(NewsNation) — The anticipation over soon-to-be-released names in court documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein is reaching a fever pitch.
Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019 before his trial on sex trafficking charges, but his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced last summer to 20 years in prison for trafficking minor girls for Epstein.
Will the reveal of the names lead to Maxwell asking for a possible sentence reduction?
Maxwell’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, says Maxwell has “nothing to say” about Epstein or the list of names.
“I don’t think she has anything to talk about except maybe that if you look at this crime, this overall crime, it’s all about men abusing women for a long period of time … and it’s only one person in jail — a woman,” Aidala said Tuesday on “CUOMO.”
The documents come from a settled civil lawsuit that Virginia Giuffre, an alleged sex trafficking victim, filed against Maxwell in 2015.
The Miami Herald has been fighting to unseal documents filed as part of that lawsuit since 2018. The legal battle came to a head in December, when U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered that the names could be unsealed beginning Jan. 1.
At the time, Preska said many of the people named in the documents had already given media interviews or their names were listed in other public court documents pertaining to the case.
Giuffre claimed that Epstein and Maxwell pressured her as a teenager to engage in sexual relationships with powerful men, including Prince Andrew. Those men denied the allegations, and Giuffre later settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew out of court.
Giuffre did not testify at Maxwell’s criminal trial, at which her attorneys insisted she was a victim of a vindictive prosecution devised to deliver justice to women deprived of their main villain when Epstein killed himself.
“Ms. Maxwell’s got nothing to say to anyone,” Aidala said.
In ordering the release of the documents, Preska noted that many of the people have already given media interviews or have already had their names listed in other public court documents pertaining to the case. In other instances, Preska wrote that individuals did not object to the unsealing or the currently sealed material “is not salacious.”
Other names were ordered to remain redacted because they would identify minors who were victims of sex crimes.
“A lot of these cases take on lives of their of their their own and people start believing things that aren’t true. Regarding this list, I could see people running amok because there are going to be names there that are just witnesses, like, oh that person may have been at this place at that time,” Aidala said.
NewsNation digital reporter Katie Smith and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
