Victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein said Wednesday they plan to release their own client list after the Justice Department in July announced it found no evidence of one.
At a rally on Capitol Hill, Epstein victim Lisa Phillips said she and other survivors of Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell plan to release a list of those involved in the abuse.
“Epstein was not just a serial predator; he was an international human trafficker,” Phillips said. “And many around him knew this, many participated, and many profited, and yet, he was protected. I know what it’s like to be trafficked to others, and I know the files contain the names of powerful men who have been shielded because of their fame or fortune.”
“And let me announce now, several of us Epstein survivors have been discussing creating our own list of names,” she added to the cheers of the crowd. “We know the names. Many of us were abused by them. Now together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world, and it will be done by survivors and for survivors.”
After the rally, the Epstein victims and their supporters joined some Republican and Democratic lawmakers for a press conference just outside the Capitol Building. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) spoke, calling on the federal government to release more information on the Epstein investigation.
“[The] Washington establishment is asking the American public to believe something that is not believable,” Massie said. “They’re asking you to believe that two individuals created hundreds of victims and they acted alone and that the DOJ has no idea of who else might have been involved that nobody else did anything that rose to a criminal enterprise. The American people know that’s not true.”
The DOJ said that it did not find evidence that Epstein had a client list or that powerful co-conspirators were involved in his child sex crimes. The DOJ also noted that the evidence showed that Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell in August 2019. President Donald Trump has blasted those focusing on the Epstein files, arguing that the issue is being pushed by the “Fake News” and “success-starved Dems.”
During the press conference, Epstein accuser Jena-Lisa Jones said, “I remembered crying the entire way home, thinking about how I couldn’t ever tell anyone about what actually happened in that house. This guy was so rich and had so many pictures with so many famous people and no one would have ever believed me if I told them.” Jones told CNN that she met Epstein when she was just 14, and that he was her first sexual experience.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee released more than 33,000 pages of Epstein documents, but critics blasted the heavily redacted document trove.
“What people are waking up and discovering right now is — the folks who stayed up all night to go through the 34,000 individual pages have found that they’re so redacted as to be useless,” Massie said.
Khanna said during the press conference that less than 1% of the Epstein files had been released.
“A nation that allows rich and powerful men to traffic and abuse young girls without consequence is a nation that has lost its moral and spiritual core,” he said.
Wednesday’s rally and press conference was the largest gathering of Epstein’s accusers since a 2019 court hearing following the sex abuser’s death, The Washington Post reported. House lawmakers met with Epstein victims on Tuesday to discuss releasing more documents.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who supports a limited release of Epstein documents, praised the Tuesday document dump, saying, “There’s 33,000 documents that were released because of this administration. When we met with victims yesterday, they said that they don’t want their personal information to be out there, and they actually asked us to not put it out there, so obviously that was information that was withheld from that document release.”
Massie also filed a discharge petition on Tuesday in an attempt to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. The discharge petition must receive 218 votes, a majority of the House, to move a vote forward.
Khanna believes that all House Democrats would sign the petition, and is hopeful that at least six Republicans would also sign. Massie said he is two Republicans away from passing the discharge petition, along with Massie and Greene, Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are the only Republicans to sign the petition.
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