A woman who claims Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused her filed a lawsuit claiming the US government and Alphabet Inc.'s Google failed to protect her identity and that of other victims amid the release of millions of pages of records about the disgraced financier.
The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, claims the Department of Justice violated US law requiring it to remove her personal identifying information from public disclosure when it released records required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Those documents included the names, phone numbers, email addresses, occupations and photos of alleged victims of Epstein's sexual abuse and sex trafficking, according to the lawsuit. The failure to protect that personal information showed a "reckless disregard" for victim privacy and resulted from inadequate review and redaction procedures, the suit alleged.
"The United States intentionally prioritized volume and speed of public disclosure over the safety and privacy of Epstein survivors, adopting a release now, retract later approach that made unlawful disclosures of" personal identifying information about the victims "not merely foreseeable, but inevitable," lawyers for the woman wrote in a lawsuit filed Thursday in a California federal court.
While the US acknowledged improper disclosures and removed some from the Justice Department website, "the unredacted documents remain available on publicly available websites," including those hosted by Google, and "has done nothing to demand their removal," the woman's lawyers said in the suit.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit, by a California woman called Jane Doe 1, claims that Google's AI Mode's enhanced search experience generates content allowing anyone to contact victims. After the DOJ's release of unredacted files, Google indexed and cached materials that including personal information, the suit claimed.
As a result, searches for names of survivors, or "searches combining their names with terms such as 'Epstein,' 'victim,' or 'survivor,' produce content in Google AI Mode displaying victims' full names, contact information, cities of residence, and association with Jeffrey Epstein," the complaint said.
Lawyers for Jane Doe 1 asked Google to remove references to her in relation to the Epstein files, but the company "has failed and refuses to remove, de-index, or block access to the offending materials," according to the complaint.
Google still displays personal information about Jane Doe 1 and other victims "in search results, cached pages, and archived materials, effectively republishing the unlawful disclosure and making it permanently and globally accessible," according to the complaint.
It claims that Google's "search, indexing, caching, and AI-generation capabilities to take already exposed victim PII and project it to a vastly larger audience, in more powerful and synthesized ways, than the underlying government site ever could."
The lawsuit claims the Justice Department violated the Privacy Act of 1974. It also claims Google violated California civil law by engaging in negligence, invasion of privacy, and unlawful business practices. It seeks an order requiring Google to "remove, de-index and case displaying" the personal identifying information of victims. It seeks compensatory and punitive damages, and it asks a judge to certify a class of victims.
The case is Jane Doe 1 v. United States of America, 26-cv-2624, US District Court, Northern District of California.