A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Attorney General Todd Blanche must turn over handwritten FBI notes from several interviews with a woman who accused both President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager decades prior.
In a 20-page order, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Reagan appointee in Washington, ruled that the Justice Department must provide the handwritten notes from the interviews, which occurred between July and October 2019, to the court for review by 11 a.m. E.T. on Sept. 24. Sullivan’s order does not yet require the DOJ to release the notes publicly.
The ruling was issued in an ongoing lawsuit brought by independent journalist and former MS NOW host Katie Phang that seeks to compel the government to release more unredacted Epstein files.
The DOJ has fought Sullivan’s prior orders to release the notes related to the Trump accuser, arguing that they contain personally identifying information and are “substantially similar” to the previously released memoranda.
While the judge agreed in his Wednesday order that several redactions to documents already produced properly conceal the names of victims and law enforcement officials, he rejected the DOJ’s argument that the interview notes could be withheld because they are duplicative of FBI interview memoranda that were previously released. In particular, Sullivan noted that the department has already released publicly handwritten notes from more than 100 witness and survivor interviews.
As MS NOW reported in February, FBI memoranda show that authorities interviewed a woman in July 2019 who alleged that Trump forced her to perform oral sex on him 35 years ago, when she was 13 or 14 years old, and subsequently hit her. That allegation also appears in a 2025 PowerPoint presentation detailing each of the FBI’s Epstein-related investigations and a spreadsheet of unconfirmed tips submitted to the bureau’s National Threat Operations Center and reviewed by MS NOW. Of at least four interviews the FBI conducted with the woman as part of the Epstein investigations, none of the handwritten notes corresponding to those interviews have been posted on the DOJ site.
Trump has not been charged in connection with Epstein’s crimes and has denied knowledge of his sex trafficking operation, as well as any personal wrongdoing in connection to Epstein.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Sullivan also found that DOJ’s failure to review foreign-language materials that could be responsive under the Epstein Files Transparency Act was wrong. He ordered the department to begin reviewing those materials and notify the court that it is underway by the Sept. 24 deadline.
A spokesperson for the DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MS NOW on Thursday.
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