Alan Dershowitz before Judge Loretta A. Preska, his counsel raised Kessler:

Just this weekend — and we’ve supplemented our 26(f) statement, your Honor, Mr. Patrick Kessler was brought to our attention and, to put it mildly, the allegations made concerning Mr. Boies and his firm and other counsel we think are going to be directly relevant to proving the truth of what Professor Dershowitz said.⁹

The judge engaged with it directly:

Now this guy Kessler, if, as you say, has photographs and videos that’s closer to being a — closer to probative evidence.⁹

Counsel’s answer contains the most careful assessment of the story anywhere in the release, and it comes from a lawyer with no stake in defending Boies:

Well but, your Honor, if the New York Times account is to be credited — and at the moment I can’t tell whether it should be or not other than what I read — Mr. Kessler brought to the Times’ attention a scheme that is a very close match to the scheme alleged here⁹

Later in the same hearing, opposing counsel noted that the article “contains excerpts from what purports to be, and the article describes, as a recording between Mr. Dershowitz and this Patrick Kessler character.” Asked by the court whether he had it, Dershowitz’s counsel said “That’s true, your Honor. Happy to produce it.” He added that he had “only read about this this weekend”, and that he would produce it in discovery: “Just as we will be pursuing, as I said, the entirety of the episode between Mr. Kessler and the lawyers.”¹³

No such recording is in the release. What is in the release is an undertaking on the record to produce one.

The same day: the Giglio demand

On the same date, the Miami lawyers Scott A. Srebnick and Jose M. Quinon wrote to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in United States v. Michael Avenatti, No. S1 19 Cr 373 (PGG), under Rule 16(a)(1)(E)(i), Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States.⁷

The letter’s argument is a conflict-of-interest argument about witnesses, and its force does not depend on the article being true. It recited the Times’s account and then asserted its legal character:

As described, Mr. Boies’s conduct amounts to conspiracy to commit extortion, as interpreted by the USAO-SDNY.¹¹

It added that the conduct “would appear to also violate other criminal statutes, including 18 U.S.C. §§ 2252 and 2252A”, and that venue “plainly exists” in the Southern District.¹¹ On the lawyers’ state of mind it wrote this, and the opening clause is the inference’s basis and its only hedge, so it is given here:

Because the videos were purportedly made at Epstein’s direction, Boies and Pottinger undoubtedly believed that at least some of the videos constituted evidence of serious criminal sex offenses targeting minors.⁷

Then the hook, which is why a prosecution’s file was the target:

As you know, BSF lawyers were the ones who reported Mr. Avenatti’s alleged scheme to extort Nike to federal law enforcement and the USAO-SDNY. Based on our prior conversations with you, it is clear that one or more BSF lawyers will be witnesses at Mr. Avenatti’s trial. Evidence that their boss and law partner David Boies may have engaged in the above-described conduct — and could potentially be prosecuted by the USAO-SDNY — is highly relevant to the motives of the testifying BSF lawyers to curry favor with the government.¹¹

And then the operative demand, printed in bold with its last four words underlined:

Accordingly, we demand any evidence in the possession of the USAO-SDNY pertaining to David Boies’s conduct as described in the Times report and Episode 22 of The Weekly. We further demand disclosure of whether Boies or any other members of his law firm are under federal investigation for the conduct described in the Times report and The Weekly. And if not, why not?¹¹

⚠ Tier, stated exactly. It is a documented fact that these two lawyers made these assertions in this letter on this date. It is not established anywhere in the release that Boies or Pottinger did any of what is described. But the page will not describe the letter as uniformly hedged, because it is not: alongside “as described” and “would appear to” it speaks of “their scheme”, “one of several overt acts”, “the illicit videos”, “venue … plainly exists”, and says flatly that “The interviews confirmed that the purpose of the plan was to get these wealthy men to pay money”.¹¹ It is a categorical accusation in an adversarial letter, made by an interested party on the strength of a newspaper report.

