Twelve Women Sue the FBI, Claim Agency Ignored 1996 Warning About Jeffrey Epstein for 23 Years

 

It is the morning of August 29, 1996.

Maria Farmer is twenty-six years old. She is a professional artist who had been working for Jeffrey Epstein as an art consultant — living in his Manhattan mansion on East 71st Street, procuring pieces for his collection, moving through the rarefied world of a man with seemingly unlimited money and an inexhaustible appetite for surrounding himself with beautiful, talented young women.

She is no longer living there. She left after something happened that she will spend the next thirty years describing in courtrooms, in congressional testimony, in interviews, and in a federal lawsuit. She went to Epstein’s Ohio estate, the Wexner property he was managing. She says Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell assaulted her there. She says she tried to leave and couldn’t. She says staff members were instructed to prevent her from using the phone. She eventually got out. She went home.

And then she did what every law enforcement training manual, every public service announcement, every instinct built into the American legal system tells a victim to do.

She called the police.

August 29, 1996. New York Police Department. Maria Farmer files a report. She describes a sexual assault. She describes Epstein. She describes Maxwell. She describes the house on East 71st Street and what she saw there — not just her own assault, but what she calls “child pornography,” naked and semi-naked photographs of young girls stored in the residence of a man who ran a global social network of powerful men.​

The NYPD officer who takes her report tells her this is a federal matter. He advises her to call the FBI.

She calls the FBI. Then she calls again. She reaches two different offices.

On September 3, 1996 — five days after her NYPD report — an FBI agent logs a file. The case is categorized as “child pornography.” The document exists. It has a date stamp. Maria Farmer’s name appears in it, redacted, with the notation that she is “a professional artist.”​

The file is opened.

Nothing happens.

For ten years, nothing happens. Jeffrey Epstein continues. His operation continues. The girls continue to arrive, be processed, be abused, and leave — many of them so young, so isolated, so afraid, and so thoroughly convinced by the infrastructure around them that no one will believe them that they do not even try to report it. And for the ones who do try — for the Maria Farmers who go to the police, who call the FBI, who describe in specific and credible terms what is happening — the answer, from the institution whose entire purpose is to investigate exactly this, is the same.

Nothing.

The Document That Changed Everything

For nearly thirty years, Maria Farmer was a woman that some people in the Epstein investigative community privately doubted. She had told her story consistently and at great personal cost — she developed cancer, she struggled financially, she faced the particular cruelty of being accused of lying about the very things that had broken her life.​

And one specific element of her story was repeatedly used to discredit her: her claim that she had reported Epstein to the FBI in 1996.

The FBI had never publicly confirmed the report. Its own internal review of the Epstein case, published in 2020 by the Department of Justice inspector general, did not reference Farmer’s original 1996 complaint. Some people covering the Epstein story had quietly suggested, in the way people suggest things when they cannot prove them, that perhaps the report had never been filed.

On December 19, 2025, the Department of Justice released another tranche of Epstein files.​

Inside those files: a one-page FBI document, dated September 3, 1996. The complainant’s name is redacted. She is identified as “a professional artist.” The case classification: “child pornography.” The substance of the complaint matches, in every documented detail, exactly what Maria Farmer had been saying for twenty-nine years.

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The New York Times reached Farmer at home to tell her the document had been released.​

She cried.

“There should be a comprehensive investigation,” her attorney Brad Edwards told the Times, “into every government employee who was aware of this document and allowed a narrative to circulate that it did not exist.”​

The document existed. It had always existed. For two decades, while Epstein continued trafficking, while girls were assaulted on his island, while his Manhattan mansion continued to operate, while his Palm Beach estate ran its daily schedule of recruited minors — the FBI had a file. Stamped September 3, 1996. Child pornography. Filed and forgotten.

That document is now Exhibit A in a federal lawsuit that twelve women filed against the United States government on February 14, 2024.​

The Lawsuit: Suing The FBI

The complaint is filed in the Southern District of New York — the same district that would ultimately prosecute Epstein in 2019, the same district that handled the Maxwell trial. It is Case 1:24-cv-01071. The plaintiffs are listed as Doe 1 through Doe 12.​

Their attorney, Jennifer Plotkin of Merson Law, does not mince words when she speaks to reporters on the day of filing.

