Inside New York's Courtrooms, the Never-Ending Battle Over the Epstein Files

Introduction: two judges, one shared documentary burden

Berman, Engelmayer, and the judicial legacy of a scandal

For several years now, two federal judges in New York have each carried, on their own side of the docket, the weight of one of the most closely watched court cases in recent American criminal history. Judge Richard M. Berman, overseeing the criminal case against Jeffrey Epstein, and Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, responsible for the Ghislaine Maxwell case, continue to closely supervise the document production tied to both matters, according to court records compiled by Wikipedia from public filings.

This dual judicial oversight is no administrative accident: it flows directly from how intertwined the two cases are, with Epstein and Maxwell prosecuted separately but for largely connected conduct, involving dozens of shared victims whose identities and privacy must be protected at every stage of document disclosure.

An ongoing dispute over victim protection

The throughline of the past several years before both judges remains the same: how to reconcile the legal requirement of transparency, imposed by the federal law on releasing the Epstein files, with the absolute protection of victims' identities, several of whom continue to live in anonymity for reasons of personal safety and dignity. This ongoing dispute has become, over the course of the hearings, the true center of gravity of the entire case.

According to CBS News, which maintains continuous coverage of the file, every new wave of documents released by the Department of Justice is systematically followed by fresh challenges before Berman and Engelmayer, proof that a judicial close to this case remains, in 2026, a distant goal.

February 2026: victims' lawyers revolt

More than 200 plaintiffs demand the DOJ website be taken down

On February 1, 2026, lawyers representing more than 200 alleged victims asked federal judges Berman and Engelmayer to order the immediate removal of the Department of Justice website devoted to the Epstein files, calling it the "single most flagrant violation of victims' privacy in one day in American history," according to information compiled by Wikipedia from public court records.

This accusation, unusually severe in American legal language, illustrates the scale of the shock felt by victims and their legal representatives over a release they consider rushed and insufficiently vetted. Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had defended the department's procedures at the time, stating that drafting errors affected only about 0.001% of all documents released, and that the department had acted quickly to correct any reported errors.

A figure that offers little comfort to victims' lawyers

That tiny percentage, while technically accurate according to the department's own figures, is not enough to ease concerns when weighed against the total volume of documents involved: with nearly 3.5 million pages released cumulatively since December 2025, even a minuscule fraction potentially represents hundreds of documents containing sensitive personal information exposed by mistake.

This tension between a reassuring statistic and a concrete human reality captures fairly well the nature of the dispute that continues to pit the Department of Justice against victims' lawyers in New York's courts.

December 2025: the release of the grand jury transcripts

Berman reverses his initial position

On December 10, 2025, Judge Richard M. Berman authorized the public release of sealed grand jury transcripts from the 2019 criminal case against Epstein, reversing his earlier decision to keep the documents under seal, according to The Independent. This judicial reversal is directly explained by the entry into force of a new federal law requiring disclosure of files related to Epstein and his former accomplice Maxwell.

Berman had previously warned that the roughly 70 pages of grand jury material then set for release added "nothing truly revelatory" to the public record, a caution likely intended to temper the disproportionate media expectations surrounding each new partial disclosure.

Engelmayer and the gray areas of the Maxwell case

That same day, Judge Paul Engelmayer, overseeing the separate Ghislaine Maxwell case, ordered the release of documents from her 2021 sex-trafficking trial. In his order, Engelmayer noted that victims' concerns about protecting their identity and privacy "unfortunately have a factual basis," after the Department of Justice failed to properly notify victims of government motions to unseal court records earlier in the year.

This direct judicial acknowledgment of a Department of Justice failure toward victims stands as one of the most significant moments of this ongoing legal saga, because it documents, in black and white, in a court ruling, a governmental procedural failure recognized by a federal judge.

A year of missed deadlines by the Department of Justice

A law passed, deadlines systematically blown

The federal law on transparency of the Epstein files, passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in November 2025, required the Department of Justice to release all files related to Epstein by December 19, 2025. According to NOTUS, that initial deadline was not met: a heavily redacted first batch of documents was released in December, followed by several million additional pages in January, then a new batch in March, along with roughly 50,000 files previously withdrawn and restored after review.

This chaotic timeline, marked by repeated delays and fragmented releases, has fed a persistent climate of distrust among victims' lawyers and journalists following the case, who struggle to get a complete and coherent picture of the full document set promised by the law.

Six million pages, half still unreleased

According to Wikipedia, the Department of Justice itself acknowledged that a total of roughly six million pages could potentially meet the disclosure criteria set by the law, while asserting that the January 30, 2026 release would be the final major wave and that the department had fulfilled its legal obligations. Critics immediately pointed out that this statement effectively meant that roughly half of the total identified volume remained unreleased.

