House Democrats brought Epstein survivors to West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday and used a field hearing near President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and Jeffrey Epstein’s former home to open what they called a new phase of the investigation. In the first testimony of the day, a survivor identified only as Roza said she was pulled into Epstein’s orbit as an 18-year-old model from Uzbekistan in 2008.
Roza told lawmakers she quickly fell into debt to her modeling agency, which she said was run by Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel. She spoke as Democrats released a new report arguing that the nonprosecution agreement negotiated by Alex Acosta let Epstein keep and grow his trafficking operation. Under that deal, Epstein served 13 months in jail after pleading guilty to a single state count of solicitation of prostitution and was required to register as a sex offender.
Rep. Robert Garcia said the hearing was meant to signal a shift. He said Democrats are “launching a new phase of the Epstein investigation,” and called the report the first of many the party intends to release over the coming months. Garcia also said the government is withholding as much as half of the Epstein files in its possession, a charge that lands squarely in the middle of a fight that has moved from the courts to Congress and now to the campaign trail.
The Justice Department has already released millions of pages of Epstein-related material, but it has also heavily redacted those pages and withheld millions more. The department says it has complied with both a bipartisan congressional subpoena and the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which called for the release of almost all documents tied to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Authorities say Epstein died by suicide while in jail in 2019, and Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with him to abuse minors.
The hearing was part of a broader Democratic push to keep the case in the spotlight, and it came at a time when the investigation has become a political headache for Trump. Republicans were not invited to the West Palm Beach session, even as lawmakers across the aisle continue pressing for more records. An Oversight spokesperson said, “Chairman Comer has made clear that the Committee intends to hold an official hearing with Epstein survivors who are willing to testify once interviews and depositions are complete,” and added, “The Committee also continues to meet with many Epstein survivors and their attorneys.”
For Roza, the first public account was not about Washington’s document fight. It was about the path that began in 2008, when she says she arrived in New York with a modeling contract and ended up trapped in debt. For Democrats, her testimony gave the hearing its moral center and sharpened the argument that the Epstein case is far from closed, even after Epstein’s death in 2019 and Brunel’s death in French custody in 2022.
