Court documents relating to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were made public on Wednesday.
Michael Jackson visited Jeffrey Epstein at the disgraced financier’s mansion on his island, according to claims made by one of Epstein’s alleged victims.
Last month, US judge Loretta Preska ruled that documents that were part of Virginia Giuffre‘s 2015 defamation case against Ghislaine Maxwell should be made public.
This expose confirms the identities of some 200 associates of the disgraced financier who, up until now, have only been known as John and Jane Doe in court papers.
Some of the names included in the documents include former US presidents Bill Clinton, Donald Trump – although neither is accused of illegality – and Prince Andrew.
Amongst the documents are depositions from Johanna Sjoberg, who has claimed that Prince Andrew groped her breast while sitting on a couch inside Epstein’s Manhattan apartment in 2001.
During an interview under oath in May 2016, she was asked if she had ever met anybody famous when she was with Epstein.
She responded that she had “met Michael Jackson”, the Daily Mail reports.
When asked where she had met the Billie Jean singer, Sjoberg said: “At his house in Palm Beach. At Jeffrey’s house in Palm Beach.”
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She was then asked if she massaged Jackson, to which she responded: “I did not.”
No further details were given on when the meeting took place.
The release of the documents comes after a deadline for objections from those who would be named passed on Monday, January 1.
While ordering the release of the list, Judge Preska said many of the unredacted names in the documents had already been identified by the media or during Maxwell’s trial, and that many others had not raised objections to the documents being released.
The documents do not appear to reveal any new major allegations against Epstein, according to the BBC, but more documents are set to be released in the coming days.
A year after Giuffre’s defamation case against Maxwell, US district court judge, Robert Sweet, rejected Maxwell’s motion to dismiss the case as he found the claims included a lot of context and facts “more broad than the allegedly defamatory statements”.
He concluded that Giuffre “was a victim of sustained underage sexual abuse between 1999 and 2002”.
From that came a series of lawsuits, including Giuffre’s action about Prince Andrew for “sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress”.
This was settled out of court.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in Manhattan in August 2019 while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, 62, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted of helping Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls.
(This article was originally published on JOE.co.uk and is republished here with permission.)Read more:
