Updated at 12:40 a.m. on December 20, 2025
Late on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known, colloquially, as the Epstein files. The contents, most of which I’ve reviewed, are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, even absurd (in the case of a photo of Jeffrey Epstein posing with a giant Winnie the Pooh mascot). More than anything, they are ████, which is to say, unknown, as many of the files are heavily redacted.
The majority of this tranche of files consists of thousands of documents containing more than 3,000 of photos of Epstein’s homes, in New York City and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, filled with art and photographs of nude and half-clothed women. One photograph in the files appears to be a framed mirror selfie of Epstein and Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist. There are photos of Epstein’s jet-setting lifestyle, a number of which depict either Epstein or his associate Ghislaine Maxwell with former President Bill Clinton. (Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison term for sex trafficking.) The photos appear to show Clinton reclining in a hot tub with a person whose face is redacted, at a table with the actor Kevin Spacey, with his arm around Michael Jackson, sitting at a table with the Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, and on what appears to be an airplane with a woman sitting in his lap (her face is redacted).
Representatives for Spacey, Jagger, and the Jackson estate did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement on X this evening, a spokesperson for Clinton said, “There are two types of people here. The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first.”
A couple images of President Trump appear to be in the files—one shows what appears to be his face among a series of photos on a desk, posing next to unidentified women. The files also include a legal complaint that alleges a verbal interaction between Trump, Epstein, and a 14-year-old girl. (In response to a request for comment, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not address questions about Trump’s appearances, and instead said that the Trump Administration is “the most transparent in history” and “has done more for the victims than Democrats ever have.”)
Many of the images inside the files show Epstein and Maxwell having fun in exotic locations—private planes, helicopters, beach-side villas, yachts, unidentified mansions. Many of the unredacted image files are banal or not explicit. But a number of the redacted ones are, or at least are unnerving: scantily clad women in various poses, with much of their nude bodies and faces blurred out; a framed image of an unidentifiable person in pajamas on their knees in front of a photographer; entire scanned sheets of redacted image thumbnails labeled St. Trop/Clinton Morocco. Nude ████.
Much of what’s released in this batch of photos adds to what previously released emails and victim testimony have alleged—that Jeffrey Epstein lived opulently and kept company with presidents, and that his lascivious nature around young women was essentially an open secret among people who knew him. Out of the gate, the files seem to contain only a few genuine revelations, including a complaint about child sexual-abuse material dated from 1996, which alleges that Epstein stole photos of two girls and threatened the photographer. According to Maria Farmer, an employee of Epstein who filed the report, the FBI did not contact her for a decade.
The files do contain numerous sordid bits of evidence: a handwritten phone-call or voice mail summary from November 8, 2004, that reads, “I have a Female for him”; an Amazon receipt from 2005 for three books, including one titled Slavecraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude—Principles, Skills and Tools. Even the redactions reveal the scale of Epstein’s actions—a list of “masseuses” is completely redacted but contains 254 entries.
Despite the gigabytes of information, this phase of the Epstein files seems unlikely to put the Epstein conspiracy theorizing to bed. Likely, it will do the opposite—fuel speculation that plenty is missing or has been obscured. In a press release related to the release of the files, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote that the administration was “following through on President Trump’s commitment to transparency and lifting the veil on the disgusting actions of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators.” But the extent of the redactions seem to undermine at least part of Bondi’s statement. While there is every reason to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims, many bystanders in the file photographs have their faces obscured by large black squares. (This afternoon, Fox News reported that “the same redaction standards were applied to politically exposed individuals and government officials” as to victims; Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox that the Justice Department is “not redacting the names of any politicians’” and that "there are no redactions of famous people.”)
There is also the matter of what the DOJ chose to release. Bill Clinton, for instance, is one of Trump’s political enemies. Trump, who reportedly knew and spent time in social circles with Epstein for years, and whose name appeared in previously released Epstein material from the House Oversight Committee, hardly shows up. In his statement, Clinton’s spokesperson, Angel Ureña, accused the administration of playing politics, claiming the timing of the file release was “about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever.”
It is difficult to know if the information in this phase of the files is simply the first in a series that will implicate people across the political spectrum or if this was the tranche that was easiest for DOJ lawyers to redact and clear for release. What is clear is that the administration, which dragged its feet releasing the files—Bondi first indicated the files were “on her desk” in February, nearly a year ago—has lost the benefit of the doubt. As my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reports, in the lead-up to the release of the files, Bondi and the Justice Department have kept Epstein’s victims in the dark about the release and, today, canceled a meeting between Bondi and victims at the last minute. (The victims were told Bondi had a medical appointment.)
On X, the White House is using information from the files to score political points. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reposted the photo that appears to show Clinton in the hot tub, with the caption: “Oh my!” As reported by Politico, Chad Gilmartin, a DOJ spokesperson, posted from his personal X account: “I wonder why the Biden DOJ refused to release the files…” (The post has since been deleted.)
So far, the conclusion from the immediate release of the files is that it has satisfied very few people. For Epstein’s victims—for whom this is not a conspiracy theory or bit of online drama—the files, and their redactions, bring little added transparency or accountability. For those looking for more evidence of Donald Trump’s personal relationship with Epstein or information about current administration officials, the files contain very little to go on. Aside from the taunting from the White House, the reaction on the right has been mostly quiet. Online, some (mostly anonymous) Trump voters or self-proclaimed patriots appear frustrated by the redactions in the current release.
In July, when the pressure truly began to mount to release the files, I wrote that the Epstein case was, in many ways, the perfect conspiracy theory because it mixes documented crimes with the tantalizing promise of uncovering some larger, elusive network of evil. What we know about Epstein—his celebrity and elite friends and associates who cozied up to him long after he became a sex offender, his proudly creepy public behavior, the wealth and power—makes what we don’t know seem that much more plausible and awful. It suggests that the QAnon-style fantasies of cabals of elite child trafficking ought not to be so far-fetched.
In recent months though, the Epstein files have evolved into something more akin to a cultural and political pain sponge. Every new disclosure only fans the flames, either feeding the public’s righteous anger over elite impunity or stoking suspicion that the public is being misled or not told the whole truth. The partial, obscured release of these files has been billed by the Trump administration as an act of bold transparency. But what it actually reveals is how, in an environment of broken trust, in an age where conspiracy theorizing has become the lingua franca of American politics, no amount of information may ever be universally satisfactory. The little black redaction squares that blanket the documents are ostensibly there to protect. But for many who’ve waited for this disclosure, they may also represent hope that on the other side of the square there might be justice, truth, and accountability. As long as those little black squares are there, that hope will be misguided.