“The FBI has turned its back on survivor victims,” Plotkin says. “This lawsuit seeks to hold the FBI responsible for failure to act when it absolutely should have.”​

Read that sentence carefully. Not failure to catch Epstein earlier. Not failure to build a strong enough case. Failure to act. The allegation is not incompetence. The allegation is a choice — a decision, made at some level inside one of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agencies, not to pursue credible evidence of child trafficking and sexual abuse because doing so would have been inconvenient, or complicated, or politically difficult, or all three simultaneously.

The complaint is twenty-seven pages. It is specific. It is chronological. It lays out, in the flat legal language that makes terrible things feel even more terrible because of the absence of emotion, exactly what the FBI knew and exactly when it knew it.​

From 1996 to 2005: the FBI receives multiple reports, complaints, and tips regarding Epstein’s trafficking of women and minors, sexual abuse, and human rights violations committed by Epstein and his associates.

July 24, 2006: the FBI opens a formal investigation — not because it has finally decided to act on the evidence it has been accumulating for a decade, but because the Palm Beach Police Department has forced its hand.​

Palm Beach PD received a report in March 2005 that a fourteen-year-old girl had been recruited to Epstein’s mansion for a sexual massage in exchange for money. The department investigated. It found forty victims. It arrested Epstein. And then it notified the FBI of likely federal crimes — child prostitution, trafficking across state lines, the full federal picture of what was happening in the house on El Brillo Way.​

The FBI, with its own ten-year file, is now compelled to act. Not by its own initiative. By a local police department in a Florida county.

September 2008: the FBI closes its investigation. The reason is Epstein’s guilty plea to a state prostitution charge in Florida. A plea deal that federal prosecutors — including, critically, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta — negotiated in a manner that federal courts would later find to be illegal. A deal that gave Epstein what amounted to immunity from federal prosecution, that notified his victims of their rights only after the agreement was signed, and that was subsequently vacated by a federal judge in 2019 as a violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

When Epstein pleads guilty to state charges and registers as a sex offender, the FBI closes its file.

From 2009 to 2019: the FBI continues to receive tips. More victims. More evidence. More reports of trafficking continuing — because it is continuing, on the island, in Manhattan, in Palm Beach, at the New Mexico ranch. The trafficking operation does not pause because Epstein has a Florida conviction. It adapts. It continues. And the FBI, which has a file that now stretches from 1996 to 2009 with documented evidence of child pornography, child prostitution, and multi-state trafficking, does nothing.

Until July 6, 2019. When Epstein is arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, stepping off a plane returning from Paris.​

Thirty-three days later, he is dead.

The Fourteen-Year-Old And The Palm Beach Police

To understand why the FBI’s failure is so specific and so documented, you have to understand how Epstein was eventually caught — and why the catching came from the last place anyone would have expected.

In March 2005, a woman in Palm Beach calls the police. Her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter has been to Jeffrey Epstein’s house. Something happened. The girl is upset. The stepmother wants someone to investigate.​

Detective Joe Recarey of the Palm Beach Police Department takes the case. What he finds, in the course of a methodical local investigation, is extraordinary: a systematic operation, running out of the house at 358 El Brillo Way, in which local girls — many of them recruited from troubled backgrounds, from the kinds of circumstances that make a hundred dollars in cash feel significant — are brought to the residence three to four times a day, every day, and directed to give “massages” to a wealthy man who sexually assaults them. The girls recruit other girls. The network expands. By the time Recarey has finished his interviews, he has documented forty victims.​

He notifies the FBI. He presents evidence of likely federal crimes. He presents victim testimony. He presents the documented pattern of cross-state recruitment that transforms a local assault case into a federal trafficking matter.

The FBI acknowledges receipt and opens a formal investigation in July 2006 — sixteen months after Palm Beach PD first obtained the report, and ten years after Maria Farmer filed her federal child pornography complaint.

And then — in the two years that the FBI actually investigates — something remarkable happens, which is that the investigation assembles exactly what it needs. Photographs. Videos. Victim interviews. The documentary record of a trafficking operation running across multiple states and multiple countries, involving a man with the financial resources to corrupt and the social connections to intimidate.​

Hard evidence. The complaint is specific: the FBI possessed “photographs, videos, and interviews that constituted hard evidence of child prostitution.”​

And then Alexander Acosta negotiated the plea deal. And the FBI closed the file.

