Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, participated in interviews with a top DOJ official, prompting outcries from victims. | John Minchillo/AP

NEW YORK — Victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are alarmed over the Justice Department’s effort to unseal grand jury testimony in their cases and its cooperation with Maxwell, a convicted sex offender.

Several victims, in letters from their lawyers, have balked at the department’s approach, saying it “smacks of a cover up,” calling aspects of it “cowardly,” and arguing that it demonstrates the Trump administration considers the victims “at best, an afterthought.”

And they warn that the Trump administration, with its treatment of Maxwell, is on the precipice of undoing the only measure of justice the victims received from a sex trafficking ring that, by the government’s own account, harmed more than 1,000 girls and young women.

In letters to the federal judges fielding the government’s request to unseal the materials, victims have largely — though not entirely — agreed with the Justice Department’s move to reveal the testimony, despite the fact that the department itself has acknowledged that much of the information is already public.

But they have derided the administration’s suggestion that it will seek to redact not only victim information but also “other personal identifying information” of third parties from the transcripts.

And they expressed fear and disgust over the administration’s recent treatment of Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. After a pair of interviews with a top DOJ official, Maxwell was transferred to a less restrictive facility, an unusual upgrade in her prison accommodations. She has also advocated for a pardon from President Donald Trump, who has reiterated he has the power to grant her clemency.

Maxwell has said she opposes the unsealing of the material since she is in the midst of attempting to overturn her conviction. Epstein, her longtime associate and onetime boyfriend, died by suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

DOJ declined to comment.

Victims speak out

Most of the letters to U.S. District Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer have been filed by lawyers for victims, with the names of the victims undisclosed or redacted.

Bradley Edwards, Brittany Henderson and Paul Cassell represent numerous victims, including some whose names, they said, appear in the grand jury materials and one who testified at Maxwell’s trial. In a letter to the court, they said their clients could support unsealing only if extreme care is taken to protect victims.

“The survivors support transparency when it can be achieved without sacrificing their safety, privacy, or dignity,” they wrote. “But transparency cannot come at the expense of the very people whom the justice system is sworn to protect — particularly amid contemporaneous events that magnify risk and trauma: the public platforming of Ms. Maxwell as a purportedly credible commentator despite her sex-trafficking conviction and perjury charges, her transfer to lower-security custody, a government request to unseal filed without conferral, and the looming specter of clemency.”

The lawyers especially took aim at what they said was the Justice Department’s failure to consult the victims or their attorneys before seeking the unsealing of the records, a step they said is not only required by law but one DOJ has previously failed to take in the Epstein saga.

In 2019, a federal judge found that federal prosecutors in Florida had broken the law by signing a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein without notifying victims. The 2007 agreement was struck by prosecutors led by Alex Acosta, who at the time of the judge’s ruling was Trump’s secretary of Labor during his first term.

“It is especially troubling that, despite the outcome of that litigation, the government has once again proceeded in a manner that disregards the victims’ rights, suggesting that the hard-learned lessons of the past have not taken hold,” Edwards, Henderson and Cassell wrote.

They also urged the judge not to consider the unsealing request in a vacuum. “Survivors are acutely concerned that unsealing, coupled with the transfer and Ms. Maxwell’s public platform, may be a prelude to clemency,” they wrote. “For some, the Maxwell conviction is the only meaningful measure of criminal accountability; its erosion would be devastating.”

A lawyer for Annie Farmer, a victim of Epstein and Maxwell who testified at Maxwell’s trial, also expressed revulsion that Maxwell “is now, to the victims’ horror, herself attempting to escape justice.”

She said the unsealing request, while it “will help expose the magnitude and abhorrence of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes,” doesn’t go far enough, and suggested the government should disclose the “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence” it possesses.

Farmer’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley also took issue with the government’s pledge to withhold identifying information about third parties, writing that “any effort to redact third party names smacks of a cover up.” And she faulted the administration’s statement that it had found no evidence to merit opening an investigation into any third parties. “The Government’s recent suggestion that no further criminal investigations are forthcoming is a cowardly abdication of its duties to protect and serve,” she wrote.

Yet another lawyer who said he represents multiple Epstein and Maxwell victims, John Scarola, told the judges that the court should release “all Epstein-related information and documents in the possession and control of law enforcement, prosecutorial and other government agents and entities,” with victim information redacted. He also said the court should order the disclosure of the complete transcripts of all interviews with Maxwell.

And an anonymous victim whom federal prosecutors said was represented by Edwards pleaded with the court for “more transparency.”

“I think the victims’ lawyers should have access to all these findings,” this person wrote. “We have a right to take legal action against these institutions and/or individuals involved in Epstein’s and co-conspirators crimes.”

There was one letter unlike the others, however. Neil Binder, an attorney for clients whose names were redacted in the publicly filed version of his letter, urged the court not to unseal the transcripts, saying the government hadn’t “met its burden to justify” such a step. Binder requested that if the documents are made public that his clients’ names be redacted because they were “innocent third parties at the time of any allegations contained in the grand jury materials.”

Binder wrote that the injury his clients could face if their names are revealed “is difficult to overstate.”

“Publicizing any information in the grand jury materials related to” his clients, he wrote, “will inflict irreparable harm on them through the very fact of their association with this case.”