By LARRY NEUMEISTER
NEW YORK (AP) — The identities of two women once listed as potential co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein will remain sealed for their safety and privacy, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
In a written decision, Judge Richard M. Berman rejected an NBC News request to make their identities public after lawyers for the women and the U.S. Justice Department opposed the unsealing request. He wrote that threats to the safety of the individuals persist and releasing their names would threaten their safety and privacy.
In requesting the unsealing, attorney Alexander Ziccardi for NBC News cited the First Amendment and said there was a “presumptive right of access” requiring that the names redacted from a July 2019 government letter to Berman be released publicly.
The 2019 letter, filed by prosecutors opposing bail for Epstein, was written in part to answer questions the judge had raised at a bail hearing about two unidentified individuals prosecutors cited in their arguments against granting Epstein bail.
Prosecutors acknowledged that their names had been publicly associated with Epstein and his alleged sexual assault on girls and young women over two decades. Epstein obtained protection for both individuals in a nonprosecution agreement he signed with federal prosecutors in Florida in 2007.
Prosecutors said in the letter that Epstein paid one potential co-conspirator $100,000 and the other $250,000 in late 2018 after the Miami Herald focused fresh attention on Epstein’s abuse and the deal he made with federal prosecutors in Florida a decade earlier that spared him from federal charges.
Federal authorities in New York, insisting that they were not bound by the 2007 nonprosecution agreement, arrested Epstein in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
In their 2019 letter, prosecutors said the woman who was paid $250,000 was one of the Epstein employees identified in the indictment.
The indictment alleged that she and two other employees facilitated Epstein’s trafficking of minors in part by contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with Epstein at his Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, residences, the letter noted.
But lawyers for the women recently adamantly opposed the release of their names. A lawyer for the woman who Epstein paid $100,000 told Berman that his client was the subject of death threats because of misinformation about her and was investigated by the FBI and found to be credible, the judge noted.
A lawyer for the second woman told Berman that investigators found that both women were “severely victimized by Jeffrey Epstein … and should be afforded the same protections that have been afforded to all other victims.”
As he awaited trial in New York, Epstein died in a federal jail in August 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. His former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of sex trafficking charges in December 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Messages for comment sent to NBC and Ziccardi were not immediately returned.
A spokesperson for the prosecutor declined comment.
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