In his testimony before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made a surprising admission: The Justice Department “failed” in its rollout of the Jeffrey Epstein files by releasing victims’ identities and personal information.
Victims of the late sex offender have told MS NOW they were retraumatized by seeing their personal information included unredacted in files released by the DOJ over the last six months.
In response to questions from Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Blanche did not directly say, “I’m sorry.” But he admitted DOJ officials “never want to release a single victim’s name,” and that the mistakes were only present in a small percentage of the more than 6 million files. When those errors were identified, he said, “[W]e owned up to them.”
Blanche’s semi-apology was a step further than the public statements of his predecessor, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who neither apologized to nor turned around to acknowledge Epstein survivors who came to watch her testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this year.
Yet Blanche’s admission was not an easily obtained one. Rather, Murray asked him three separate times if he would apologize to victims whose identities and even nude photos were released in the file dump.
During his testimony, Blanche also seemed to suggest the DOJ has corrected each and every redaction failure brought to the department’s attention.
“The second that a victim or their lawyer told us that we made a mistake,” Blanche told Murray, “we pulled that document down.”
When asked by Murray whether he would meet with survivors, Blanche countered, “I have met with them. I’ve met with many, many of the lawyers for the survivors of victims, as did Attorney General Bondi.”
But in a statement given to MS NOW, a coalition of nearly 20 survivors plus family members denied that Blanche had ever met with any of them, noting that a meeting they sought with Bondi and DOJ officials never occurred. They added, “Given Blanche’s comments, we are again asking DOJ to meet directly with survivors and their counsel–not to ask survivors to start over, but to hear their concerns, hear how these failures occurred, and provide clear answers about the release, redaction, and withholding of Epstein-related records going forward.”
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Arick Fudali, who represents “Roza,” a former model abused by Epstein beginning in 2009 and who first came forward last week, told MS NOW that the DOJ “has failed and continues to fail to redact the names of Epstein’s survivors. … Strikingly, the DOJ seems to have made no ‘errors’ in redacting the names of potential associates and potential abusers in the files.”
Similarly, Brittany Henderson, a lawyer who has represented more than 100 Epstein survivors, explained that there were “thousands and thousands of errors.” She said despite her and other lawyers’ efforts to apprise the DOJ of redaction failures impacting their clients, “there are still documents posted right now that contain victim names and identifying information.”
Henderson added, “He may believe what he is saying, but if so, he is very misinformed. … Nothing was taken down ‘the second’ they were altered. It took days, or sometimes weeks, and several follow-up emails. In other cases, when documents were removed, they were reposted again, still unredacted.”
Blanche also insisted that his department was not legally permitted to release any of the Epstein documents until Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025.
An unsigned July 2025 memo from the DOJ, which revealed the DOJ and FBI determined “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” listed several reasons for the department’s decision not to release the files on its own. Those reasons included the department’s conclusion that there was no evidence “that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties” and its discovery of “sensitive information relating to the[ ] victims … intertwined throughout the materials.”
The purported unlawfulness of such a release was not mentioned.
Lisa Rubin is MS NOW's senior legal reporter and a former litigator.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.