The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has removed thousands of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein from its website after victims said their identities had been compromised.
Lawyers for Epstein’s victims said flawed redactions in the files released on Friday had “turned upside down” the lives of nearly 100 survivors.
Email addresses and nude photos in which the names and faces of potential victims could be identified were included in the release.
Survivors issued a statement calling the disclosure “outrageous” and said they should not be “named, scrutinized and retraumatized”.
The DOJ said it had taken down all the flagged files and that mistakes were due to “technical or human error”.
In a letter submitted to a federal judge on Monday, the DOJ said: “All documents requested by victims or counsel to be removed by yesterday evening have been removed for further redaction.”
The department said it was continuing to examine new requests, as well as checking whether there are any other documents that may need further redaction. A “substantial number” of documents independently identified have also been removed, it added.
Under the terms of the release, which was mandated after both chambers of Congress approved a measure compelling the DOJ to publish the documents, the federal government was required to redact details which could identify victims.
On Friday, two lawyers representing victims asked a federal judge in New York to order the DOJ to take down the website hosting the files, calling the release “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history”.
Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards said there was “an unfolding emergency that requires immediate judicial intervention” due to the DOJ “failing to redact victims names and other personally identifying information in thousands of instances”.
Several of Epstein’s victims added comments to the letter, including one who described the release as “life-threatening” and another who said she had received death threats after her private banking details were published.
Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Epstein survivor Annie Farmer said: “It’s hard to focus on the new information that has been brought to light because of how much damage the DOJ has done by exposing survivors in this way.”
Another of Epstein’s victims, Lisa Phillips, said that many of the survivors were “very unhappy with the outcome” of the release.
“The DOJ has violated all three of our requirements,” she told BBC’s Newsday on Tuesday. “Number one, many documents still haven’t been disclosed. Number two, the date set for release has long passed. And number three, DOJ released the names of many of the survivors.”
She added: “We feel like they’re playing some games with us but we’re not going to stop fighting.”
Gloria Allred, a women’s rights lawyer who has represented many of Epstein’s victims, previously told the BBC that numerous victims’ names had been disclosed in the latest release, including some who had not been identified publicly previously.
“In some cases… they have a line through the names but you can still read the names,” she said. “In other cases, they’ve shown photos of victims – survivors who have never done a public interview, never given their name publicly.”
A spokesperson for the DOJ told the BBC’s US news partner CBS that it “takes victim protection very seriously and has redacted thousands of victim names in the millions of published pages to protect the innocent”.
They added that the department was “working around the clock to fix the issue” and “to date 0.1% of released pages” had been found to have unredacted information that could identify victims.
