Do court documents unsealed in early January 2024 show that California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff visited the island of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein more than 70 times? No, that's not true: There is no credible information or evidence to support the claim. A search of the court records revealed no mention of Schiff.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X (formerly Twitter) by The Patriot Oasis on January 3, 2024. The post's caption says:
🚨 BREAKING: Adam Schiff visited Epstein Island allegedly over 70 times!
Should he be expelled from Congress and prosecuted??
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of the writing of this fact check:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Jan 5 16:25:52 2024 UTC)
The post was published after the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York unsealed another portion of the documents (archived here) related to the activities of Epstein and his associates. The files, made public on January 3 and January 4, 2024, came from a civil lawsuit filed by one of the victims, Virginia Giuffre, against Ghislaine Maxwell, a British-born socialite who was convicted in U.S. federal court for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
Contrary to the claim published on X, none of the freshly released court records contained any references to Schiff. Below are screenshots of a website hosting the documents as well as the search results (archived here) for the name "Adam Schiff":
(Source: CourtListener screenshots taken on Fri Jan 5 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories also searched the court records for variations of his name: "Schiff" (archived here), "Adam B. Schiff" (archived here) and "Adam Bennett Schiff" (archived here). These queries also returned "no results."
Epstein Island
While often referred to as Epstein Island, the actual name of the land mass is Little Saint James. It is a small private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, located southeast of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean. Here's what an Associated Press story from May 4, 2023, said about it and Epstein:
Little St. James, which locals had nicknamed 'Pedophile Island,' has three beaches, a helipad, a gas stations and more than 70 acres (28 hectares) of land. ...
Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trail in 2019. He had been accused of federal sex trafficking charges and pleaded not guilty to charges of sexually abusing dozens of girls, some as young as 14 years old. Authorities said some of the girls had been brought to his home in the Caribbean.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Epstein can be found here.
