Epstein Victims' Lawyers Ask Court to Pull Docs

Lawyers representing victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are urging a federal court to order the Justice Department to take down a massive online release of Epstein-related records, according to multiple reports.

In a letter dated Sunday and sent to two federal judges in New York, the attorneys are warning that failure to properly redact victims' identities has created what they call an "unfolding emergency."

Attorneys Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards — who represent more than 200 alleged Epstein victims — said the Justice Department's release of millions of documents has exposed sensitive victim information and put survivors at risk.

"Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ's latest release," Henderson and Edwards wrote to U.S. District Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, who oversaw Epstein's criminal case and the prosecution of his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The attorneys said the scope of the errors defies explanation.

"There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication," they wrote.

According to the letter, some documents allegedly revealed a minor victim's name as many as 20 times in a single file, while others listed dozens of underage victims with little or no redaction.

The lawyers said that even after notifying the Justice Department, many of the errors remained uncorrected.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the document release Sunday, saying the department made significant efforts to protect victims.

"We took great pains, as I explained on Friday, to make sure that we protected victims," Blanche told ABC News' "This Week." "Every time we hear from a victim or their lawyer that they believe that their name was not properly redacted, we immediately rectify that."

Blanche added that any mistakes affected only a tiny percentage of ther documents.

Henderson said in a separate statement to CNN that the damage is ongoing.

"With every second that passes, additional harm is being caused to these women. They are scared, they are devastated, and they are begging for our government to protect them from further harm," she said.

Not all reactions to the document release have been critical. Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday that the Justice Department went too far in the opposite direction.

"I don't want to see anything redacted," Dershowitz said. "I want to see every single accusation. Anybody who's named the accuser should be named. And all of their background information should be given."