Five days after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July 2019, federal authorities directed New York Police Department investigators to halt their own criminal probe into the disgraced financier, according to documents recently released by the Justice Department.
The directive applied to the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit — the unit specifically trained to handle sex crimes and child abuse cases — and assumed the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office would also cease its parallel investigation, records show.
Epstein, a high-powered financier and convicted sex offender, hanged himself in a jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in August 2019, a death officially ruled a suicide.
The public never bought it, with 45% of people polled saying they believe he was murdered.
Also buried in the newly released Epstein files is an FBI tip sheet alleging an underage girl was forced to perform a sex act on Donald Trump in New Jersey roughly 35 years ago. The claim is unverified.
“FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already, and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us,” reads a July 11, 2019, email obtained by Just Security, a nonpartisan law and policy journal. The sender and recipient names were redacted.
The existence of the so-called “stand down” order was uncovered by law professor Ryan Goodman, who found it buried within the approximately 3.5 million pages of Epstein-related files the Justice Department has released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Congress passed in November.
At the time of the directive, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had an active investigation involving Epstein’s victims. An earlier email from July 10 flagged concerns: “Here’s another fire: DANY is proceeding with their investigation and already reached out to NBC News victim to arrange an interview.”
Internal FBI communications from January 2020 suggest the bureau believed the NYPD probe had been effectively closed.
“After our arrest was public, some phone calls were made amongst NYPD brass, and I’m pretty sure their investigation was closed and deferred to us,” reads one email. “I’m not totally sure of DANY’s involvement in that investigation or if they ever stopped. Our assumption was obviously that they closed anything they had after his death.”
The correspondence also reveals concern about potential parallel investigations into Epstein’s associates, including Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew.
“It may be an issue, though, if DANY somehow was continuing an investigation into Prince Andrew or his best friend Maxwell,” the email continues.
On August 29, 1996, Maria Farmer reported Epstein and Epstein’s crimes to the New York Police Department’s Sixth Precinct, according to a document identified as NYPD Police Report Complaint #1996-0067241.
Farmer told NYPD officers that Epstein and Maxwell had sexually abused her and that they, together with others, were committing multiple ongoing illegal sex abuse crimes, including crimes against minors and vulnerable young women, child pornography crimes, and possible crimes against her minor siblings.
The FBI did not open an investigation into Epstein until May 23, 2006, but New York law enforcement authorities should have been alerted to revelations of a criminal conspiracy after several civil lawsuits were filed in New York and Florida following Epstein’s 2008 plea.
Instead, on January 18, 2011, the Office of Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. attempted to reduce Epstein’s sex offender status in New York to the lowest possible level, only to face rebuke from State Supreme Court Justice Ruth Pickholz.
In 2021, Maxwell was convicted by a jury and, in 2022, sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Since January 2025, the administration has used the Justice Department to shield Maxwell from meaningful questioning about Epstein’s crimes, sending Trump’s former defense lawyer to interview her without asking who else was involved or even warning her against lying.
The revelation comes just days after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced his office would reopen its investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. New Mexico’s initial probe was closed in 2019 “at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,” according to Torrez’s office.
The New Mexico Department of Justice said special agents and prosecutors will seek immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file and intend to work with a truth commission established by state lawmakers to investigate activities at the ranch, located about 40 miles east of Albuquerque.
Epstein purchased the sprawling property in 1993 and sold it in 2023. The ranch appears thousands of times in recently released documents, showing that a long list of entrepreneurs, actors, and scientists were invited over the years.
While Epstein never faced charges in New Mexico, state prosecutors confirmed in 2019 that they had interviewed possible victims who visited the ranch.
In a court filing after Epstein’s death, a woman identified as Jane Doe said he molested her at Zorro Ranch in 2004, when she was 15. She described being laid on the floor, where she could see framed photographs of Epstein smiling with wealthy celebrities and politicians.
New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard called the allegations “deeply disturbing” and urged a thorough investigation.
The newly released documents also show that the Justice Department withdrew several thousand documents after victims complained that sensitive information had been released due to redaction failures. Lawyers for Epstein’s victims said the lives of nearly 100 survivors “have been turned upside down by the DOJ’s latest release.”
Epstein died in August 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York while awaiting trial. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by hanging. Records later revealed that correctional officers failed to complete mandatory rounds the night of his death, and cameras outside his cell were reported to have malfunctioned.
A federal draft statement announcing Epstein’s death, released in the document trove, is dated August 9, 2019 — the day before his official date of death — raising further questions about the timeline.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to release all documents related to Epstein with victim names redacted, but stipulated that no records could be “withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
Representatives who have reviewed unredacted versions said they saw the names of “lots of people who were redacted for mysterious or baffling reasons” and that many redactions were made before the documents reached the Justice Department, possibly by the FBI or prosecutors.
The decades-long failures by federal law enforcement and oversight agencies—including the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of the Treasury—in the handling of Epstein’s crimes: child sexual abuse and the sex trafficking of minors, as well as the sexual abuse of young adult women, span Democratic and Republican administrations, and have taken place in the context of extreme wealth and influence which, together with gendered power dynamics and socioeconomic vulnerability, have shaped government inaction.
“Democrats and Republicans have spent the better part of a generation engaged in what appears to be a furious competition for the affection of the same small circle of benefactors, a handful of men whose combined wealth exceeds the gross domestic product of most nations,” said progressive insurgent Lisa McCormick.
The investigation into potential co-conspirators is said to be ongoing, but language in FBI press releases suggests that it is more like a cover-up.
One such remark was, “the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
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