They built an Epstein files library, but realized they couldn’t let everyone read them

NEW YORK —  David Garrett had no intention of blocking access to the Epstein files.  

But when he and the team he was working with discovered the identity of “dozens” previously undisclosed victims in documents already published by the Department of Justice, he said he had no choice.

“We found the names of some survivors that have publicly asked to be redacted, and some Jane Does that are still not public,” Garrett said in an interview on Thursday. “The docs were riddled with them.”

For months, the Midwest native turned wine businessman had been corralling people to stage an admittedly attention-grabbing stunt: print every single document publicly released by the Department of Justice related to the years-long investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sexual abuser and wealthy financier who died in 2019 while facing charges of trafficking and raping a still-not-fully-agreed-upon number of victims.

Seven years later, only one person has been convicted of criminal wrongdoing connected to Epstein — his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Victims, lawmakers in both parties, and a growing percentage of the public say more people should face accountability.

“When you’re flipping through your phone and looking at your news feed,” Garrett said “and you see, you know, a cat video, and, you know, the next thing is an ICE raid, and the next thing is, like, a birthday party, and the next thing is evidence of one of the worst crimes in American history — like, all those things seem to kind of go together, and they seem to … have the same level of importance, right?” 

“It’s hard,” he said, “to have context, and it’s hard to understand the source, and you don’t know if it’s fake or it’s real, and it’s just sort of this blob of information that numbs you, right?”

“This,” he said, “is the opposite of that.”

Garrett is the face of a privately funded group called The Institute for Primary Facts, a non-profit that says its goal is to open “immersive, traveling museum exhibits designed to provide accessible, fact-based explorations of the foundational elements of American democracy.” People who register to visit receive a confirmation email that includes a solicitation for donations using a division of ActBlue, the fundraising platform used by the Democratic Party. He said ActBlue is just “infrastructure” and widely used by non-profits and civic projects.

“We’re not affiliated with any political campaign or party,” Garrett said, and the installation “is focused on accountability and transparency, not partisan politics.” 

The funders’ identities and politics are immaterial, he said, because the subject of the installation transcends politics. 

“This is about corruption. This is about breaking the law,” he said.

Later, he added, “I don’t care who’s corrupt “ and “I feel the same way about Eric Swalwell, that I feel about, you know, Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. Swalwell is the California Democrat who dropped out of the California gubernatorial race and resigned from Congress after several women publicly accused him of sexual assault and abuse.

President Trump is the only other person featured in the exhibit, even though Epstein had associated with many elite figures, like former president Bill Clinton, the then-Prince Andrew of Great Britain, Trump ally Steve Bannon, and celebrities like director Woody Allen. 

Garrett said the focus is on Trump because he “is the sitting president” and is “influencing” what should be an independent and thorough investigation. Garrett called that “corruption” and said that is “what we are trying to draw attention to.”

“Let’s have a fulsome investigation, and anyone who is found guilty should be held accountable,” he said.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump had been “totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” though the House Oversight Committee is still calling in witnesses it says may have information about Epstein’s criminal behavior. Jackson said the committee investigation, the DOJ’s release of documents and the president’s signing of bipartisan legislation requiring the release of those documents are proof that “President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”  

Trump has denied numerous assault accusations from more than two dozen women, and said, “I apologize if anyone was offended” after the Washington Post published a video on which Trump could be heard saying years earlier that he groped women’s genitals without consent because he was famous. Trump was also found civilly liable of assault in 2023 for an encounter in New York decades earlier.

The documents find a home, eventually

Straight Arrow interviewed Garrett in one corner of a converted art gallery now called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, its first installation on what is a scheduled nationwide tour. He said more than one printer and more than one venue backed away once learning about the subject material. Eventually, he found partners to collaborate with.

The art gallery sits on Reade Street in the Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, which the New York Times noted, is “just blocks from where Epstein was found dead inside his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial.” The author of that story had previously faced scrutiny over their own conduct.

All 3,437 volumes of the so-called “Epstein files” are stacked on nearly 7-foot-tall bookcases that line two walls of the gallery’s main floor, and part of another wall in a second room downstairs. Also downstairs are desks and writing supplies for people to write notes, bulletin boards featuring those notes, and a couple of unplugged desktop computers, which one organizer said added to the ”library” vibe. 

In front of each of the bookcases are velvet ropes preventing the public from touching, let alone reading, any of the books.

Why open a Reading Room without much to read?

Garrett said the goal is to hopefully reanimate enough public attention to force more people to be held accountable. And the initial concept did not actually rely on people reading the files, Garrett said. Just seeing the files all at once would help people appreciate how big the case is.

