Reading room with printed copies of the Epstein files opens in New York

A new immersive cultural experience has opened in New York—a reading room in which visitors can sit down with printed and bound volumes of documents from the U.S. Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, released earlier this year.

The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, as it is called, opened Friday at an undisclosed location in Tribeca with 3.5 million pages from the Epstein files in book form.

The nonprofit Institute for Primary Facts, based in Washington, D.C., which bills itself as “advancing civic literacy and fostering a deeper public understanding of America's democratic institutions,” is behind the project. It took them about a month to put it together.

The nonprofit is positioning the reading room as “an exercise in radical transparency” and said the printed copies are an “undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime.”

Admission to the reading room is free, but advance reservation for one-hour sessions to view the materials is required.

Organizers are allowing members of Congress, law enforcement, journalists, and survivors or their advocates to apply for a private appointment in the reading room.

Urgent Matter has reached out to organizers of the reading room for more information and additional comment.

People online have already taken to calling for the reading room to travel across America, particularly to red states.

“We're gonna need this to stick around for like half a year,” one commenter said on a post by the nonprofit to Instagram. “We need to give EVERYONE a chance to see this!”

Others joked that Trump would be happy with the existence of the reading room because “he does love to have his name on everything.”

The reading room also arrives after months of reporting that showed how deeply Epstein’s network intersected with parts of the art world and cultural institutions.

Documents released by the Justice Department included investigative materials involving billionaire collector and former Museum of Modern Art chairman Leon Black, who was accused by multiple alleged victims of violent sexual abuse in records reviewed by investigators.

Meanwhile, art collector Les Wexner, whose relationship with Epstein has long drawn scrutiny, had faced a subpoena from the FBI in 2019 and was named in a series of unverified tips connected to Epstein.

And files reviewed by Urgent Matter named longtime president Leon Botstein and his efforts to solicit donations to the college from Epstein.

An independent review commissioned by Bard’s trustees concluded that while Botstein had not engaged in illegal conduct, some of his decisions regarding Epstein “reflect on his leadership of Bard.” Botstein later announced he would retire as president at the end of the academic year.

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