EXCLUSIVE: 90-Minutes Inside the Todd Blanche-Epstein Survivor Showdown
An exclusive reconstruction of Todd Blanche's 90-minute meeting with Epstein's survivors, where they pressed him on investigative failures, Maxwell, Prince Andrew and the mishandling of victim data.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
On July 7 of 2025, Pam Bondi declared that the Jeffrey Epstein case was closed.
Survivors of his crimes disagreed—and they wanted to talk to the Justice Department about that disagreement.
It would take a while for the conversation to happen.
In fact, if you were counting—and the survivors were—it took 374 days for the federal law enforcement agency to process the request.
On Thursday afternoon, approximately seven of Jeffrey Epstein's survivors, along with Virginia Giuffre's brother, Sky Roberts, and sister-in-law, Amanda Roberts, arrived at Justice Department headquarters in Washington. They spent 90 minutes inside.
They came carrying stories that they say demonstrate why the case Bondi declared closed is anything but. They posed their questions directly to Todd Blanche, Bondi's successor, whose confirmation hearing had concluded just hours earlier and who still needed the support of the Senate Judiciary Committee before his nomination could advance to the full Senate.
They left DOJ headquarters with little new information and what they viewed as the burden of making their case all over again—this time to the FBI, the very agency they say failed them in the first place.
“It was patronizing,” survivor Jess Michaels, who was in the room, told me. “He would dispute everything. He would say ‘that’s not true or I never said that.’”
BEYOND THE PAYWALL: I reconstructed the closed-door, 90-minute meeting from interviews with survivors who were in the room, participants who joined remotely, and others with direct knowledge of what transpired.
Keep reading for an exclusive account of the tense exchange—and why many survivors left feeling they had been sent back to square one — and even more insistent that Blanche not be confirmed.
