Steps away from City Hall, Long Beach leaders, shelter workers and a victim of Jeffrey Epstein — the disgraced financier and sex offender — on Monday demanded that all remaining files documenting the investigation into his crimes be released to the public.
Flanked by local and state lawmakers, Rep. Robert Garcia, the Democrats’ ranking member on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the committee still awaits more documents to be released by the Trump administration and Epstein’s estate.
The House committee last week received cash ledgers, message logs, calendars and flight logs in the estate’s possession. It’s the third round of documents released, following the discharge of a so-called birthday book for Epstein’s 50th in 2003 that Oversight Democrats confirmed included a note and a sexually suggestive drawing by President Donald Trump previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Alluding to a potential government shutdown set to happen this week, Garcia said the pressure will remain on the Trump administration to “live up to his promise during the campaign” despite the turmoil looming over Washington.
Garcia previously told reporters that a petition effort is also underway to bypass Republican leadership and force a vote in the coming days, planned around the swearing in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) to reach the necessary 218 signatures.
When asked by reporters, Garcia said lawmakers should not relent in their calls for the files; the optics of it alone, of being quietly brushed out of the newscycle, would only sow more distrust in governance.
“There are so many people across this country that are seeing how we react to this and to actually know if they can actually share their story, or if they can trust their government, or if something happens to them, will someone be there to actually seek justice for them,” Garcia said.
In attendance also was Annie Farmer, a Long Beach resident who said for years that Epstein and his former girlfriend and associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, sexually abused her at the late-financier’s New Mexico ranch when she was 16. She testified publicly, using her full name, both at a 2019 bail hearing for Epstein and at Maxwell’s 2021 criminal trial.
Farmer demanded that Maxwell, who is serving 20 years for sex trafficking, finish her full sentence without special treatment. Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison in Texas following an interview with President Trump’s lawyers and a senior Justice Department official in July.
“It is not clear whether other lawmakers will have the courage to stand with victims rather than predators, but what is clear is that they and this administration have the opportunity to live up to their promise of finally bringing transparency to this horrific saga,” Farmer said.
Several at the lectern, including Farmer, also reiterated the issue of sex trafficking as a national epidemic, faced just as much here at home as anywhere else in the nation.
“Child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, they are not just things happening over there,” Farmer said. “They’re not just things happening to other people. They’re very much things happening in this community.”
Monday’s press conference arrives as revisions are still being worked out to existing public nuisance laws to target motels in Long Beach that abet prostitution.
First broached in April by Councilmembers Joni Ricks-Oddie and Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, details of the plan are still being settled but will ultimately go through public feedback before possibly being enshrined into law.
The city also established a multi-departmental, cross-jurisdictional alliance with the cities of Lynwood and Compton to curtail prostitution and investigate human trafficking along portions of Long Beach Boulevard known as tracks for sex-trafficking.