Thousands of pages of US justice department material tied to criminal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein were released online late on Friday, promising a new level of disclosure about one of the most politically combustible cases of the past two decades. By Saturday night, that promise was already being contested: survivors said they had been offered spectacle rather than transparency, lawmakers accused the department of failing to comply with a new federal law, and journalists and politicians were trying to work out why a tranche of files appeared to vanish from the government webpage within hours.

The release, published at about 9pm UK time, is the first major document drop under recently passed legislation requiring the Department of Justice (DOJ) to publish unclassified files linked to Epstein. Much of what has emerged so far is messy and fragmentary: photographs, flight logs, transcripts, scanned scraps of notes and pages that are wholly blacked out. Taken together, they underline the breadth of Epstein’s contacts across public life. But they also show how little the public has been allowed to see of the investigative core of the case, with critics arguing that redactions go beyond what is needed to protect victims and witnesses.

In the UK, attention quickly settled on images placing Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, in Epstein’s orbit once again, including a photograph Sky News identified as having been taken inside Sandringham, the Norfolk royal residence where the Royal Family typically spends Christmas. Another image shows the then-prince in the royal box at Ascot with Epstein and his former partner and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

The publication of such images has carried a repeated caveat from news organisations reviewing them: being pictured with Epstein or appearing in the released material is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing. That point has been widely emphasised because the document dump contains numerous photographs of Epstein with well-known figures, some taken in social settings years before his first conviction.

Still, the photographs of Andrew at royal venues have landed with particular force because of the long-running allegations surrounding his relationship with Epstein, and because of the years of public scrutiny that followed the emergence in 2011 of the now infamous photograph that appears to show Andrew with Virginia Giuffre in Maxwell’s London home. Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing. He previously said he did not recall meeting Giuffre and suggested the 2011 image could have been doctored. He later reached an out-of-court settlement with her while continuing to deny her allegations of sexual assault.

In the newly released material, Sky News reported, Andrew also appears in a photograph lying across several women, with Maxwell standing behind him. The identities of the women have been protected. Sky’s data and forensics reporting matched furnishings in the image, including a fireplace, to Sandringham.

Alongside the pictures are emails and records that, taken together, provide further glimpses into how Epstein worked behind the scenes when his relationships became a public liability. In one exchange, shown in previous batches of released material and recirculated in coverage of the latest drop, Epstein is seen urging a hard line against Giuffre’s claims. In an email to a reporter on 1 July 2011, Epstein wrote that “the girl” had “fled the country” and described her account in crude terms, adding: “Yes she was on my plane, and yes she had her picture taken with Andrew, as many of my employees have.” In another message to a publicist that day, he suggested Buckingham Palace “would love” information he claimed would undermine Giuffre’s credibility.

There is also a March 2011 email exchange in which Epstein tells someone saved as “The Duke” – thought to be Andrew – that he is not sure how to respond to a journalist’s inquiry, adding: “im not sure how to respond, the only person she didn't have sex with was Elvis”. The reply reads: “Please make sure that every statement or legal letter states clearly that I am NOT involved and that I knew and know NOTHING about any of these allegations. I can't take any more of this my end.”

The Sandringham photograph is not the only UK-linked image in the new release. Maxwell is pictured on the steps of Downing Street in another photograph included in the files, and Sky News reported that flight records add further corroboration of Epstein’s movements in and out of Britain. One log shows his aircraft arriving at Luton airport on 15 May 2002, with Sky noting that he met Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, the next day in a meeting arranged by Peter Mandelson. This was before Epstein’s first arrest, and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Blair in relation to that meeting.

Mandelson, who served as UK ambassador to the US before being removed from the post this year amid controversy about his ties to Epstein, appears in the latest DOJ material too, though less prominently than in some earlier releases. A photograph shows Mandelson sitting at a table with Epstein as Epstein blows out candles on a cake. Previously released material has included what became known as a “birthday book” compiled for Epstein, containing a message from Mandelson referring to Epstein as his “best pal” and describing time in “one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends”. Mandelson has said he regrets having known Epstein and described the messages as embarrassing, while stressing they were written before Epstein was indicted.

