Investigative reporter Julie K. Brown and the Miami Herald — working with First-Amendment attorney Sanford L. Bohrer (Holland & Knight) — filed the 2018 Freedom-of-Information action you are asking about.
On April 6-9, 2018 the paper moved to intervene in Giuffre v. Maxwell in the Southern District of New York, arguing that every sealed document in the case was presumptively public and should be released.
This became the first large-scale legal effort to pry open federal records on Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 plea deal, and it set the stage for hundreds of pages being unsealed the next year.1234
Background of the 2018 filing
Brown had begun tracing Epstein's victims in 2017 and published the Perversion of Justice series in November 2018. While working on that investigation she learned that a trove of discovery material in Giuffre v. Maxwell — depositions, correspondence, flight logs, photographs, and FBI email — remained sealed.
Acting on Bohrer's advice, the Herald petitioned the court in April 2018 to unseal the entire docket, citing the First Amendment right of access to judicial records.56
How the 2018 action differed from other efforts
Key individuals behind the 2018 FOIA-style push
Impact
The April 2018 filing broke the log-jam that had kept the Maxwell defamation docket sealed. The Second Circuit's July 2019 opinion ordered a line-by-line review with a strong presumption of openness, leading to the release of deposition transcripts, flight manifests, photographs seized by Palm Beach police, and scores of internal emails.6
Those records underpinned subsequent federal indictments, civil suits, and congressional inquiries into how Epstein escaped serious punishment for so long.13