FILE: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend an event on March 15, 2005, in New York City. Court records were released Wednesday from a 2015 lawsuit.
Patrick McMullan via Getty ImageA rush of people jumping online to see a list of names associated with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday crashed the web page of a Bay Area nonprofit.
The documents, unsealed Wednesday afternoon as part of a December court order, are expected to include hundreds of names — including those of accusers and some public figures. A viral link to the unsealed documents goes to CourtListener.com, an archive of court data run by the Oakland-based nonprofit Free Law Project.
But when SFGATE checked the site, it appeared as if the crush of visitors had overwhelmed it.
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“Hmmm, something didn’t work, sorry :/,” CourtListener’s page said. “This usually happens when we are doing maintenance or our server is overloaded. Usually things are fixed within a few minutes.”
By 5 p.m., Free Law Project had fixed the CourtListener site, and the documents were available for download.
The nonprofit organization posted on social media Wednesday afternoon that the site was getting “utterly hammered” by interest in the Epstein documents. Misinformation has spread that the list would include salacious reports on prominent businesspeople and politicians, but the Associated Press reported that many of the names in the list unsealed Wednesday, including French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, were already publicly linked to Epstein.
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“On a good day, CourtListener gets tens of thousands of new items added to it, it sends hundreds of alerts to users monitoring cases or search terms, and it serves over a million people,” Free Law Project’s website says.
Wednesday, Jan. 3 was perhaps TOO good a day.
Hear of anything happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.