The Plea Deal That Became Its Own Crime

The story of the Acosta plea deal has been told many times, but its implications for the FBI lawsuit require it to be told once more, in its specific and documented particulars.

In 2006-2007, as the FBI’s investigation was underway and Palm Beach PD had built a case that local prosecutors believed could result in charges carrying life imprisonment, federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta entered negotiations with Epstein’s legal team.​

The legal team was extraordinary. Alan Dershowitz. Roy Black. Gerald Lefcourt. Ken Starr — the same Ken Starr who had led the investigation into President Clinton. These were not criminal defense attorneys who worked for ordinary defendants. These were men with long-standing relationships inside the legal and political establishment, men who understood exactly how to apply pressure in exactly the right places.

The deal Acosta signed gave Epstein an eighteen-month sentence in a Palm Beach County jail. Not a federal prison. A county facility. From which he was permitted to leave for work release six days a week, spending twelve hours a day at his Palm Beach office. From which, according to the Jane Does’ complaint and subsequent reporting, he continued to receive visits.​

The deal also contained a provision that Epstein’s attorneys fought to include: a non-prosecution agreement that extended immunity not just to Epstein but to “any potential co-conspirators.” By its terms, the sweeping immunity agreement protected everyone who had participated in the operation — every person who had recruited, transported, or facilitated the trafficking — from federal prosecution.​

The victims were not notified before the deal was signed. Under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, they were legally entitled to be consulted. They were not. A federal judge would rule in 2019 that this violated the law. By that point, Epstein was dead and the question of remedy was moot.

When the deal was signed, the FBI closed its investigation. Two years of assembled evidence, forty documented victims, photographs and videos that the complaint describes as “hard evidence of child prostitution” — filed away.

And from 2009 to 2019, while Epstein was a registered sex offender who had served time and was technically no longer the subject of an active FBI investigation, the tips continued to arrive. The agency continued to receive reports. It continued to do nothing.

Maria Farmer’s Thirty-Year Wait

The December 2025 confirmation of the 1996 FBI file is not just significant as evidence. It is personally significant to Maria Farmer in a way that the legal proceedings do not fully capture.

She had reported what she saw in Epstein’s Manhattan residence. She had reported the child pornography — the photographs. She had reported Maxwell. She had done everything right.

And then she had spent thirty years being managed.

After she filed her complaint, she says she began receiving what she describes as threats — subtle, sustained pressure designed to discourage her from continuing to pursue the matter. She believes that Epstein became aware of her complaint and that his network was used to intimidate her.​

She developed cancer. She faced financial difficulty. She moved repeatedly. She gave interviews and testimony over the years as the Epstein story slowly emerged into public consciousness, and in those interviews, she described consistently and in specific detail the same events she had reported to the FBI in 1996.

In 2022, she gave testimony that contributed to the Maxwell conviction.

In May 2025, she filed her own separate federal lawsuit against the government. The complaint, filed in federal court, alleges that the FBI did “absolutely nothing” after receiving her 1996 report — that the specific, documented complaint she made about child pornography in Epstein’s possession was logged, filed, and then abandoned while Epstein continued his operation for twenty-three more years.​

“For over two decades,” her 2025 complaint states, “the FBI permitted Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic and sexually abuse scores of children and young women by failing to do the job the American people expected of it.”​

She is not suing Epstein’s estate. She is suing the United States of America.

What The Twelve Women Experienced

The complaint filed on February 14, 2024 does not describe all twelve plaintiffs’ experiences in detail — the case is filed under pseudonyms, and the specific accounts of individual women are protected. But the amended complaints and the September 2024 additional lawsuit filed by eight more women (also represented by Merson Law) add specific detail to the pattern.​

Jane Doe 1 was sexually abused as a minor in New York and trafficked to Epstein’s Virgin Islands estate multiple times between 2007 and 2017. That span — 2007 to 2017 — includes the entire period when the FBI had already closed its investigation, when Epstein was a registered sex offender, when his name was in federal databases as a convicted criminal. During all of that time, Jane Doe 1 was being trafficked to Little St. James.​

Jane Doe 1 was also, according to the complaint, “forced to marry an Eastern European woman to further Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring.” A forced marriage. International trafficking. Document fraud. The kind of federal crimes that FBI countertrafficking units exist specifically to investigate.​

Jane Doe 2 was abused in New York and trafficked to the Virgin Islands multiple times between 2005 and 2017. Her abuse began in 2005 — one year before the FBI opened its first investigation, and twelve years before it ended.​

Twelve years. The FBI received its first child pornography complaint in 1996. It opened its investigation in 2006. It closed its investigation in 2008. Jane Doe 2 was trafficked until 2017. That is twenty-one years from first complaint to last documented abuse.

