Judge grants DOJ motion to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury files

Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News on Dec 9, 2025

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NEW YORK — A Manhattan judge on Tuesday granted a request by the Justice Department to unseal grand jury materials in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal case, complying with new legislation compelling federal law enforcement to release its investigative files on deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

In a 24-page opinion, Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer granted the DOJ’s motion to release the materials in the prosecution of Epstein’s convicted right-hand associate and also granted a motion to modify a protective order.

Set for release are transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to Maxwell’s indictment on sex trafficking charges in 2020, exhibits, and investigative files the feds shared with her attorneys.

The judge said the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress in November and signed by President Donald Trump, did not specifically mention the materials, but he agreed with the DOJ that their inclusion was implicit.

“The Act does not explicitly refer to grand jury materials. The Court nonetheless holds — again in agreement with DOJ — that the Act textually covers the grand jury materials in this case,” the judge wrote.

Tuesday’s order follows a similar decision by a federal judge in Florida last week, which granted the DOJ’s motion to unseal grand jury materials from the 2008 federal prosecution that ended with Epstein receiving a highly unusual plea deal that permitted him to cop to a state-level sex crime in return for a stint in a county jail.

Engelmayer said that the materials in the Maxwell case may be unsealed after Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton personally certifies that they have been rigorously reviewed to comply with a provision of the new legislation protecting victims’ privacy.

“Congress’s inclusion of that provision reflected its respect for the privacy rights of Maxwell’s and Epstein’s victims. DOJ has pledged to honor that provision,” he wrote.

Engelmayer noted that while victims have supported the release of the materials, they’ve expressed concern that their privacy will be compromised and about the government’s motivations.

“The victims’ concerns, regrettably, have a basis in fact. In its two rounds of applications to this Court to disclose records, DOJ, although paying lip service to Maxwell’s and Epstein’s victims, has not treated them with the solicitude they deserve,” Engelmayer wrote.

The judge wrote that the DOJ had misled the women and the public about the big-picture significance of the grand jury materials in a previous motion to unseal, which he denied in August before the legislation was passed. The government did not notify the victims in that first motion or the latter about the requests it was making, the judge noted.

The government first asked for the materials to be unsealed this summer, as the Trump administration failed to contain the unrelenting Epstein scandal after the DOJ and the FBI refused to publicly release upwards of 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence recovered in investigations, and it was reported that Trump had been told he featured in the files.

The materials Engelmayer ordered unsealed on Tuesday are separate from the larger trove and are expected to contain little information that didn’t emerge at Maxwell’s trial.

The original motion, Engelmayer wrote, misled victims “and the public at large” by describing the materials “as essential to the goal of ‘transparency to the American public,’ when in fact the grand jury materials would not add to public knowledge.” He included a provision in his Tuesday order, which was requested by victims of Epstein, that nothing within his order could be construed to excuse the government’s public release of its much larger trove of investigative files by the Dec. 19 deadline.

Maxwell is currently serving out a 20-year prison sentence following her December 2021 conviction for facilitating Epstein’s sexual abuse and trafficking of teenage girls and young women for at least a decade starting in 1994.

Epstein was found dead in his lower Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The DOJ has also made a request to unseal the grand jury materials in the financier’s prosecution, which awaits a ruling by Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Berman.

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