5 December 2019: the answer, and the limb it leaves alone

Three days later the U.S. Attorney’s Office replied, by email, over the printed name of the United States Attorney, Geoffrey S. Berman. ⚠ He did not sign it personally: the sheet closes with his name and title set in printed capitals, and beneath them “By: s/” over a barred name and the words “Assistant United States Attorneys”. It went out over his name, signed by an Assistant United States Attorney the producer has blacked out.⁸

It confirmed what had prompted the demand, describing it as “your letter dated December 2, 2019, which requests certain information in light of a New York Times article dated November 30, 2019 concerning Jeffrey Epstein and alleged videos, and Episode 22 of The Weekly”, and then answered on timing:

Rather, the parties have previously agreed, in writing, that the Government will provide such material, if any exists, on or before January 14, 2020. We are aware of our obligation in this respect, and intend to comply timely.⁸

It then denied entitlement, in terms that concede nothing about existence:

In any event, to the extent that we understand your request, we do not agree that you are entitled to what you seek, assuming arguendo that it exists, and assuming further that the prosecution team (which is not on any Jeffrey Epstein-related investigation) both had it and was at liberty to provide it.⁸

And it took a position on the allegations themselves, not on their truth but on whether a jury should hear them:

Please be advised, however, that irrespective of the resolution of your request, we expect that we would object to you offering any evidence or argument concerning the above-referenced allegations, including during your opening statement or in cross-examination, as both improper and inflammatory.¹⁴

What the reply does not do is answer the second demand. It addresses the Giglio timetable and the admissibility of the material. It says the prosecution team is not on any Epstein-related investigation. It does not say whether Boies or any member of his firm was under federal investigation, and it does not answer “And if not, why not?”⁸¹⁴¹¹

This desk treats a refusal as carefully as a production. The office replied in three days, engaged two limbs of a three-limb letter, and passed over the third in silence. That silence is the most document-backed finding on this page, and it is a finding about the office rather than about anybody’s conduct.

June 2020: the subpoena record

Six months later the episode reappears in discovery. In Giuffre v. Maxwell, responses and objections dated 10 June 2020 answer a subpoena whose requests include four directed specifically at Kessler: communications with him, communications between him and David Boies, communications between him and the New York Times or other media outlets, and communications between him and law enforcement.¹⁰

Each is objected to as irrelevant, overbroad and privileged, and then answered: “Subject to the foregoing objections, Cassell states that no such documents exist …”¹⁰ A further request, for communications with Boies and his firm, is objected to on privilege.¹⁰

That is not an investigative file, and no investigative file on this episode has been found. But it is a discovery record about the Kessler episode, and the objection-then-denial pattern is itself part of the record.

The sequence

When	What	Where
30 Nov 2019	Article published	The New York Times
30 Nov, 15:03 UTC	Excerpt pasted into an unrelated thread inside the USAO	¹
1 Dec, 02:49 UTC	Automated share-by-email copy of the article	²
1 Dec, 13:26 UTC	Circulated inside the office as an “apparent con man” story	³
1 Dec, 14:42 UTC	”I spoke to Julie Brown about this guy. Even she was skeptical.”	⁴
1 Dec, 16:08 UTC	”The story sure makes it seem like the guy (Kessler) is a scammer.”	⁵
1 Dec, 23:33 UTC	An unattached forward, “the millionth person”	⁶
2 Dec, 09:06 ET	Kessler raised before Judge Preska in the Dershowitz action	⁹
2 Dec 2019	*Srebnick and Quinon’s Brady/Giglio* demand**	⁷
5 Dec 2019	The U.S. Attorney answers; the investigation demand is not answered	⁸
10 Jun 2020	Kessler-specific subpoena requests answered “no such documents exist”	¹⁰

What is not established

No video and no contract. Neither is in the release. The absence of any trace of the nonprofit named in the article was tested directly and holds: the name appears only inside the quoted article extract.¹²
No investigative file on this episode. None found, though the June 2020 subpoena responses are a discovery record about it.¹⁰
Whether Boies or any member of his firm was ever under federal investigation over this conduct. It was demanded in writing and the written answer does not address it.¹¹⁸
Whether the office ever assessed the lawyers’ conduct, as opposed to Kessler’s credibility and the admissibility of the allegations. Nothing in the release records such an assessment.
Whether any of it reached the Avenatti trial, and whether the recording undertaken to be produced in the Dershowitz action was ever produced. No document read here says.
What Kessler actually had. The office’s private view was that he was a con man; a federal judge observed that photographs and videos, if they existed, would be “closer to probative evidence”; and counsel who raised him said he could not tell whether the account should be credited. No document in the release resolves it.

