On the heels of news reports that more than 40,000 files were either withheld or taken down from the Department of Justice’s site with documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the DOJ late last week released documents including FBI memos related to accusations against President Donald Trump. But MS NOW has found that the released files still appear to be incomplete, missing FBI notes and memos reflecting interviews with women alleging abuse by other prominent men.
One of those women not only accused Epstein of ongoing sexual abuse but also claimed she was sexually assaulted by former Wall Street executive and Epstein friend James “Jes” Staley at Epstein’s New York mansion. She also said that private equity billionaire Leon Black initiated sexual contact with her during a massage Epstein directed her to perform, at which point she ran out of the room.
Half of the documents that appear to reflect her statements to federal law enforcement cannot be found within the files released by the Justice Department. Among the missing documents are roughly 35 pages that, according to an index prepared by the DOJ in 2021 and produced to the public in January 2026, include handwritten notes from at least three interviews with federal law enforcement and an FBI memo also known as a “302,” used by agents to formalize witness interviews.
Both Black and Staley have denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein or any woman they met through him, and MS NOW has not corroborated this woman’s allegations.
A PowerPoint presentation created by FBI employees in 2025 and released by the DOJ in January is what led to MS NOW’s discovery of missing documents relating to the woman’s accusations against Staley and Black. That presentation is the same document that led to the earlier discovery of missing documents reflecting interviews with the Trump accuser.
The White House has consistently denied that Trump engaged in any wrongdoing associated with Epstein and told NPR in February that the president has been “totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”
Justice Department officials, as far back as a July 2025 memo and continuing through the present day, have also maintained that the department’s review of Epstein-related files has not uncovered evidence that could lead to an investigation into “uncharged third parties.”
As for the more than 40,000 files, the DOJ acknowledged that an unknown number of images were “temporarily pulled down for review due to some flagged for nudity” but said that they were republished on the site on a rolling basis. The missing documents that refer to the allegations about Trump were also published on the site, with the DOJ stating in a post on X that they had been previously withheld because they were incorrectly coded as “duplicative.”
The FBI PowerPoint summarizes allegations, which MS NOW has not corroborated, against multiple “prominent names,” as the title of one particular slide notes. Included on that slide are Trump, Staley and Black, among others.
“[Redacted name] stated Epstein told her to give Staley a massage at Epstein’s mansion,” the document notes. “Staley forced her to put her hands on his crotch and had ‘rough sex’ with her.”
The FBI PowerPoint presentation also states that Epstein “told her to give Black a massage while Black was naked.”
In addition to the PowerPoint presentation, documents containing the woman’s original accusations against Staley and Black are available on the DOJ’s Epstein site.
A person who has viewed unredacted documents confirmed to MS NOW that the woman identified as the Staley and Black accuser in the FBI’s PowerPoint presentation was also interviewed by the FBI on at least three occasions from 2019 through 2021.
One FBI 302 summarizes an Oct. 24, 2019, interview with the woman, an FBI agent, two federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York and a New York Police Department detective. During that interview, which the woman said was her first conversation with any law enforcement agency, she claimed to have first met Epstein when she was 20 or 21 — in either 2006 or 2007 — and stayed familiar with him for several years. She also told the group that she had been Epstein’s “‘it’ girl” for some time, stating she “thought that she and EPSTEIN loved each other” and “believed her and EPSTEIN were dating” until she learned that another woman was his real girlfriend.
At one point in the interview, the woman was asked about any sexual contact she may have had with other men. In response, the FBI interview memo says, she named both Black and Staley.
Black, the founder of Apollo Global Management, which he led for more than 30 years, resigned from his firm in 2021 after it was revealed that he paid Epstein almost $160 million in fees for financial and tax advisory services and lent him almost $30 million.