The attorneys at Merson Law represent thirty-three total women victimized by Epstein and his associates. They have been careful and methodical in building the case — collecting declarations, obtaining documents through Freedom of Information requests, cross-referencing the FBI’s internal timelines against the documented experiences of their clients. The picture they have assembled is not circumstantial. It is a timeline. A sequence of dates and decisions and non-decisions that maps, with painful precision, the gap between what the FBI knew and what the FBI did.​

The Anonymous Question

On April 29, 2024, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres issued a ruling in Case 1:24-cv-01071 that stopped the proceedings in their tracks.

The motion to proceed anonymously — the Jane Does’ request to continue the case using pseudonyms rather than their legal names — was denied.​

This is not a minor procedural obstacle. For victims of sexual trafficking, the ability to proceed anonymously is often the difference between filing a lawsuit and not filing one at all. The specific nature of what happened to these women, the potential for retaliation, the documented pattern of intimidation associated with Epstein’s network, the ongoing power and connections of people potentially implicated by their testimony — all of these factors weigh heavily in the decision of whether to attach a legal name to a federal complaint.

Judge Torres denied the initial motion without prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs could refile. They did.​

On August 7, 2024, the renewed motion to proceed anonymously was also denied.

The plaintiffs now faced a choice: reveal their legal names in a public federal complaint in one of the most high-profile cases in American legal history, or withdraw the lawsuit.

As of this writing, the case remains active. Merson Law has continued to pursue it. The question of anonymity — of whether women who were trafficked as minors must publicly identify themselves in order to sue the government agency that failed to protect them — is one of the procedural fault lines running through this litigation, and its resolution will determine whether these twelve women can pursue their day in federal court.

This detail is not incidental. It is part of the story of how the system continues to impose costs on survivors that it does not impose on anyone else.

The FBI Director Testifies: A Promise That Did Not Age Well

On December 5, 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.​

The timing matters. The hearing occurred after the Miami Herald’s landmark 2018 investigative series by Julie Brown had exposed the Acosta plea deal and the pattern of FBI inaction. It occurred after Epstein’s 2019 arrest. After his death. After the Maxwell conviction in 2021. After years of congressional demands for accountability and years of FBI non-responses.

Director Wray testified that his team would “further the investigation into Epstein and other sex trafficking networks.”

Ten weeks later, on February 14, 2024, the twelve Jane Does filed their lawsuit.​

They cite Wray’s testimony in their complaint. Not as evidence of good faith, but as evidence of the distance between what the FBI says and what the FBI does. Wray promised further investigation in December 2023. The twelve women were already preparing their lawsuit. They had been waiting, in various forms, for years — some for decades. They had given interviews. They had provided testimony. They had filed reports. They had done everything asked of them.

And they were filing this lawsuit not because they expected the FBI to finally act on a thirty-year-old complaint, but because the Federal Tort Claims Act — the legal mechanism by which American citizens can sue their own government for negligence — allows them to hold the institution accountable in a way that no congressional hearing, no inspector general report, and no FBI director’s Senate testimony had managed to do.

They want two things. They want one hundred million dollars in damages. And they want the FBI’s complete file on Jeffrey Epstein released — every document, every interview, every assessment, every internal communication from the September 3, 1996 child pornography log to the moment Epstein was taken into custody at Teterboro in July 2019.​

Not summaries. Not redacted versions. The file.

The Parallel Nobody Can Ignore: Nassar And The FBI

If the story of twelve Jane Does suing the FBI feels familiar, it is because it has happened before. Recently. In a case that generated congressional hearings, DOJ inspector general reports, at least one FBI firing, and testimony from four Olympic athletes that remains among the most powerful witness statements ever delivered to a Senate committee.

The Larry Nassar case.

