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

Marshall Cohen, CNNDecember 24, 2025 at 4:05 AM

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Jeffrey Epstein's former home on the island of Little St. James in the US Virgin Islands seen on November 22, 2023. - Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

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.”

Attorneys for the Virgin Islands filed an amended lawsuit in February 2021. That document, which is still available on the public docket, added new allegations that contained the botched redaction. That document was later attached as an exhibit in a related Virgin Islands-based civil case against Epstein’s estate in March 2022, and the error carried over.

The Justice Department posted that entire case docket on its new “Epstein Library” webpage Friday – including the file with the botched redaction.

The redacted paragraph claimed Indyke ran Epstein’s tax-exempt charitable foundation in the Virgin Islands and, between 2015 and 2019, he “signed Foundation account checks for over $400,000 made payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model who received over $380,000” through monthly installments over several years.

Another redacted paragraph claimed Indyke signed a check to pay a lawyer who was involved in “one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein’s victims to secure a victim’s immigration status,” and that the memo line on the check “references the former Russian model’s last name.”

Indyke’s lawyers have previously denied the allegations in the Virgin Islands’ lawsuit. His lawyer, Daniel Weiner, told CNN in a statement Tuesday that Indyke “did not socialize” with Epstein and wasn’t aware of Epstein’s actions while providing him legal services.

“Not a single woman has ever accused Mr. Indyke of committing sexual abuse or witnessing sexual abuse, nor claimed at any time that she reported to him any allegation of Mr. Epstein’s abuse,” Weiner said, adding, “not surprisingly, no judge in any court anywhere has ever found that Mr. Indyke committed any wrongdoing of any kind.”

Regarding claims of forced marriages, Weiner said, “That two women married each other – as allowed by law in this country – is not evidence of a forced marriage.” He also said there is no evidence that Indyke “knew at the time that those marriages were anything other than consensual.”

The Virgin Islands attorney general settled in 2022 with Epstein’s estate for over $105 million.

CNN has reached out to the Virgin Islands attorney general and several of the officials from the office whose names appear on the original 2021 court filing with the botched redaction.

CNN’s Julie In contributed to this report.

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