Staley, the former head of the investment bank at JPMorgan Chase, facilitated Epstein’s relationship with that institution, despite some reported concerns from rank-and-file employees. Ultimately, Staley was forced to resign as CEO of Barclays in 2021, after U.K. regulators investigated his relationship with Epstein. Because he misled investigators about the nature of his relationship with Epstein and had a “serious failure of judgment,” those regulators later banned Staley from holding a senior management role in the financial services industry, a decision upheld in June 2025 after Staley’s appeal.
In the 2019 interview, the woman recounted her experience with Black. On that occasion, she said, she was asked to come to Epstein’s New York home by his executive assistant, and Epstein told her to give Black, whom she had met before, a massage. When she went into the massage room, she said Black attempted to make the massage sexual and she recounted running out. When she told Epstein, she said she remembered that he laughed it off.
The woman also alleged that in 2011 or 2012, as she was graduating from massage school, Epstein told her to come to his home to give Staley a massage, an experience she said ended in what she characterized as “rough sex.”
The FBI document does not detail how the incident escalated to rough sex but reflects that the woman had been reluctant, telling Staley that Epstein wouldn’t like it, but Staley responded that it was fine. Later in the document, she says she told Epstein about it — clearly upset — but that he seemed to not care.
The woman told the FBI that after those incidents she kept her distance from Epstein, saying she “realized he didn’t care about her.” She explained to the agents that because Epstein had paid for her to attend massage school, she felt indebted to him and obligated to give massages to men as he directed.
A lawyer for Black, Susan Estrich, told MS NOW, “To be clear, there is absolutely no truth to any of the allegations against Mr. Black. State and federal authorities conducted lengthy investigations regarding the alleged claims against Mr. Black, and he was not charged.”
A lawyer for Staley did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
It’s not clear from the documents available if any witnesses ever corroborated the woman’s specific accusations against Staley or Black.
However, a summary of her experiences with both men is recounted in an 86-page memo drafted by SDNY prosecutors in December 2019 titled “Investigation into Potential Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein,” as well as an undated, six-page summary of that office’s investigation from inception through the sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate.
Additionally, like hundreds of other witnesses interviewed by federal law enforcement officers during the Epstein and Maxwell investigations, the woman was assigned a unique, numerical identifier by SDNY prosecutors. In research conducted by MS NOW, that number is featured not only on her 2019 interview memo but also on other documents that include her prior statements.
Among those documents is a civil lawsuit the woman filed in August 2021 in which she alleged Epstein “forced [her] to give other powerful friends massages,” during which “she was sexually abused, by force, against her will, by the friends whom she had been required to massage.” The woman did not name any specific people beyond Epstein who allegedly sexually abused her.
DOJ materials and other public documents reflect that the woman rejected a compensation offer from the Epstein Victims Compensation Program and later settled with Epstein’s estate.
Among the questions that remain are how, if at all, the woman’s accusations against Staley and Black in that 2025 FBI presentation were resolved. Under a short description of the allegations against each man is a three-word note: “referred to state.”
While the reference isn’t clear, a July 2021 email from a federal prosecutor refers to “a potential referral to DANY” — or the Manhattan district attorney’s office — “regarding information [the woman] provided regarding third parties.”
In New York, most sex crimes carry statutes of limitation of 5 to 10 years; the woman who made accusations against Staley and Black was in her 20s at the time of her allegations, and more than 10 years had passed.
A email in the Justice Department’s release reflects that the Manhattan DA’s office was assessing allegations as recently as June 2023 that Black and Staley sexually assaulted women who also claimed to have been abused by Epstein, but notes reflecting a call between the DA’s office and federal law enforcement agents suggest that some of those claims were considered dubious.
One accuser, according to those notes, was believed to have “[f]alsely denied extortion of Black that was recorded.” With respect to another accuser, the DA’s office apparently told federal law enforcement that there wasn’t any corroboration of her claims and that the woman had also received payments from Black.
A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA’s office declined to comment.
Mychael Schnell, Maddie Bimonte and Sydney Reynolds contributed to this reporting.
Lisa Rubin is MS NOW's senior legal reporter and a former litigator.