The Trump administration just published nude photos of young women to the public internet—and called it “transparency.”
In what might be the most catastrophic screwup yet in the Epstein files release, the Justice Department’s latest tranche of 3 million documents included at least 40 unredacted images showing naked women and identifiable faces of potential victims, according to The Daily Beast. The New York Times discovered the images while poring over the massive document dump uploaded Friday.
This wasn’t even close to the first failure. The DOJ had already blown past its December 19 deadline and faced criticism for repeated redaction failures before this latest disaster.
They said they needed time to “protect the victims.” That does not appear to be what was happening.
THE DETAILS: The Epstein Files Transparency Act—which Congress passed and Trump signed in late November—explicitly required the DOJ to redact sexually explicit imagery and anything that could identify victims. They did the exact opposite. Seven different people were exposed in the unredacted Friday upload.
The photos show women in bedrooms and some appear to have been taken at Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious island, Little St. James. While the Times noted the females “appeared to be young,” it was unclear if any were minors.
WHY IT MATTERS:Annie Farmer, who testified in court about her alleged abuse at the hands of Epstein and his jailed accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, didn’t mince words: “It’s hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims than having full nude images of them available for the world to download.”
“Extremely disturbing,” she called it. That might be an understatement.
OF COURSE: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had the audacity to declare mission accomplished at a press conference Friday, saying the department had “completed” its review and calling it “a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people.”
Comprehensive. Sure.
A DOJ spokeswoman said the department was “working around the clock” to fix the mess after the Times flagged the images Saturday and Sunday. Officials have since “largely removed or redacted” the problematic files—but the damage is done. These images were publicly available for anyone to download for days.
BOTTOM LINE: The administration that promised to expose the truth about Jeffrey Epstein just re-victimized the very people he abused. Whether through staggering incompetence or something worse, Trump’s DOJ turned a transparency effort into a nightmare for survivors—the one group the law was specifically designed to protect. That’s not transparency. That’s cruelty with extra steps.