The general public would be allowed into the space. But access to the printed files is only allowed for victims, their lawyers, law enforcement, credentialed journalists and members of Congress. 

A spokeswoman for the DOJ, Natalie Baldassarre, said in a statement that the department is “working around the clock to address any victim concerns” and that “once proper redactions have been made, any responsive documents will repopulate online.”

Putting evidence, victims and timeline on display

In the middle of the room on the main floor is a giant rectangle of white curtains hanging from high above, cordoning off a display of more than 1,400 candles, representing Epstein’s publicly known victims. The gallery’s inability to remove a large structure in the middle of the room forced this piece of creativity, which organizers later realized created a perfect opportunity to express their desire to center victims in the exhibit. Several victims have already visited, Garrett said.   

“When you walk in this room, and you see row after row, volume after volume, millions of pages of evidence of one of the most horrific crimes in American history. It’s very hard to believe,” Garrett said.  

“What I hope,” he added, “is that people leave this experience and say, like, unless there’s accountability for a crime this massive, do we really have a democracy? Do we really have a society?”

“We need to go and make sure that there’s accountability for this, even if it’s just so that there’s a safe world for our daughters and granddaughters, right?” he said.

Does accountability mean Donald Trump faces charges?

The installation features Trump nearly as much as it features Epstein. In the back of the main room is a floor-to-ceiling picture of the two men, with a timeline on an adjacent wall describing their actions over the years.

• A 1993 incident titled “Attempted Rape at Mar-a-Lago” says Jill Harth alleged “that during a January 1993 visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump pulled her into his daughter’s bedroom and groped her. ‘He was pushing me against a wall and had his hands all over me,’ she later told The Guardian. She filed a lawsuit alleging attempted rape in 1997, which she later withdrew.”

• A 1993 incident that says, “Beatrice Keul, a Swiss model, alleged that Trump groped her in his suite at the Plaza Hotel. Keul came forward in 2024, providing photographs and event tickets that documented her presence at the Plaza on the night in question.”

Garrett himself stopped short of explicitly accusing Trump of criminal wrongdoing, which may partly explain why he has yet to see a lawsuit over the installation. 

“If you come here and look at just the facts that we’ve presented and draw your own conclusions,” he said, “I think that it’s fair to say that Donald Trump certainly is a witness, certainly should — there’s an investigation that should be done, even if he did nothing wrong in the Epstein abuse piece of this.”

“He’s certainly corruptly influencing the investigation,” Garrett said. “And that is a level of corruption that we would never accept under any other circumstances.”

Does the exhibit imply something more than the facts show?

When asked whether they designed the exhibit to give people the impression that Trump is guilty of participating in Epstein’s criminal behavior, Garrett said there are two tracks to be mindful of: Trump’s time with Epstein and Trump’s time as president. There “certainly have been allegations, documented allegations” by “Epstein’s survivors about Trump,” Garrett said. “Those have clearly not been investigated, and they haven’t been investigated for a reason.”

But if you accept Trump’s denial of wrongdoing, “he still has to answer for the corruption. He still has to answer for the fact that he has impeded this investigation into the worst sex crimes in American history.”

The public reaction, and what is next

More than 5,000 people signed up to visit the installation and nearly 1,500 have already walked through the door, Garrett said. It is open to the public by appointment from noon to 8 p.m. and to victims, researchers, law enforcement and journalists starting at 9 a.m. (On Sunday, the exhibit closes at 6 p.m.)

The installation has generated headlines from news outlets as far away as France and Australia, as well as by outlets as varied as Reuters, Artnet, MS Now, Wired, The Financial Express and The Architect’s Newspaper.

Garrett later told me that his organization intends the exhibit to be the first of several highlighting what he and the Institute say are wrongdoing and authoritarian moves by Trump and his allies that have gone unpunished and under-appreciated. Future exhibits may include: the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol; election interference; the slashing of the federal workforce led by Trump ally Elon Musk; federal immigration enforcement actions and business dealings that benefit Trump and his family.

Outside the exhibit, one woman who said she does not normally walk down Reade Street said the installation sounded “interesting” before taking a picture of the exterior and walking away. 

Andres Tavarez, 43, paused his Amazon delivery schedule to take a photograph of the exterior too. After being told about the installation, he called it “a step towards transiency. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, [on] both sides of the political aisle, there isn’t a willingness to get to the bottom of this.”

Tavarez said it was “heartbreaking” to learn that Harvard linguist Noam Chomsky, whose denouncement of media bias and elite corruption long ago made him a hero on the left, “had correspondences” with Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea. Before pulling out a digital Nikon camera, he added, “This is freaking nuts.”

Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief