The entertainment world has been rocked with the revelations from the sealed court documents related to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The document includes a bunch of names from Hollywood. Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio are some of the big names in the document along with politicians Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, reports Mirror.co.uk.
Stars such as Cate Blanchett, Cameron Diaz, Bruce Willis, and Kevin Spacey have also been name-dropped. However, simply their mention does not imply that they have been party to any wrongdoing. The claims and association of the names to the crimes are yet to be proven in the court of law.
As per Mirror.co.uk, the judge said a handful of names should remain blacked out in the documents because they would identify people who were sexually abused. Before the unsealing, the names were listed in court papers as variants of J Doe. Many of the names on the list are people who had been publicly identified as Epstein associates prior to this unsealing through years of coverage of the case.
Dozens of previously sealed court documents related to Epstein were made public late Wednesday after US Judge Loretta Preska ruled last month that documents naming more than 170 people who were either associates, friends or victims of Epstein should be made public.
The documents are part of a 2015 US defamation case by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell, the disgraced British socialite who supplied Epstein with underage girls. Giuffre claimed the now deceased physicist Stephen Hawking participated in an “underage orgy.”
In 2015, photographs showed that Hawking was hosted on Epstein’s private Caribbean island before the billionaire was first charged in 2006, while it is alleged that magician Copperfield had dinner with Epstein and asked a “survivor” if she knew girls were getting paid to find other girls.
Prince Andrew has also been named in the tranche of names, despite Buckingham Palace previously saying the allegations are “categorically untrue.”
Epstein was indicted in 2019 on charges of operating a sex trafficking ring involving underage girls after Virginia Roberts Giuffre alleged he abused her as a minor and that his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, aided in the abuse. He was found dead in his jail cell while awaiting trial, while Maxwell was found guilty in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.