Documents excluded from this page

Five documents reach the same searches and are not used here. They are 2024 material from a person who writes as a victim of Epstein, addressed variously to public figures and to lawyers, and they cite the same Times article among much else. Two of the five are compilations of roughly a thousand pages each, and the five together run to about 2,136 pages, so “correspondence” would understate them.¹⁵

They are excluded for one reason: the writer presents as a survivor, and this desk does not build pages out of survivors’ material or reproduce the third-party allegations inside it. Nothing in them was read beyond a document-level test sufficient to classify them. Their identifiers are recorded so that a later reader running the same query knows why the scope of this page is what it is.¹⁵

The full union of the reliable searches is sixteen identifiers: the ten documents this page uses or names, the five excluded, and one further item.¹² That last is a 2017 filing in Giuffre v. Maxwell which reaches the search only because Pottinger appears in its certificate of service as a served individual rather than as counsel, and in which David Boies does not appear at all.¹⁶

Footnotes

U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y. internal e-mail, Saturday 30 November 2019 15:03:19 +0000. EFTA00105876 pp.1-2 of a three-sheet run. Read at the image. From:, To: and Cc: are present with their values barred; the Subject: line is itself partly barred, printing “RE: ▮ MTD Opposition”; the Date: value is unbarred. There is no Sent: field on p.1, and the nested blocks on the later sheets use Sent: rather than Date:. The bar quoted in the body sits immediately before “(particularly”. The article’s own URL is present on this sheet, and its mangled rendering in the text layer is why a URL sweep does not reach it. Nothing on p.3 concerns this episode; p.2 carries a further paragraph of the article extract which this page does not reproduce. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Automated NYTimes.com share-by-email copy of “Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’”, carrying the newspaper’s own summary line, dated Sunday 1 December 2019 02:49:28 +0000. EFTA00029251 p.1, a single sheet. Read at the image. From: and To: are present with their values barred; there is no Cc: field on the sheet at all. This is a newsletter-service message rather than an office communication. ↩ ↩² ↩³
U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y. internal e-mail, Sunday 1 December 2019 13:26:19 +0000, circulating the article. EFTA00076013 p.1. Read at the image. The sender’s name is barred, and so is the job title in the signature block on this sheet; the office name prints. Telephone, cellular and e-mail values in the signature block are barred and would not be reproduced in any event. No role is attributed to the sender on this page, because the sheets cited for this message do not print one. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y. internal e-mail, Sunday 1 December 2019 14:42:08 +0000, replying to the circulation at ³ and quoting it. EFTA00098045 p.1. Read at the image. Sender, recipient and copy values are barred, as is the job title in the signature block on this sheet. The message carries the line “Sent from my iPhone”. The quotation is complete with nothing cut at either end. The reporter named is Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald; the message does not say when the conversation happened or what else was said. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y. internal e-mail, Sunday 1 December 2019 16:08:21 +0000, replying in the same thread and quoting both earlier messages beneath it. EFTA00105879 p.1. Read at the image. Sender, recipient and copy values are barred. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
U.S. Attorney’s Office, S.D.N.Y. internal e-mail, Sunday 1 December 2019 23:33:57 +0000, forwarding the article with no comment beyond the sentence quoted. EFTA00020442 p.1. Read at the image, where the header block is clean and legible; only the text-layer extraction of it is mangled, and an earlier draft of this page wrongly described the header itself as damaged. From: and To: are present with their values barred; there is no Cc: field. That this is not a forward of any message in the thread rests on the body, which is a bare URL rather than a quoted message, and not on the header. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Scott A. Srebnick, P.A., Miami, to the United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, 2 December 2019, “Re: United States v. Michael Avenatti, Case No. S1 19 Cr 373 (PGG)”, sent “Via E-mail” to a named addressee whose name is barred. EFTA00032751 p.1. Read at the image. The run is exactly two pages and ends on p.2. There is no e-mail header block on the sheet; it is a letter on firm letterhead. A request under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16(a)(1)(E)(i) and the Due Process Clause, citing Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) and Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972). The letterhead’s telephone, facsimile and e-mail values print on the sheet and are not reproduced here. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, to Scott A. Srebnick, 5 December 2019, “BY EMAIL”, in the same matter, over the printed name of Geoffrey S. Berman, United States Attorney. EFTA00032753 p.1 of a two-sheet run. Read at the image. ⚠⚠ CORRECTED 2026-09-18: an earlier version of this page said three times that the reply was “over the signature of” Berman, which asserts a personal signature the sheet does not carry. Rendered at 400 dpi, p.2 closes “Very truly yours, / GEOFFREY S. BERMAN / United States Attorney” in printed capitals, and below that “By: s/ ▮” over “Assistant United States Attorneys”, the signing name barred. There is no ink signature of Berman and no s/ against his name; the s/ is the Assistant’s. The letter went out over his name and was signed by somebody else. It sits at the Bates number immediately following the Srebnick letter, which is how it was found; a full-text search for the docket number and for the two case citations together reaches the letter and this reply and nothing else. