Botched Epstein redactions trace back to Virgin Islands' 2020 civil racketeering case against estate

Source: CNN Politics

Updated Dec 23, 2025, 10:05 PM ET
PUBLISHED Dec 23, 2025, 9:43 PM ET


A botched redaction in the Epstein files revealed that government attorneys once accused his lawyers of paying over $400,000 to “young female models and actresses” to cover up his criminal activities. Social media users on Reddit and TikTok noticed in recent days that the redacted allegations could be uncovered by simply copying the blacked-out words and pasting them into a new document. CNN has verified that there are faulty redactions in at least one document.

The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021.

Still, it went viral online, amid the ongoing headaches for the Justice Department over the redactions that at times didn’t go far enough to protect victims, while also going too far to shield others. The redaction snafu can be traced back to a civil racketeering lawsuit in the Virgin Islands from 2020.

The territory’s attorney general sued Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, his companies and lawyers, including his long-time attorney Darren Indyke, claiming they “fraudulently” obtained more than $80 million from the Virgin Islands in tax breaks for Epstein’s various holdings while running a “sex trafficking ring.”

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-glitch-virgin-islands