Beyond the British connections, the most politically volatile aspect of the latest release has been the claim that at least some files were removed after publication. The Associated Press reported that at least 16 files disappeared from the DOJ’s public webpage between Friday and Saturday, including images described as paintings depicting nude women. US Democrats on the House Oversight Committee separately claimed an image “that includes Donald Trump has apparently now been removed” from the released files. The image they circulated appears to show framed photographs on a desk, including a picture of Trump visible inside a drawer.

Sky News said its research team could not find the file in the official files browser and could not locate a previously downloaded version there either. The justice department had not confirmed why files disappeared.

That disappearance has given fresh momentum to accusations that the release was curated for political effect. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic minority leader, wrote that if material was being taken down, “just imagine how much more they're trying to hide”, adding: “This could be one of the biggest cover-ups in American history.” Schumer also referenced a Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, who acknowledged the president was “in the file” but said he was not “doing anything awful”, describing Trump and Epstein as “young, single playboys together” who later fell out.

Trump has emphatically denied wrongdoing regarding Epstein’s crimes. As with others named or pictured, there is a crucial distinction between association and criminality, and much of the public debate has blurred it.

If one political question has been asked repeatedly since Friday night, it is why the rollout appears to have foregrounded some public figures while leaving large sections of the investigative record obscured. Scott Lucas, a professor of American studies at University College Dublin, told Sky News he feared the release functioned as “a cover up, posing as a release”, arguing that there were “very few documents related to the criminal case against Jeffrey Epstein” and that the material had been “dumped with absolutely no context and no explanation of the redactions”. He expressed concern that early official emphasis on photographs of Bill Clinton served to drive headlines towards Clinton rather than towards “Epstein, or Trump, or anyone else that might have been connected with criminal activity”. Clinton and Trump both deny wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

The focus on Clinton has been reinforced by the sheer volume of celebrity imagery in the files. Sky News compiled a scroll of notable pictures, ranging from a painting of Bill Clinton in a dress to photographs of Epstein posing with Michael Jackson. Other images show Clinton with Maxwell in a pool, and with actor Kevin Spacey, as well as pictures of Diana Ross. The files also include a photograph of Epstein with former Victoria’s Secret chief executive Les Wexner and his wife Abigail, with other faces blurred.

The danger, victims’ advocates have warned, is that the story becomes a hunt for famous faces and a “smoking gun”, rather than a reckoning with how abuse was enabled and ignored. Dr James Boys, a US politics expert at University College London, told Sky News the furore reminded him of the periodic public obsession with files relating to President John F Kennedy’s assassination: intense anticipation of “damning information” that often fails to materialise. He said the DOJ’s handling left “both sides unhappy”: Republicans hoping for full disclosure and Democrats expecting damaging material about Trump. “What seems to have been forgotten in all of this is the actual victims,” he said.

Survivors’ reactions to the release have ranged from vindication to anger. Maria Farmer, who made an early complaint to the Miami FBI in 1996, said she felt redeemed, describing it as “one of the best days of my life” while also expressing sorrow for other victims and anger at the FBI’s past failures. Dani Bensky, who has said she was abused by Epstein at 17, told NBC News there was a feeling of validation that the allegations were “real”, even as she noted that the release did not contain as much as many had hoped to see.

Others were scathing. Marina Lacerda, a Brazilian-born survivor who said Epstein abused her from the age of 14 until 17, told Sky News the survivor community had been excited ahead of the publication, but that the result was “very disappointing”. “We see that there is nothing there that is transparent,” she said, calling the incomplete release, with many redactions, “a slap in our faces”.