This contradiction between the official claim of legal compliance and the missing volume of documents remains, to this day, the central knot of the dispute pitting independent journalist Katie Phang against the Department of Justice before a separate court in Washington.

February 2026: controlled access for lawmakers

A supervised but real review

In February 2026, members of Congress were authorized to review unredacted files related to Jeffrey Epstein at secure federal facilities run by the Department of Justice. This access followed the passage of the Epstein files transparency law and ongoing congressional oversight of its implementation, according to public records compiled by Wikipedia.

Lawmakers were able to examine the documents on-site, under strictly controlled conditions, but without permission to remove, copy, or reproduce them, a procedure that illustrates the constant tension between Congress's constitutional oversight duty and the need to preserve the confidentiality of certain sensitive information contained in the file.

A compromise that satisfies few

This controlled-access compromise has not fully satisfied either the advocates of total, immediate transparency, who see it as an excessive limit on the public's right to information, or the advocates of victim protection, who fear that even restricted access for lawmakers increases the risk of unauthorized leaks to the press or the public.

This relative stalemate illustrates the structural difficulty of this case: no disclosure solution, however carefully managed, manages to satisfy both the demand for democratic transparency and the absolute protection of the victims' privacy at the same time.

The shadow of Todd Blanche over the entire case

A central role, from deputy attorney general to acting attorney general

Todd Blanche, who held the post of deputy attorney general during the February 2026 revelations about redaction errors, has since been named acting attorney general by President Trump on June 8, 2026, according to USA Today. This promotion places Blanche directly at the center of every decision regarding future disclosure of the Epstein documents, a role he already held, to some extent, during the earlier controversies over drafting errors.

This personal continuity between the February 2026 episodes and the more recent judicial developments of June 2026 reinforces the sense that management of this case remains concentrated in the hands of a very small number of officials, a centralization that eases administrative consistency but also complicates the emergence of internal institutional checks.

Judicial pressure converging on a single man

Beyond the strictly criminal cases supervised by Berman and Engelmayer in New York, it is Todd Blanche who, in June 2026, also finds himself targeted by a separate lawsuit brought by journalist Katie Phang before a federal court in Washington, built around the Epstein files transparency law. This convergence of judicial pressure, coming from different jurisdictions but bearing on the same underlying issue, places Blanche in a position of unprecedented institutional accountability on this file.

This buildup of separate judicial fronts, all tied to the same body of documents, shows just how much the Epstein-Maxwell case continues, seven years after the financier's death in custody, to generate active legal ramifications and to consume considerable judicial resources across multiple federal jurisdictions.

What the official silence doesn't say

The persistent absence of a consolidated final report

Seven years after Jeffrey Epstein's death in custody in 2019, no consolidated final report, recognized as definitive by all parties, has been published to formally close the multiple investigative threads opened into this case. The Department of Justice memo released in July 2025, which concluded there was no "client list," no credible evidence of blackmail against prominent figures, and confirmed Epstein's suicide per the medical examiner, remains to this day the most complete official document, but it remains heavily disputed by several victims' lawyers.

I must state this clearly, consistent with the demand for transparency that shapes this narrative: at this stage, no corroborated, publicly available evidence supports the existence of such a document or list beyond that official memo. Any claim to the contrary, unsupported by verifiable sources, would amount to speculation I refuse to spread.

A justice system moving in fragments

What this judicial narrative reveals above all is a justice system moving in successive fragments, compelled by law to publish, challenged by victims' lawyers over every new documentary wave, and constantly scrutinized by federal judges trying to balance two hard-to-reconcile imperatives. Nothing in the developments from December 2025 to June 2026 suggests this process is nearing its end anytime soon.

The upcoming hearings before Berman and Engelmayer, along with the outcome of the separate dispute involving Todd Blanche in Washington, will likely determine the pace of future disclosures, in a case where every new legal step seems to systematically spawn another.

Katie Phang's battle, an extension of the New York case

A complaint that directly challenges the executive branch

Independent journalist and lawyer Katie Phang filed a federal complaint on April 27, 2026, against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in Washington's federal court, alleging an ongoing violation of the Epstein files transparency law. This complaint, which directly extends concerns already documented in New York by Judges Berman and Engelmayer, shows how far the Epstein dispute has now spread beyond New York's criminal courts alone to encompass broader questions of federal executive accountability.

This geographic and institutional expansion of the dispute demonstrates that the question of documentary transparency related to Epstein has become, in 2026, a constitutional issue in its own right, touching directly on the balance of power between Congress, which passed the transparency law, and the executive branch, tasked with enforcing it.

A thread linking New York to Washington

This legal thread, connecting the New York criminal courts where Berman and Engelmayer sit to the Washington civil court where Katie Phang is litigating, illustrates the deeply interconnected nature of this case: no single jurisdiction, no single judge, can alone deliver a definitive resolution to every question raised by the Epstein-Maxwell case.