Nassar was the team physician for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, and for decades he sexually abused the athletes in his care. The FBI received credible allegations from multiple victims in July 2015. It did not conduct adequate interviews. It did not transfer the complaint to Michigan, where Nassar was still actively abusing girls. It did not report the allegations to appropriate state authorities. It did not act.​

From July 2015 to September 2016 — fourteen months — the FBI’s Indianapolis field office sat on the Nassar allegations. During those fourteen months, approximately one hundred young women and children were sexually assaulted by Nassar.​

In September 2021, Simone Biles testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. So did Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols. The hearing produced the kind of television moment that congressional proceedings rarely achieve — four women, at the peak of American athletic achievement, describing in plain and devastating language what was done to them and what was not done by the people whose job was to protect them.​

“I blame the system that enabled Larry Nassar,” Biles said. She said it carefully, clearly, without hesitation.​

In June 2022, more than ninety assault victims filed claims against the FBI totaling $1 billion. The claims alleged negligence. They alleged that the agents who received the Nassar complaints had turned a blind eye. They alleged that the FBI’s failure to act was not a mistake but a choice, made by identifiable people in identifiable offices, who understood what they were being told and decided not to respond.​

The DOJ inspector general report, published in July 2021, confirmed the substance of these claims. It found that the FBI had not responded with “the utmost seriousness and urgency” that the allegations required, and that agents had made “fundamental errors” in their initial response. The report found that an FBI agent had lied to investigators during the review. The Justice Department declined to prosecute that agent — during both the Trump and Biden administrations.​

Now read those sentences again and replace “Nassar” with “Epstein.” Replace “Indianapolis field office” with “any of the FBI offices that received Maria Farmer’s calls in 1996.” Replace “fourteen months” with “twenty-three years.” Replace ninety victims with the hundreds of women and girls documented in the Epstein files, the Manhattan evidence catalog, the Virgin Islands testimony.

Same agency. Same structure. Same outcome.

The pattern is not a coincidence. It is institutional.

What The FBI Actually Had

The twelve Jane Does’ complaint is careful to be specific about what the FBI possessed during the years it chose not to act. This is important because the government’s likely defense is some version of “we didn’t have enough to proceed” — and the complaint preemptively and specifically dismantles that argument.

By 2006, when the investigation was formally opened, the FBI had:

Victim testimony. Multiple women who had come forward directly, including Maria Farmer in 1996, and the Palm Beach victims interviewed by Detective Recarey in 2005.

Photographs and videos. The complaint states that the FBI possessed “photographs, videos, and interviews that constituted hard evidence of child prostitution.” This is not circumstantial material. This is documentary evidence.​

A documented pattern. The recruitment pipeline, the compensation structure, the travel arrangements, the use of minors, the geographic spread across multiple states and countries — all of it documented in Palm Beach PD’s records before it was ever handed to the FBI.

And after Epstein’s 2008 plea deal — after the FBI closed its investigation and Epstein became a registered sex offender legally required to report his activities — the bureau continued to receive tips. Additional victims. Additional reports. The trafficking did not stop. The complaints did not stop. Only the FBI’s investigation stopped.​

The complaint alleges that from 2009 to 2019, a period of a decade during which the FBI received continued tips about Epstein’s ongoing operations, the agency “allowed the continuation of child trafficking, rape, and sexual abuse involving minors and young women across locations including New York, Palm Beach, the US Virgin Islands, and others.”​

Allowed. That is the word the complaint uses. Not failed to prevent. Not was unable to stop. Allowed.

The Passport Problem

Among the specific failures documented in the September 2024 complaint, one deserves particular attention because of what it reveals about the nature of the FBI’s inaction.

Epstein repeatedly initiated passports and visas for victims for international travel. This is not incidental. It is the logistics of international trafficking — moving people across borders requires travel documents, and travel documents require applications, and applications create a paper trail in federal databases.​

The Jane Does’ complaint notes that Epstein’s pattern of initiating travel documents for young women who were not his family members, who had no evident professional reason to be traveling internationally on his behalf, and who were in some cases minors — this was “a red flag the FBI failed to investigate.”​

The FBI has jurisdiction over international trafficking. The FBI has access to State Department records. The FBI is precisely the agency whose job description includes following up on patterns of passport applications associated with international travel by a man already under investigation for trafficking.

The FBI did not follow up.

This is the specific, documented, prosecutable version of institutional failure — not a vague claim that agents should have tried harder, but a concrete allegation that a specific and identifiable red flag in a specific and identifiable federal database was not investigated by an agency that had both the access and the mandate to do so.

Christopher Wray And The Senate Hearing

The arc of congressional accountability in this case is instructive in what it reveals about the limits of congressional accountability.

In September 2021, in the direct aftermath of the Simone Biles testimony about the FBI’s Nassar failures, the Senate Judiciary Committee was galvanized. Members on both sides of the aisle were furious. Senator Chuck Grassley. Senator Richard Blumenthal. Senator Amy Klobuchar. The testimony was devastating and the response was bipartisan.

An FBI agent who had failed to properly investigate the Nassar complaints was reported to have been fired. The DOJ inspector general report was published. Congressional pressure was applied.​

And then, in the way of Washington, the moment passed.

The FBI did not undergo structural reform. The agents who made the specific decisions not to investigate were not, in any documented public accounting, disciplined or removed from their positions. The inspector general found that an agent had lied to investigators and recommended prosecution. The Justice Department declined.

Three years later — December 5, 2023 — FBI Director Christopher Wray is before the Senate Judiciary Committee again, this time about Epstein. He promises further investigation.​

Ten weeks after Wray’s testimony, Jennifer Plotkin files the Jane Does’ complaint.

She has been listening to promises from the FBI for years. Her clients have been listening for decades. The testimony of FBI directors before Senate committees has not stopped trafficking. It has not released files. It has not held anyone accountable. It has produced, with reliable consistency, more promises.

The lawsuit is what accountability looks like when promises run out.

The DOJ Reviews Its Own Work

In 2020, the Department of Justice published an internal review of the FBI’s handling of the Epstein case — an assessment conducted in the aftermath of Epstein’s arrest and death, examining what the bureau did and did not do during the years it possessed information about his crimes.​

The review was criticized immediately for a specific and damning omission: it did not reference Maria Farmer’s 1996 complaint.

A child pornography complaint, logged in the FBI’s own system on September 3, 1996, the foundational document of the bureau’s entire relationship with the Epstein case — not mentioned in the DOJ’s own review of that case.

Two possibilities follow from this omission. Either the reviewers did not find the 1996 document, which raises profound questions about the integrity of the internal review process. Or the reviewers found it and chose not to include it, which raises different but equally profound questions.

The December 2025 Epstein file release confirmed the document’s existence. Attorney Brad Edwards, representing Maria Farmer, called for an investigation into “every government employee who was aware of this document and allowed a narrative to circulate that it did not exist.”

No such investigation has been announced.

The Missing FBI Interviews

On March 6, 2026, the Department of Justice released a new set of FBI records related to the Epstein case — records that had not been included in the January 30, 2026 mass release.​

The DOJ’s explanation: the fifteen documents had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative” and therefore excluded from the initial release.

Incorrectly coded as duplicative. Fifteen documents. In a case that had been under active review for years by hundreds of DOJ attorneys specifically tasked with preparing the document release. Fifteen documents about Epstein that were accidentally left out because someone typed the wrong code.

The released records contain summaries of FBI interviews with an unidentified woman who made sexual allegations against a prominent figure — the identity of the figure in those specific records became a matter of immediate political controversy, as the White House issued a denial and a House committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi for questioning about the document management.​

The political controversy around specific names should not obscure the institutional significance of the revelation. The FBI had interviews. The DOJ reviewed those interviews as part of a mandated full disclosure. The interviews were coded as duplicates and excluded. They were released only after the error was identified — under circumstances that remain murky — six weeks after the initial document dump.

How many other documents have been coded as duplicative? How much of the FBI’s investigative record — the record that the twelve Jane Does are suing to have released, the record that would document specifically who decided not to act in 1996, in 2006, in 2008, in the decade of continued tips from 2009 to 2019 — is currently sitting in a federal database with the wrong classification code?

The DOJ has not answered this question.

What The Jane Does Are Really Asking

Beyond the one hundred million dollars in damages — beyond the legal language and the Federal Tort Claims Act and the procedural battles over anonymous status — the twelve Jane Does are asking something simpler.

They are asking the United States government to look directly at what it did and say what it did.

Not: “mistakes were made.” Not: “agents failed to respond with appropriate urgency.” The specific, accountable, named-and-dated accounting of who received what information, when, and made what decision.

Maria Farmer called the FBI in 1996. Someone answered the phone. Someone opened a file. Someone classified it as child pornography. Someone filed it in a database. And then — someone, somewhere in the chain of decisions that followed — decided not to pursue it. That person had a name. That person had a supervisor. That supervisor had a name. The decision not to pursue a 1996 child pornography complaint was a decision, made by identifiable people, and those people are either still alive and identifiable or their decisions are documented in a file that the Jane Does are suing to see.

The FBI’s response to requests for comment on the lawsuit has been consistent and brief: “The FBI does not comment on litigation.”

It has maintained this position through congressional hearings, through the DOJ’s 2020 internal review, through Director Wray’s December 2023 Senate testimony, through the January 2026 document release, through the March 2026 revelation of the fifteen incorrectly coded interviews, and through every stage of Case 1:24-cv-01071.

The FBI does not comment on litigation.

The twelve Jane Does are still in federal court.

The Simone Biles Moment, And The Absence Of One

There is no equivalent, in the Epstein FBI case, of the Simone Biles testimony.

There is no moment in which the most famous and accomplished woman in American public life sat before a Senate committee and described, in her own words, what the FBI’s failure had cost her. There is no televised hearing that produced the bipartisan outrage of September 2021. There is no moment when the institution was forced to sit and listen while an Olympic gold medalist explained, with clarity and without flinching, that she blames not the man who abused her but the system that allowed him to.

The twelve Jane Does are anonymous. They are proceeding through a federal court that has, twice, denied their motion to remain so. Their names are known to their attorneys and to the court, but not to the public. Their experiences — the specifics of what was done to them, the particular years during which the FBI had information and chose not to act, the costs that those years of inaction imposed on their lives — are contained in sealed court filings that most Americans will never read.

This is the asymmetry of the case. Epstein’s social world — his dinners, his flights, his island, his associations with the powerful and the famous — has been documented in ten thousand newspaper articles and congressional hearings and documentary films. The women he trafficked, and the women who are now suing the agency that failed to stop him, remain anonymous. They are Jane Does. They are numbers.

Simone Biles has a name. She has a face. She has four Olympic gold medals and one of the most recognizable careers in American sports. And when she sat in front of that Senate committee, the country knew exactly who was speaking and what she was saying.

The twelve Jane Does sit in a federal courtroom in the Southern District of New York, and the country does not know their names.​

They are suing anyway.

The Answer That Has Never Been Given

On September 3, 1996, an FBI agent typed a four-character classification code on a one-page document and filed it in a federal database. The classification was “child pornography.” The complainant was a young artist who had worked for a man she was alleging had photographic evidence of crimes against children.

The document sat in that database for twenty-three years.

During those twenty-three years, the man the complainant described continued to operate. He built an island. He maintained a Manhattan mansion. He kept a Palm Beach estate. He flew on a plane with his name on it. He went to dinner with presidents and princes and Nobel laureates and the CEOs of the world’s largest banks. He trafficked girls, and the girls became women who tried to report what had happened to them and were told, in various ways and by various people, that no one was coming.

In 2006, someone came. The Palm Beach Police Department, working with a fourteen-year-old’s mother, forced the FBI’s hand. For two years, the FBI investigated. It assembled the evidence. It had forty victims. It had photographs. It had videos. It had everything a case requires.

And then Alexander Acosta sat across a table from six lawyers who represented Jeffrey Epstein, and they negotiated a deal, and the FBI closed its file.

For another eleven years, the tips came in. For another eleven years, the trafficking continued. For another eleven years, young women arrived on helicopters at Little St. James and left changed in ways they are still living with.

Until 2019. When a reporter at the Miami Herald named Julie Brown published a series of articles that forced the hand of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Epstein was arrested at an airport in New Jersey, and died in his cell thirty-three days later.

The twelve Jane Does filed their lawsuit on February 14, 2024. They are asking for one hundred million dollars. They are asking for the complete FBI file. They are asking for an answer to the question that the DOJ inspector general, the Senate Judiciary Committee, two FBI director testimonies, and 3.5 million pages of released documents have not fully answered.

Who decided not to act? And why?

That is not a complicated question. It is the oldest question in every story about institutional failure: who knew, and what did they choose to do with what they knew?

The FBI does not comment on litigation.

The twelve women are still waiting.

And somewhere in a federal database in Washington, D.C., there is a document stamped September 3, 1996, classified as child pornography, with a woman’s name redacted and the words “professional artist” in the field where her occupation should be.

It existed for twenty-nine years before the government confirmed it.

The question is what happens now that it has.