Be Careful! These Files Are No Accident

How unredacted documents, CSAM, and intimidation are being used to silence independent investigators

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by Ellie Leonard, BAM Contributing Editor

I’ve been digging through the Epstein files since July, 2025. That’s it. I’ve done this for only six months, but in that time I’ve put in countless hours of bleary-eyed late nights, scrolling mind-numbing documents from photocopies of unpublished books, fully-redacted court cases, and endless email threads scheduling proffers, depositions, and airline tickets.

Every so often we’ll get a drop that interests the rest of the world, usually photos and videos. But after thousands of pictures of Epstein’s water heaters, bookshelves, gravel pits, and empty memory cards, people get bored and shuffle out. The social media commentary dies down.

Not me.

I’m looking in those drawers filled with cosplay, wondering how it lines up with the dentist chair, and that weird Coney Island art on the walls. I wonder why a guy took a $60 million mansion and decorated it like a Hot Topic. I want to know what’s on those blurry documents sitting on his desk. I’m reading every label of every floppy disk. I’m image-searching obscure sex toys (unbeknownst to me). I’m double-checking every redacted photo to see if I can find another copy online, careful to avoid AI fakes.

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My favorites are the emails, those long threads of weird conversations that no one ever thought would be made public. Moments where bad men let their guard down and brag about their indiscretions, acting like little boys wondering “will she call me back?” when a 20-something flight attendant stops by their hotel room thousands of miles away. Academics suddenly like frat boys. Wall Street’s finest toeing the line of their own sexual preference, just for favor from a guy who seemingly has it all and nothing at the same time. The descriptions of not just any girl, but a special one—young, blonde, skinny, childlike. Maybe she’s 18, but she doesn’t look like it.

I sometimes feel like the DOJ knows when I’m offline. It’s impossible, but it always seems to line up with a kid’s birthday or a trip into the city, and my phone blows up. This time I was headed in to hang out with Aidan Wharton, whom I’d met at the Substack Notes meetup last fall. “I like your nametag” I said, like an idiot. But the “Gay Buffet” had a nice ring to it. Now he hosts the Getting Close podcast, and we’d set a time aside to really talk, face-to-face, with little glasses of tepid water and a professional setup. Actual microphones, unlike my $30 sometimes-mic that lives half its life on my gamer kid’s desk.

We had a lineup of questions that felt easy, kind of happy and banter-y. A just-right conversation between two new-old friends. But then Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were dragged from their sleep by masked FBI agents before daylight. Journalism was targeted yet again. And then they dropped the files, all 3.5 million of them. Coincidence? If you believe in that sort of thing...

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While we chatted, I thought I could hear my phone buzzing, and buzzing, and buzzing through the closet wall where I’d hung my coat. I couldn’t, but my brain wouldn’t let go of those files. I knew what was waiting for me. I knew people wanted to know what I’d found. I knew influencers had already grabbed the biggest headlines and were posting wild and unexpected finds all over social media. Me, I was not in a hurry. Four-thousand files had been work. Thirty-thousand files had been a lot of work. 3.5 million files felt like a joke. So we chatted. I grabbed coffee. And I tried not to get carsick in the Uber home.

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That night I began the first step, the same one I always do, in filtering through the files. I knew the DOJ wouldn’t make it easy, and I was right—3.5 million individual files, needing to be opened one at a time. Take too long, and you’ll get timed out. Click the wrong thing, and you start all over again. Purposefully difficult. But like always, the world is filled with beautiful little tech geniuses, many of whom live on Substack, and we all found our massive piles of downloadable files to begin picking through. It meant upgrading our file-share systems; we could write it off on our taxes later. Upgrading Adobe, too; worth it. And then we waited for that slow download to tick by, thousands and thousands of pages at a time. Because remember, 3.5 million files is not 3.5 million pages. A file could be anything—10, 20, 1000 pages. We were facing the Mount Everest of citizen journalism.

I downloaded Data Set 11 first, which felt doable. Gigantic of course, but nothing like the others. I shrunk it down into pdfs and sent it out to the internet sleuths to start to do their thing. Then I found batch 10, exponentially bigger than 11. It took me hours to download and I was just about to start compiling files when someone reached out with an SOS.

“DON’T OPEN DATA SET 10. WARNING: CSAM!”

I had no idea what CSAM was. I asked. Child Sexual Abuse Material.

Apparently this was (or wasn’t) a version of Data Set 10 that had not been redacted whatsoever, including imagery and video of children being abused. I deleted it immediately.

Then it became a terrible Easter egg hunt, where none of us knew if we had the wrong version of the files, the fully-unredacted documents of the Epstein case. No one wanted to accidentally happen upon something so heinous, but it was 3.5 million files. In the words of Ralphie Parker’s old man: There could be anything in there.

I sat back and did some thinking on Friday night, while I compiled what I had. Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, along with a host of other independent journalists had just been arrested for reporting the news. Not participating. Not inciting. Just showing up and hitting record. TikTok, which was purchased by ByteDance in January, had begun recording all of our data, whether we posted something or not, blocking videos from independent journalists and banning their accounts. Twitter continues to shadow-ban links to independent media articles and videos, especially Substack. And stories that I’d participated in were now on Donald Trump’s radar. Literally the President of the United States.

And it struck me that it was no accident that we’d received an unredacted version of these files. Because the DOJ had promised us for months that they were dragging their feet so as to keep survivors safe, and redact their names and information out of the files and away from prying eyes. Yet Aaron Parnas found documents with children’s faces and information, including drivers’ licenses and birth records. (He’s since contacted the DOJ, who removed the file.) And there are still pages of CSAM hidden in the files on average citizens’ hard drives, unbeknownst to them, as they dig and do their due diligence to society in the name of helping survivors.

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Why? Well, it’s no accident. The only place that had those files before they were sent out to the masses is the DOJ. The only people who ever had access to documents that included CSAM were the United States government. And now they’re in the hands of unknowing citizens who are trying to do the right thing. They only came from one place. And they only came for one reason.

So please listen carefully, so as to protect yourself and your families. We have created a beautiful, and very big, community of citizen journalists to protect the rights of kids and create a better world moving forward that includes justice and accountability. But in so doing, we have a target on our backs. The men and power who we are outing in these files, and the agencies who knowingly ignored them for decades, do not want us to find anything, do not want us to report on anything, and do not want to see justice and accountability served. They want to discredit you, and they want to deny you your rights. And so they will put things in the files that then can be traced back to you and your computer, to ruin your reputation, to create legal problems, and to otherwise wipe you off the map.

Please be careful. What you are doing is worthy, and just, and filled with warrior spirit, but also puts you in danger. If you see anything, if you hear of anything, if anything shows up in files you are digging through in good conscience, please report it immediately to the owner of the files, whether that be me, or someone else. Let them know that they have something terrible in those files that needs to be deleted right away. Protect yourself, and protect them. Because right now we are all unprotected.

A friend told me this week that it’s no longer Democrat vs. Republican. This is now money, and power, and evil vs. the rest of us. That’s most of us. And together we’re stronger, but it’s going to take work. I’m grateful you’re all here together and fighting for something so just, and so meaningful, and so long overdue. You’ve earned those capes.

Stay safe, citizen journalists.

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