FBI Identified 10 Alleged Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein During 2019 Sex Trafficking Trial By Chris Spargo

Federal officials wasted no time building their case against Jeffrey Epstein following his arrest in 2019 on sex trafficking charges.

Just days after FBI and NYPD agents arrested Epstein when his private plane landed at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, officials began tracking down his alleged co-conspirators to serve them grand jury summonses.

On July 9, 2019 — three days after Epstein’s arrest — members of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Human Trafficking Unit discussed contacting 10 alleged co-conspirators to provide grand jury testimony, according to emails viewed by PEOPLE, which were released recently along with a trove of documents pertaining to Epstein’s case.

The documents do not name any of those individuals, but they do note the locations where agents found them or expected to find them.

Epstein had already been indicted by a grand jury on July 2, 2019, on multiple charges including sex trafficking, but prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were planning to file a superseding indictment after speaking with multiple witnesses and those alleged co-conspirators following the convicted sex offender’s arrest.

By that time, the FBI had tracked down a majority of the 10, with an agent writing that “3 have been located in FL and served [grand jury] subpoenas; 1 in Boston, 1 in NYC, and 1 in CT were located and served.”

There were also four who had not yet been served, three of whom were “currently out of pocket” and the other “a wealthy businessman in Ohio,” according to the email.

An email sent the day after Epstein’s arrest identified a few of the alleged co-conspirators by name, including Ghislaine Maxwell and Jean Luc Brunel. Maxwell would go on to be convicted of sex trafficking at her own federal trial while Brunel hanged himself in a prison cell in France in 2022 after he was accused of raping minors.

On Aug. 7, 2019 — a month after the email identifying Maxwell and Brunel as alleged co-conspirators was sent — a member of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Human Trafficking Unit (CACHTU) wrote that all but one of the alleged co-conspirators had been served with a subpoena.

The final individual “is a British citizen and is currently out of pocket,” the agent explained in the email.

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The agent then shifted to a discussion about a massive search that would be happening at Epstein’s Caribbean compound on Little St.James in the Virgin Islands that weekend.

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It was a massive effort that was set to involve over 50 agents and require use of the FBI’s private plane.

Then, with the search teams lined up and a plan in place, as well as a host of alleged co-conspirators lined up to give testimony, Epstein was discovered dead in his prison cell after taking his own life.

The search of the island was scaled back and there was no longer a need for a grand jury.

A number of Epstein’s alleged victims have been fighting for the release of all information related to his case since that day. The Department of Justice’s ongoing rollout of the files has not satisfied many victims.

In an email to PEOPLE, Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti-trafficking advocate, wrote, “The DOJ’s partial, staggered release — largely repeating already public information, lacking context, and extending beyond the statutory deadline — violates federal law and risks shielding the individuals and institutions who perpetrated and enabled this abuse, falling far short of the transparency intended by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”