There has been a lot of media excitement about the release of unredacted versions of documents from the ultimately-settled defamation lawsuit that Virginia Giuffre brought against Jeffrey Epstein’s friend and collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015. The release has been done in batches, and news accounts indicate that more than 170 individuals referred to in the documents as “John Doe,” etc., have now been identified.
Some casual consumers of news may have the impression that we are talking here about Epstein’s “client list,” but that is not the case. I have no idea whether such a list exists. Rather, these are names that a witness mentioned in a deposition or a document, in some cases in a completely innocent context. Moreover, no one should assume that anything said in a “court document” is true. On the contrary. Witnesses testifying in depositions and authors of emails and memos get many things wrong. In a deposition, witnesses are specifically permitted to testify to hearsay. Such testimony is obviously of questionable reliability, apart from its lack of admissibility in court.
An excellent case in point is the story about Bill Clinton storming into the offices of Vanity Fair magazine and demanding that the magazine not publish an expose on his good friend Jeffrey Epstein. This story got lots of media play yesterday, but it turns out to be false. It was based on an email written by Virginia Giuffre, the accuser of alleged Epstein clients like Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz:
Only it turns out that Giuffre was wrong. It wasn’t Bill Clinton who stormed into the Vanity Fair office, it was Epstein himself. The New York Post, having more or less fallen for Giuffre’s version yesterday, has the corrected story today.
It is a useful reminder that not everything that anyone says, that happens to fit your political predilections, turns out to be true. And also of the fact that a person’s name being mentioned in a lawsuit stemming from appalling misconduct doesn’t necessarily mean that person is guilty of anything. Finally, it is a warning against assuming that everything that Virginia Giuffre says must be true, since she was a victim.
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