Florida judge denies DOJ request to unseal Epstein West Palm Beach grand jury docs

Ben Wieder and Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald on Jul 23, 2025

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MIAMI — A Florida judge denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts from the Southern District of Florida’s original federal investigation into deceased serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

The request to unseal records from the Florida investigation came as the Trump administration has been under fire for failing to publicly disclose new information about the financier’s sex crimes as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had said publicly the administration would do.

U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg wrote that “the Court’s hands are tied” by the court’s rules and that the government hadn’t successfully made the case that any of the exceptions would apply that would allow the release of grand jury testimony — which is otherwise kept secret.

The government argued that they should be released because Epstein’s death diminished the reason for keeping grand jury testimony secret and because of the “public’s strong interest” in the Epstein case.

Rosenberg also denied a request by the government to transfer the proceeding to the Southern District of New York, where the government filed a parallel request to unseal grand jury testimony related to Epstein’s 2019 arrest on sex charges.

Epstein’s high-profile friends included President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, among others. Several of Epstein’s hundreds of underage victims have accused Epstein and his accomplice and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, of trafficking them to the pair’s high-profile friends, though Trump and Clinton have not been accused of wrongdoing. Maxwell was convicted on several charges related to sex trafficking in 2021 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Bondi indicated in an interview on Fox News that she had a copy of the so-called “Epstein List” on her desk, seemingly giving credence to the existence of a list of which of Epstein’s friends had participated in his sex abuse of hundreds of girls, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories for years. Epstein’s death in federal custody in 2019, which was ruled a suicide, has also been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons has acknowledged many failings in its handling of Epstein’s custody, but the government has maintained that Epstein’s cause of death was suicide.

The Miami Herald reported in its "Perversion of Justice" series on the sweetheart deal Epstein received from federal prosecutors in 2008 that allowed him to plead guilty to two state solicitation charges, one including a minor. He served just over a year in custody in a county jail.