Did the Department of Justice database correctly render the contents of a Jan. 17, 2013 email to Jeffrey Epstein when it turned the email's words into "New Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute, =9yo"? No, that's not true: The original email said "19yo". The = sign is one of several substitution errors that arise from optical character recognition scanning, PDF conversions and other automated processes the Department of Justice used to meet Congress' deadline for release of millions of pages of investigators' files on the late pedophile financier.
The claim that a 2013 email to Epstein referred to a nine-year-old was made in a Feb. 3, 2026 X post (archived here) on the @jakeshieldsajj account under the title "New Brazilian just arrived: sexy and cute 9-year-old ". It continued:
They are openly buying 9-year-old children, and our DOJ is protecting their names
The DOJ are the enemy of our nation
The X post included this image:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/2018916279567241431.)
Researchers looking into the Epstein files have observed this glitch elsewhere in Epstein investigation documents.
When emails are exported or "flattened" into a PDF, there are encoding markers such as the equal sign that may remain in place of the character it was meant to modify, which would break numbers like "19" into "=9".
It's a common enough problem that asking Google Search about it turns up multiple conversations among Adobe users and others about technical issues with such conversions:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of results of Google search for "why is = substituted for numbers when exporting email to PDFs.")
It turns out there are often duplicate copies of the same documents in the DOJ's online Epstein library, sometimes copied or scanned by other methods. Lead Stories located the document (archived here), which appears to be a scanned copy of a printout of the same email, judging by the varying typefaces and colors, which you would not see in an Optical Character Recognition version. In this version, the Brazilian is referred to as a 19yo in a sans serif typeface in blue. The complimentary close - "Best regards," is in black, in a typeface with serifs.
The other difference in this version is that multiple black redaction blocks appear to cover the name of the sender as well as .jpg images referred to in the "Attachments" and "Inline-Images" notes at the top of the email.
Here's what that item in the DOJ Epstein document library looked like at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of PDF found at justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00659212.pdf.)
