I Watched 15 Years’ Worth of Epstein Police Footage. Here’s What They Knew.

Video Description

Buried deep within millions of pages of the recently released Epstein files are hundreds of hours of hard-to-obtain footage. Earlier this month, we published all 14 hours of the footage from Data Set 10, a raft of videos seized from Epstein’s electronic devices. The videos painted the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world. Today, we are publishing 12 hours of footage from Data Set 9. This collection traces more than a decade of efforts by law enforcement to investigate Epstein. There are tapes of police searching his mansion, clips from depositions spanning multiple years and cases, and even covert footage of a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting operation to retrieve his infamous “little black book.” The footage shows, on camera, a game of cat and mouse between Epstein and law enforcement that lasted more than a decade. One way to think about it is that Data Set 10 captured Epstein’s world as he saw it, while Data Set 9 captures authorities’ long, uneven effort to dismantle it. Of all 12 batches of material that were released by the Department of Justice last month, the footage from Data Set 9 was the hardest to obtain. That’s because in addition to the structural obstacles in the agency’s website—such as no master index and no ability to browse or search by file type—Data Set 9 was partially taken down shortly after its release, reportedly following complaints that some files contained unredacted child pornography. As a result, the bulk download link was disabled, which means that even anyone willing to download hundreds of gigabytes of data was no longer able to do so. The Free Press cross-checked multiple online repositories, which claim to host full or partial versions of the archive, to account for all of the currently available video files in Data Set 9. We are publishing this footage in its entirety, excluding only obvious duplicates and extensive prison closed-circuit television recordings. (Those duplicates and recordings are linked to in the show notes.) Numerous images that line the walls in Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, recorded by police during a search, depict fully or partially naked young females—some of whom might be among Epstein’s alleged victims. We decided to keep those images as is in the full 12-hour version of Data Set 9 for consistency with how the Department of Justice released them. But we are blurring all of the sensitive imagery in a shorter video that summarizes the full footage. Data Set 9 also includes a handful of what appear to be personal videos seized from Epstein’s devices. There are short clips of Epstein with notable figures such as Woody Allen, Bill Gates, and former Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. But those clips are few and far between. Most of the footage was captured by authorities trying to bring Epstein to justice through investigations that ranged from local to federal and spanned multiple agencies, states, and jurisdictions. Watched together, these videos—an hourlong house tour, the FBI’s recovery of key evidence, depositions, and testimonies from Epstein’s enablers and staff—demonstrate just how much was meticulously documented about Epstein’s life and conduct after law enforcement began looking into him in 2005. One of the most important questions about the Epstein case is this: Why didn’t Epstein face more serious legal repercussions sooner? This collection of videos offers no conclusive answer, but it does make the question harder to ignore.