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Transcript of a hearing in a defamation action against Alan Dershowitz, No. 19 CV 3377 (LAP) (S.D.N.Y.), 2 December 2019, 9:06 a.m., before the Hon. Loretta A. Preska, filed as Document 101-3 on 20 December 2019. EFTA00092688 p.11 of a 28-sheet run. Read at the image; the page is unredacted. ⚠ The plaintiff’s name is barred on the caption sheet of this run, and the action is therefore cited here by number only and the name is not reconstructed. Speakers are identified in the transcript; two different counsel share a surname and are distinguished in the transcript by initial. The em-dashes in the quotations are the transcript’s own. The sentence quoted from the last passage continues onto the following sheet with a comparison this page does not reproduce, because it names a third party against whom nothing on this page is alleged. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Responses and objections to a subpoena, dated 10 June 2020, filed in Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433-LAP (S.D.N.Y.), as Document 1058-5 on 12 June 2020. EFTA02781899 pp.5-6. Requests 7 to 10 seek documents concerning communications between the respondent and Kessler, between Kessler and David Boies, between Kessler and the New York Times or other media outlets, and between Kessler and law enforcement; each is objected to and then answered “Subject to the foregoing objections, Cassell states that no such documents exist”. A further request for communications with Boies and his firm is objected to on privilege. Kessler’s forename is barred in the request text on this sheet. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Same letter. EFTA00032751 p.2. Read at the image. It closes “Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. / Respectfully,” above a single manuscript signature in blue ink over the typed names SCOTT A. SREBNICK and JOSE M. QUINON; both are signatories and both are named on this page. The two demands in the final paragraph are printed in bold on the sheet, with the last four words underlined. This sheet also refers to an episode of the newspaper’s television series, said to have included interviews of both lawyers, in which the letter reports Boies as having described the object of the plan as “peace”, and quotes the Times on “an extensive surveillance apparatus”. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Enumeration and classification, 18 September 2026, each probe run separately against pages_fts over text_content. The six e-mails are six distinct messages and none is a duplicate copy of another, but they comprise four communicative events: one article excerpt pasted into an unrelated thread, one automated newsletter share, one three-message thread, and one unattached forward whose body is a bare URL. Within the thread, [Contractor] markers in the sender fields and the matching signature structure indicate two participants. ⚠ A URL sweep is not a reliable enumerator for this episode: the sheet at EFTA00105876 does not match the article’s URL because its text layer renders the host as “nytimes.corn”. A defensible scope must union the headline phrase, the URL, "Patrick Kessler" and Kessler AND Boies; that union is sixteen identifiers. Tested absences: the nonprofit named in the article returns three documents, of which only the article extract is genuine and two are OCR noise. Positive control that fired: "surveillance apparatus" returns the Srebnick letter at p.2, where it quotes the Times. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Same transcript. EFTA00092688 p.15. Read at the image; the page is unredacted. ↩
Same reply. EFTA00032753 p.2. ↩ ↩²
EFTA00144588, EFTA00144597, EFTA00145723, EFTA00144401 and EFTA00144485, reached by the URL sweep and by Kessler AND Boies, dated 2024 where dated, and running to about 2,136 sheets in total, two of them compilations of roughly a thousand sheets each. Identified only so that the scope of this page is reproducible. Classification rests on a document-level test and nothing further was read; their contents, the writer’s identity and the third-party allegations they contain are not described here, and no quotation is taken from them. ↩ ↩²
A filing in Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433-RWS (S.D.N.Y.), Document 751, filed 17 March 2017. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_014797 p.1. This identifier’s page 1 is a container row of 50,442 characters, which is a concatenated record and not a page, so nothing here rests on its text layer beyond the counts stated. It reaches the search because “J. Stanley Pottinger” appears twice in its certificate of service as a served individual; the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner appears once, also in the certificate of service, and David Boies does not appear in the document at all. “Kessler” appears nowhere in it. Contact values appear beside the served individual’s name on that sheet and are not reproduced here. Not part of this episode and not otherwise used. ↩

tags	topic, media, sdny, 2019, boies-schiller-flexner, avenatti, dershowitz
aliases	Patrick Kessler, Hot List, Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative 'Hot List', Boies Pottinger videos

Epstein Data Wiki