It is precisely this scattering of the case across multiple courts and multiple types of litigation, civil and criminal, that explains the perceived slowness of the overall process, without excusing its most criticizable aspects, notably the Department of Justice's repeated missed legal deadlines.

The role of the Public Integrity Project in the legal strategy

A public-interest firm at the heart of the Phang case

Katie Phang's complaint was filed with the assistance of the Public Integrity Project, a public-interest law firm specializing in government transparency issues. This partnership reflects a deliberate legal strategy: mobilizing specialized legal expertise to maximize the odds of success against a Department of Justice with considerably greater resources for its defense.

This imbalance of resources between an independent journalist backed by a public-interest firm, on one side, and the full legal apparatus of the federal government, on the other, makes the legal victory won in June 2026 before Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, a direct extension of the disputes already documented in New York, all the more significant.

A precedent that could set a pattern

If this legal strategy leads to a complete and verifiable disclosure of the documents still being withheld, it could establish an important precedent for other journalists and victims' lawyers seeking to enforce similar transparency laws in other federal cases in the future. The reach of such a precedent would then extend well beyond the Epstein-Maxwell case alone.

It is this potentially far-reaching dimension, beyond the case itself, that explains the sustained attention legal observers are paying to how this separate dispute unfolds, distinct from those overseen by Berman and Engelmayer in New York.

The victims, largely absent from the public debate

Voices rarely heard directly

One constant runs through this entire legal case since 2025: the victims themselves rarely speak directly in the media, preferring to rely on their lawyers to carry their concerns before Berman's and Engelmayer's courts. This choice, entirely understandable given the intimate and traumatic nature of the underlying facts, nonetheless deprives the public debate of an essential human dimension, too often reduced to abstract procedural arguments.

The rare public statements from victims, generally managed by their legal representatives, consistently insist on one point: legal transparency must never turn into a new non-consensual exposure of their identity or intimate details of their experience, a requirement the New York judges appear to have fully absorbed into their successive rulings.

A fragile judicial balance respected so far

Despite the documented tensions and delays, it is worth acknowledging that neither Berman nor Engelmayer has, to date, authorized a mass, unfiltered disclosure that would have directly exposed the identity of non-consenting victims, contrary to the fears expressed by their lawyers in February 2026 regarding the Department of Justice's website.

This balance, admittedly imperfect and a source of legitimate frustration for advocates of faster transparency, nonetheless reflects a constant judicial vigilance that deserves to be highlighted in any honest account of this case.

The political weight of the case on the Trump administration

A subject the president long tried to avoid

President Donald Trump initially urged lawmakers to reject the Epstein files transparency law before signing it, according to POLITICO, a reversal that reflects the considerable political pressure exerted by Congress and public opinion on a case particularly sensitive for his administration, given his documented personal ties to Epstein in the decades before the legal scandal.

This political context partly explains the perceived slowness of the law's administrative implementation once enacted: every new document disclosure carries a direct political risk for the administration, a reality that the New York judges and Judge Sullivan in Washington cannot ignore when assessing the arguments the Department of Justice offers to justify its delays.

A necessary distinction between military posture and handling of the Epstein case

A clear analytical distinction must be maintained here: the Trump administration's firmness on Western defense, support for NATO, and its posture toward Russia, Iran, or North Korea, should neither excuse nor minimize the documented delays and ambiguities in handling the Epstein case, a matter of domestic justice that demands its own standard of rigor and transparency.

This distinction, essential to any honest analysis, helps avoid both partisan indulgence and a reflexive rush to judgment, by sticking strictly to the documented legal facts before Berman, Engelmayer, and Sullivan.

What the historical precedents of non-disclosure reveal

The July 2025 memo, starting point of the current controversy

To fully understand the scale of the current dispute before Berman, Engelmayer, and Sullivan, one must go back to the memo released by the Department of Justice and the FBI on July 7, 2025, which concluded there was no "client list," no credible evidence of blackmail against prominent figures, and confirmed the theory of Epstein's suicide in custody. This two-page document, presented as final at the time, immediately triggered widespread skepticism among victims' lawyers and part of Congress.

It is precisely this initial skepticism that fueled, in the following months, the political pressure that led to the passage of the Epstein files transparency law in November 2025, itself the direct origin of every piece of litigation documented in this narrative, from New York to Washington.

A distrust that still shapes today's debate

This initial distrust, born from the July 2025 memo, continues to shape how every new document disclosure is received by the public and victims' lawyers: no release, however massive, ever seems fully able to dispel the doubt created by that first, widely deemed insufficient, document.

