Epstein survivors left in limbo as DOJ’s “substantial progress” yields nothing nearly a month past deadline
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors still lie awake at night, fingers hovering over refresh buttons, hearts sinking at the same sterile phrase: “substantial progress.” Nearly four weeks after the December 19, 2025 deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the U.S. Department of Justice has released zero new documents in 2026, despite deploying more than 500 prosecutors, paralegals, and redaction specialists to sift through millions of pages seized from Epstein’s properties and digital archives.
The Act, signed into law in early 2025 amid bipartisan outrage, mandated phased public disclosure of non-grand-jury material while protecting victim identities. Officials insist the delay stems from meticulous care—every name, every address, every potentially identifying detail must be redacted by hand to prevent retraumatization. Yet for survivors who have waited years, sometimes decades, for accountability, the explanation rings hollow. “They keep saying ‘soon,’” one survivor, speaking anonymously through a victims’ advocacy group, told The Guardian. “Soon feels like never when you’re the one who lived it.”
Internal sources describe a Herculean effort: teams working 12-hour shifts in secure DOJ reading rooms, color-coded spreadsheets tracking redactions, and daily briefings on “victim-centric” protocols. By January 17, 2026, the department claimed to have reviewed more than 40 percent of the total corpus—an estimated 12 million pages including flight logs, safe contents, and hard-drive images. Yet not a single batch has been cleared for release. Legal experts point to a bottleneck at the FBI–DOJ interagency review board, where disagreements over what constitutes “sensitive” versus “public interest” information have stalled progress.
Critics, including Senator Marsha Blackburn and Representative Ted Lieu—who co-sponsored the Transparency Act—have accused the department of weaponizing caution. “Protecting victims cannot become a permanent excuse for protecting perpetrators,” Lieu said in a January 15 statement. Transparency advocates note that similar large-scale declassifications (such as the JFK files) moved faster once political will aligned. Here, the will appears fractured.
The human cost is visceral. Support hotlines report a spike in calls from Epstein survivors since January 1, with many citing renewed despair over the continued secrecy. “Every day without answers is another day the powerful sleep soundly while we relive the nightmares,” said an advocate from the Survivor Justice Coalition.
As the delay stretches into its fourth week, a darker question looms: is the DOJ shielding victims—or shielding those whose names remain blacked out in the margins? Until the first redacted pages finally surface, trust in the process continues to hemorrhage.
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