Ashley Rubright, another survivor, told Sky News that given how long Epstein’s conduct had been known about, she believed “there’s no way that there’s not a cover-up”, adding that she hoped nobody would “fly under the radar with their involvement”.

The scale of the redactions is, in itself, now a major strand of the story. NBC News reported that more than 680 pages in the first release were entirely redacted, including a 119-page document described as grand jury testimony that was blacked out in full. Schumer said that “simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages” violated both “the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law”.

Paul Pelletier, a former US prosecutor, told Sky News the partial and heavily redacted release was “quite disappointing”, arguing that redactions went “beyond what the law requires” and suggesting that material related to Clinton had been “frontloaded” compared with material related to Trump. Pelletier said Congress might ultimately have to go to court to force a faster, less aggressively redacted production, potentially seeking an injunction.

On Saturday evening, US political fallout was already being framed through the lens of electoral risk. Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former Senate aide, told Sky News that the “heavily redacted disclosures” had added fuel to controversy and could be a “political risk” for Republicans in swing seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman who has criticised the administration over the issue, wrote on X: “People are raging and walking away.” Conservative influencers echoed that anger, including one former federal agent turned podcaster who reposted an older statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi praising transparency and suggested it now read as “tongue-in-cheek”.

Democrats, meanwhile, have promised to push the issue further. Sky News reported that Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, said an investigation would examine what he described as the administration “violating federal law to protect the rich and powerful”. The claim rests on the assertion that the DOJ has failed to meet requirements set out in the recently passed legislation mandating release.

For all the argument about what has been withheld, the documents that are visible still contain stark descriptions of how Epstein and Maxwell operated. Among the newly published transcripts is grand jury testimony from a Palm Beach victim in April 2007. In it, a lawyer asks the victim to confirm that Epstein had said “the younger the better”. “That’s correct,” she replied, according to the transcript. The witness described how Epstein’s expectations could be communicated without explicit discussion of age, and said he once complained someone was “too old”.

Another transcript, from the testimony of an FBI special agent to a grand jury in the Maxwell case in June 2020, describes an incident involving an 18-year-old woman at Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach. According to the agent’s account, Maxwell showed the woman to a bedroom where a schoolgirl outfit lay on the bed, telling her she thought it would be “adorable if you gave Jeffrey his tea in this”. The witness said the woman felt she had to put it on, took tea to Epstein, and that Epstein then slapped her buttocks, reached under the skirt and touched her. The woman was described as very upset and crying when recounting it.

A separate image in the files shows a row of schoolgirl-style outfits recovered from Epstein’s New York home. As with much in the release, its relationship to specific testimony is not established in the document dump itself, and news organisations have cautioned that the materials are being published without the contextual framing that would normally accompany courtroom evidence.

That absence of context has become the defining complaint: that the release offers snapshots without a coherent account of decision-making, investigative steps, or conclusions. It has also created the conditions for conspiracy narratives to flourish, fuelled by the removal of files from the DOJ website and the unevenness of what has and has not been made visible.

The UK dimension, too, is likely to intensify rather than fade. Andrew’s appearance in photographs identified as taken at Sandringham carries an unavoidable symbolism, bringing Epstein’s social access into proximity with one of the country’s most recognisable institutions. Flight logs showing movements through UK airports, and images of Maxwell near Downing Street, reinforce the sense that Epstein’s network was not limited to the United States, and that the boundary between celebrity socialising and the machinery of power could be porous.

The fundamental question raised by the weekend’s events is whether the American public, and by extension those in other countries touched by Epstein’s orbit, are about to see the full investigative record that lawmakers promised, or whether the “Epstein files” will harden into another partisan proxy war, fought over redactions, missing pages and selective images.

As Congress considers enforcement options and as the DOJ signals that further releases may follow, survivors and their advocates are still asking for something more basic than a headline-grabbing photograph: a complete, intelligible accounting of who knew what, when they knew it, and how a man investigated for abusing children was able to cultivate status, protection and proximity to the famous for so long.