Judge Orders Virginia Giuffre’s Lawyers to ‘Destroy’ Some of Their Jeffrey Epstein Files Due to Not Being "properly in possession", Bars Dershowitz from Accessing Them

A federal court in New York City has moved to further restrict access to long-sought-after secret files in the Jeffrey Epstein saga. In a Wednesday order, Senior U. S. District Judge Loretta Preska determined that attorneys for Epstein survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre had improperly gained access to many of those highly-prized documents.

Preska determined that certain discovery materials covered by a years-old protective order “are not properly in possession” of Giuffre’s current legal team and “thus must be destroyed.” That means that they can’t have copies of the documents in question; it does not mean that all copies of the documents will be deleted from existence. Additionally, the law firm of Cooper & Kirk must provide “an affidavit detailing the steps that it took to destroy the materials.”

The ruling was also a setback for Harvard Law professor emeritus and former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has repeatedly sought access to the full tranche of Epstein files and discovery materials.

At issue here are two separate legal controversies: (1) a protective order issued in 2015 by Judge Robert W. Sweet in a since-settled defamation case between Giuffre and Epstein’s alleged groomer and girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell; and (2) a more recent series of extant defamation, back-and-forth claims between Giuffre and Dershowitz.

The Giuffre v. Maxwell protective order is the major legal lock-and-key which has long-protected the Epstein files. A process is currently underway for both sides to sift through those documents and eventually make many of them available for public consumption.

Dershowitz, however, recently requested unencumbered access to those files and more–asking the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to modify and make him a party to the original protective order because it would help him in his ongoing defamation lawsuit.

Such access was necessary, Dershowitz’s attorney argued during a hearing last week, because Giuffre’s attorneys in the defamation battle also have access to many of those documents covered by the Maxwell protective order. Judge Preska moved to rein in both sides.

“[T]the Court was troubled to learn at the June 23 oral argument that replacement counsel for Ms. Giuffre, Cooper & Kirk, had received from Ms. Giuffre’s former counsel, Boies Schiller Flexner, the Maxwell materials at issue in their entirety,” the judge chidingly explained. “Asked to explain how those materials came into the firm’s possession, attorneys from Cooper & Kirk explained that they had obtained access to the materials because Ms. Giuffre retained them ‘both to represent her in [Giuffre v. Dershowitz] and to represent her in conjunction with the Boies Schiller firm in the Maxwell case.'”

That explanation didn’t land well with the SDNY judge:

[W]hatever Cooper & Kirk’s intentions in requesting and obtaining the Maxwell materials from Boies Schiller, the Maxwell Protective Order explicitly provides that (1) discovery materials designated CONFIDENTIAL cannot be disclosed or used outside of the confines of the Maxwell action and (2) that properly designated discovery materials may only be disclosed to specific groups of individuals, including attorneys “actively working on” the Maxwell litigation.

“Cooper & Kirk is sunk on either score,” the judge reasoned. “As a practical matter, the Court would be surprised–shocked, even–if Cooper & Kirk was not in some sense ‘using’ the Maxwell discovery in its representation of Ms. Giuffre in her action against Mr. Dershowitz. And, even if it was not doing so, Cooper & Kirk is not ‘actively working on’ the Maxwell matter such that disclosure of discovery materials to it would be permissible under the plain terms of the protective order.”

Preska went on to explain that the protective order only provides access to the “preparation and trial” o... (Read more)

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