As the Epstein case shows, "document dumps" are both a journalistic blessing and a curse
Leaks of incendiary materials can be full of red herrings, banalities and bullshit. Diligent reporters sift the wheat from the chaff. It's not easy. But it can be fruitful
It’s the biggest story in town. In fact it’s the biggest story in the world this week, or at least for the past few days since the USA’s Department of Justice (DOJ) published three million new documents, 180,000 hitherto unseen images and 2,000 new videos relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in August 2019, aged 66.
The DOJ has a portal where anybody - including you - can search this mammoth cache of material to see who appears in it, whether in a significant and potentially criminal way, or, much more likely, is mentioned in passing.
To do your own search, go to this DOJ link, confirm that you are aged 18 or older, and then search for whichever person or subject you are interested in. But be aware that many of the findings will be completely banal, for example coming up with links to newsletters or news alerts that Epstein subscribed to that contained the name or subject you were looking for.
For example I asked the DOJ’s “full Epstein library” to update me on everything it had on David Beckham. There were 13 results! And they are ALL media reports about Beckham from sources Epstein subscribed to, none of them particularly interesting let alone scandalous.
A search for Richard Branson, on the other hand, turns up 644 results, many of which are emails between Branson (or his staff) and Epstein (or his staff), and while potentially salacious, fall some miles short of evidence of wrong-doing by the Virgin empire founder.
Search for Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly and you’ll find 80 results, many of which also involve Peter Mandelson, although there is far too little information to understand why, precisely.
Search for the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, or indeed Mandelson, and yes, you’ll get a load of stuff that looks a bit more murky. OK, a lot more murky. But it will take weeks, or even months, for any news organisation to properly digest these new millions of pieces of information and work out who did what (or not) and when, in the orbit of Epstein, and work out whether that was illegal, or just morally wrong, or completely innocent.
This preamble is meant only to attempt to explain that “document dumps” can be both a journalistic blessing and a curse. You need lots of time, and forensic attention, and then loads more follow-up time when leads seem promising, to actually get to the point where you might be able responsibly to write a story that matters, instead of something that might seem great (salacious) but doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny.
Today, this piece will take you through my own experience of five “document dumps” relating to sport, and detail how I went about interrogating them, and explore what, if anything, I was able to write after doing so.
Before we get to those five, I’ve done a few sports searches on the latest Epstein “dump.” A German colleague of mine, Jens Weinreich, has already found some connections in the latest documents between Epstein and Olympic figures related to 2028 summer Games in Los Angeles.
I started with a simple search for “FIFA” in the new Epstein “dump” and came up with 73 hits, and arguably the most interesting of those were direct emails between Epstein and a person known as “Jabor Y”.
This person is believed to be Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani (or Sheikh Jabor bin Yousef bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani), a businessman and member of the Qatari royal family.
If you cast your mind back to 27 May 2015, law enforcement officials raided hotels in Zurich and arrested numerous football officials, kick-starting the 2015 FIFA corruption case, and signalling the beginning of the end of Sepp Blatter’s FIFA.
Then on 28 May 2015, Epstein emailed “Jabor Y” (with whom he frequently communicated about various geopolitical issues, not least around the Middle East), and told him: “If the fifa issue requires legal help, let me know.”
“Jabor” replies: “I will do. Thanks my friend.”
That email can be seen below, and also here in the DOJ document dump.
What exactly might Epstein have been able to do for Qatar or Qatar-related parties as FIFA burned? Who knows?
The other FIFA / Epstein material includes multiple communications between Nicole Junkermann (a football “influencer”) and Epstein; and talk about an apparently Russia-related “Rostov”, involving videos that have now been deleted by YouTube “for violating YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content.” Rostov in this case was almost certainly a place, not a person, but again, it’s not certain.
I can’t tell you much more, because it’s so opaque and there are few clear leads to go on.
But anyway, today’s piece isn’t about Epstein’s case and that docs dump, but rather about five previous document dumps relating to sport.
The rest of this article, available to paying subscribers without whom this site would not exist, will detail:
The “evidentiary package” of evidence of state-sponsored doping in Russia, which has since been removed from the internet but which I’ll show you how to access these days anyway. I spent two weeks solid going through this in 2017 and landed a scoop as a result.
The 'Football Leaks’ dump of documents, acquired mainly but not only by Rui Pinto, and largely (but not only) reported by Der Spiegel. The Manchester City case grabbed many headlines but it was far, far, far from the only material published.
The USADA document dump of the case against Lance Armstrong, published in 2012, which brought down the 7-times Tour de France winner and set in train multiple cycling investigations, including one by me that started in 2012 and really only ended in 2024 when I published my full findings on here.
The IAAF blood database leak that provided detailed information on 12,000+ blood tests on international-level track & field athletes between 2001 and 2012, with the results giving strong indications about which athletes were cheating. If you are a subscriber, you’ll be able to download that full database as an XLS below and then interrogate it by named athlete, nationality and blood results.
The “Fancy Bears” leaks of alleged dodgy behaviour by mainly western sportspeople, leaked by Russian hackers for PR reasons.
