A Justice Department email went out on July 10, 2019, four days after agents arrested Jeffrey Epstein at Teterboro Airport: “The SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us.” The Special Victims Unit was off the case, and everything Epstein ran through the Southern District of New York. Attorney General Bill Barr had announced the day before that he would not recuse himself after all.
Fourteen days later, FBI agents sat down with the woman the court calls Jane Doe 4 and filled fifteen pages.
Ellie Leonard brought those pages to Narativ Live on Monday with a number nobody had reported: thirty-seven pages of handwritten FBI notes, not twenty-two. Leonard, who publishes The Panicked Writer, refuses the credit. “This is a perfect example of crowdsourcing and why independent news is so important,” she said — readers on Reddit, Substack and Signal trading what they had, pulling unredacted copies off the internet and calling domain hosts to take down the rest.
A Justice Department source handed those notes to Kaelan Deese of the Washington Examiner, refusing other reporters a copy, and Deese loaded them onto a public file-sharing site. He “was sending them out to people unredacted with this girl’s name, address, phone number, social security number,” Leonard said. The woman is in hiding, and her family says she is terrified. Leonard says she is not a journalist. She knew better than the newspaper: “You don’t release unredacted documents to the public from the DOJ that includes a survivor.”
Two agents’ handwriting runs across the same pages, shorthanded “DT” and “Jeff.” In the first interview, on July 24, 2019 — the day of Epstein’s reported first suicide attempt in his Manhattan cell — she never mentions Donald Trump. She brought a photograph, the famous one of the two men in their suits, and asked the agents to crop the other man out. “I don’t want to talk about that guy,” she told them. When they pressed her on who he was, she ended the interview and went home. In the files the government did release, that photograph appears with Trump cropped out of it.
She came back a month later willing to talk. Interview two ran eighteen pages on August 7, three days before Epstein died, and this time Trump is in it — a girl of 13 to 15 driven to a big building she could not place, a man who “smells like money,” mocking her and then throwing her out. Nobody has corroborated that account. Trump denies it. No prosecutor has charged him. Leonard says it herself: “it’s still just an accusation, but I think that it’s a very, very important one.” She notes it reads like the Katie Johnson case, and flags the limit herself: this woman “never would have been able to read Katie Johnson’s file at this point.”
The Justice Department released the one interview that does not mention Trump and withheld the ones that do. That is the second story, sitting on top of the first: prosecutors may never prove what happened in 1984, but they could prove who buried it. Zev was reporting the Trump-Epstein friendship in those same weeks of 2019, with Steven Hoffenberg describing the operation from inside.
Department lawyers call the handwritten notes duplicative of the typed interviews they already handed over. Leonard says they are not. The notes record that one friend had known the account for decades, from before Epstein was famous and before any of it was worth lying about, and that the two women drove out together, before she went to the FBI, to stand in the places she remembered. “Why put in the effort if you’re not telling the truth?” Leonard asked.
The woman described a half-remembered dean or money man from a public university in Ohio. Leonard tracked down a Jim Atkins who ran a for-profit business school in Cincinnati, lived in Kentucky, and part-owned the resort property where she says she met Epstein. Anyone measuring this against the Epstein of Palm Beach has the wrong man, Leonard argues: at thirty he offered a teenager alcohol and marijuana, not the two and three hundred dollars the fifty-five-year-old paid girls to bring friends.
Agents ignored most of the Epstein complaints. They interviewed this woman four times, for hours, twice before he died and twice after. She never went public — no interviews, no book, no name. She took compensation connected to the Epstein estate and went back to a private life.
The notes went up on that file-share site on March 6, the same day NPR and Roger Sollenberger surfaced the missing serial numbers. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of that happened on the same day,” Leonard said. Somebody inside the department handed out unredacted pages that day. Nobody has said who, or why.
Judge Sullivan has given the department until August 27 to produce the notes in Katie Phang’s suit. In Leonard’s account, he told its lawyers: “I’m not holding you in contempt, Department of Justice, but I could if you do not bring me these documents.” Thursday, they have to show him what they’ve been sitting on. In Washington, it is always the cover-up that gets you.
She redacted these documents harder than the Justice Department did. The Panicked Writer is worth paying for.
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