Epstein, Redactions, and the Theatre of Accountability

The House Judiciary Committee hearing on February 11, where US Attorney General Pam Bondi was pressed about the Department of Justice handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, looked like democracy at work.

Elected representatives demanded answers in public. Survivors were present in the room. Yet the hearing also revealed a darker pattern: A state can perform transparency while still controlling what the public is allowed to know, and who must pay the price for knowing it.

For years, “the Epstein Files” have hovered in public discourse as a promise. A promise that once the documents were opened, the architecture of complicity would finally be visible. The phrase carried the weight of revelation, as if truth lay sealed inside cabinets, waiting for political courage.

But when millions of pages were finally released, the effect was less illumination than saturation. Names appeared, disappeared, reappeared in fragments.

Critical lines were blacked out. Vast quantities of paper threatened to overwhelm the very public they were meant to inform. Transparency began to look curated.

Congress attempted to reduce executive discretion through the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which compels release of unclassified Epstein related DOJ records in a searchable format, with limited redactions mainly to protect victims.

The DOJ says it published 3.5 million responsive pages on January 30 and built an official online repository, the Epstein Library, for ongoing updates, as reflected in its press release.

If the aim is justice, the first duty is to avoid further harm. That is why the release has been criticised for exposing survivors’ identifying information, and why the department reportedly removed thousands of documents for additional review after privacy breaches.

A system that can diligently redact the names of influential men, yet fails to safeguard the vulnerable, sends a message about whose dignity is treated as negotiable.

Bondi’s exchanges with lawmakers made that message harder to dismiss. Representative Pramila Jayapal asked survivors in the room to raise their hands if they still had not been able to meet with the DOJ, and every hand went up.

Jayapal then asked Bondi to turn and apologize directly to them for what the department had put them through. Bondi declined, even after offering a general apology in her opening remarks.

In a victim centred process, apology is not theatre. It is a minimum sign that the state understands its own capacity to retraumatise.

The hearing also showed how quickly a victim centred inquiry can be converted into partisan defence. Bondi repeatedly praised President Donald Trump and attacked Democrats. When Representative Ted Lieu challenged her claim that there is “no evidence” implicating Trump, Bondi treated the exchange as a political ambush.

The careful position would be simpler: allegations, tips and associations exist in the archive, but associations are not convictions, and denials are not accountability.

Then came the most unsettling detail. Photographs and reporting show Bondi holding a paper labelled “Jayapal Pramila Search History,” listing which unredacted Epstein files the congresswoman had viewed.

Jayapal called it spying and a separation of powers breach, and it is unclear how the list was compiled. Even if there is an innocent explanation, the optics are deeply troubling. Oversight cannot function if scrutiny is met with counter surveillance.

This is why the dispute over redactions is not a technical quarrel. Redactions can be lawful and necessary. Victims must be protected. Witnesses can face retaliation. Some investigative steps may require temporary confidentiality.

But legitimacy requires reason giving. In transparency practice, secrecy is justified by specific, reviewable grounds. It is not justified by vague claims that names must be hidden to avoid embarrassment, protect prominent reputations, or manage political fallout.

When redactions appear to protect the powerful, and when explanations are thin, the public logically suspects self-protection.

The deeper sociological question is the one polite institutions avoid: could a predatory enterprise like Epstein’s persist for years without some form of state consent? Not consent as an explicit green light, but consent as selective enforcement, negotiated leniency, and deference to wealth.

Elite impunity often does not require a grand conspiracy. It requires a thousand small choices by prosecutors, police, regulators, and gatekeepers, each choice framed as pragmatic, each choice shifting the burden onto victims and the public.

Hearings alone cannot end that culture. Hearings are accountability, but they are also performance. They reward viral clashes more than careful reconstruction. They turn evidence into ammunition.

They encourage parties to treat abuse as a tool for damaging opponents. In the end, a massive archive becomes a battlefield of narratives, and survivors are asked to watch their trauma repurposed as political spectacle.

For a country that markets itself as the torchbearer of democracy and human rights, this saga is not a tabloid distraction. It is a stress test of institutional equality. Democracies do not fail only through coups.

They also corrode when citizens conclude that law is negotiable for elites and unforgiving for everyone else. That conclusion fuels apathy, conspiracy markets, and the cynical belief that justice is just politics in a robe.

A path toward something closer to justice still exists, but it requires institutional design rather than more shouting. Independent review of redactions by a court supervised process, or a special master, would reduce the perception that the DOJ is judging its own secrecy.

A transparent redaction ledger, explaining categories and legal bases in aggregate, would help the public distinguish victim protection from reputation management.

Survivors should have structured access to decision-makers, and clear avenues to challenge releases that expose them as well as redactions that protect the powerful.

Where criminal prosecution is constrained by time, civil accountability, professional sanctions, financial investigations, and institutional inquiries into past decisions remain essential tools.

The Epstein files test a basic democratic claim: That no one is above the law. If the outcome is curated transparency, where victims are exposed and the influential are obscured, the test will have been failed.

If the outcome is a victim-centred process with explainable redactions and genuine independence, the files might finally serve the purpose they were invoked to serve: Truth that can support justice, rather than truth edited to protect the editors.

Khan Khalid Adnan is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb), a Barrister in England and Wales, and an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.