This dynamic of persistent distrust explains, implicitly, why Judges Berman, Engelmayer, and Sullivan continue to demand detailed explanations from the Department of Justice for every redaction, rather than simply accepting the executive branch's general claims of legal compliance.

Toward what legal outcome in the coming months

Possible scenarios before the courts

Several scenarios remain open for the rest of this multifaceted legal case. The most optimistic would see the Department of Justice fully comply with Sullivan's orders in Washington and the ongoing demands from Berman and Engelmayer in New York, leading to a substantially more complete disclosure by the end of 2026. The most pessimistic would instead see a multiplication of appeals and delaying tactics, indefinitely prolonging the dispute with no tangible resolution for victims or the public.

Between these two extremes, the most likely scenario, given the pace observed since December 2025, remains one of gradual, contested disclosure, punctuated by new hearings, new appeals, and new partial document waves, with no definitive closure in the short term.

The call for civic and journalistic vigilance

Whichever scenario plays out, this legal narrative underscores the importance of rigorous journalism and constant civic vigilance to maintain the necessary pressure on all the institutions involved. Without the tenacity of journalists like Katie Phang and victims' lawyers before Berman and Engelmayer, it is fair to doubt whether the current pace of disclosure, imperfect as it is, would have been maintained.

It is this combination of judicial, journalistic, and civic pressure that will continue, in the months ahead, to determine whether the promise of transparency passed by Congress will ever be fully honored.

The international dimension of the Epstein-Maxwell files

A network that extended beyond American borders

The documents released since December 2025 confirm what several journalistic investigations had already established before Epstein's death: his network of contacts and alleged accomplices extended well beyond American borders, touching figures and institutions in several Western countries. This international dimension further complicates the task of Judges Berman and Engelmayer, who sometimes have to work with documents written in foreign languages and partner jurisdictions with different confidentiality requirements.

The Department of Justice itself has acknowledged lacking sufficient language resources to quickly process certain foreign-language documents, an administrative gap that further delays the case's full resolution, according to developments documented in Katie Phang's separate case in Washington.

An international judicial cooperation still in its infancy

This international dimension logically calls for stronger judicial cooperation with America's Western partners, cooperation that remains, to this day, largely insufficient given the transnational scale of the Epstein network documented by several international journalistic investigations since 2019.

Until this international cooperation becomes more structured, some parts of the case will likely remain out of reach for American justice, a frustrating reality for victims hoping for full accountability that extends beyond the borders of the U.S. federal justice system alone.

Conclusion: a case that will continue to haunt American justice

A legal close still out of reach

At the end of this legal journey, one thing is clear: neither the criminal case Berman oversees in New York, nor Engelmayer's handling of the Maxwell matter, nor the separate dispute Katie Phang is pursuing in Washington, shows any sign of imminent, definitive resolution. Every new document release generates fresh challenges, and every fresh challenge further delays the closure hoped for by victims, journalists, and the general public.

This complex legal reality, far from the simplistic shortcuts sometimes circulated on social media, deserves to be told with precision: neither a proven total cover-up nor total transparency achieved, but a slow, contested, and still fundamentally unfinished legal process, seven years after Epstein's death in custody.

What America still must demand

Until the exact volume of documents still to be released is clarified, until victim-protection protocols are fully honored, and until the Department of Justice stops missing its own legal deadlines, the judicial pressure exerted by judges like Berman and Engelmayer, and by plaintiffs like Katie Phang, will remain an essential safeguard against any temptation to bury this case for good without a complete answer.

It is this constant judicial vigilance, more than any political statement, that will continue to determine whether the promise of transparency passed by Congress in November 2025 will ever be fully kept.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My sources and my limits

This narrative draws on public court records compiled by Wikipedia, on CBS News's continuous coverage, and on reporting from The Independent, PBS NewsHour, USA Today, and NOTUS. I did not have access to any sealed documents or non-public information: my account is strictly limited to what has been made public by the courts, the Department of Justice, or accredited press. Where a fact remains uncertain or disputed, I state that explicitly rather than deciding arbitrarily.

My acknowledged biases

I demand maximum transparency in this case, while firmly refusing any unsourced theory. My editorial line consistently favors facts established by court documents or verifiable reporting, never rumors, however widespread they may be on social media.

Sources

Primary sources

CBS News — Live coverage of the DOJ's release of the Epstein files, 2026

Wikipedia — Detailed timeline of the Epstein files

Secondary sources

PBS NewsHour — Lawmakers can sue over release of Epstein files, but not as part of the Maxwell case, judge says

The Independent — Judge allows release of grand jury transcripts in Epstein case, December 10, 2025

USA Today — Todd Blanche faces a court deadline on the Epstein files, July 2, 2026

The Hill — Judge orders DOJ to produce more unredacted documents, June 25, 2026