The “Epstein files” in the sense people are talking about online today refer to the large cache of Justice Department records made public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and they effectively started with the first official DOJ document release on December 19, 2025.

Quick timeline (when they “started”)

  • Mid‑November 2025: Congress passes the Epstein Files Transparency Act , and President Donald Trump signs it into law, starting a 30‑day countdown for disclosure.
  • December 19, 2025: The first batch of files is released by the Department of Justice – heavily redacted and relatively small, but this is what most outlets and forums treat as the moment the “Epstein files” officially began to drop.
  • January 30, 2026: A massive second release follows: over 3 million pages of documents, plus hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of videos, which DOJ says brings it into compliance with the law.

So if your question is “when did the Epstein files start?” in the current news sense, the key date people point to is December 19, 2025 , when DOJ first pushed documents online under the new law.

What the “Epstein files” actually are

When media and forums say “Epstein files,” they’re talking about:

  • DOJ investigative records tied to the federal sex‑trafficking investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and related cases.
  • FBI materials, emails, memos, photos, and videos held by law enforcement, plus some court records and prior public‑records releases grouped into what’s now sometimes called the “Epstein Library.”
  • Files released under rules that block or redact victim‑identifying details, explicit child‑abuse material, and anything that would harm active investigations or national security.

These are distinct from earlier court documents that had already trickled out over the years, such as civil suits and deposition records. Those earlier materials helped build public pressure, but they’re not what people usually mean by the “Epstein files” as a capital‑F event tied to the new law.

How it turned into a big trending topic

From late 2025 into early 2026, the topic blew up across news and forums because:

  • The law forced a release after years of speculation that a large cache existed but was being withheld.
  • The first release was heavily redacted , with some documents nearly blacked out end‑to‑end, which triggered anger and more conspiracy chatter.
  • A technical redaction screw‑up in some December 2025 documents let people recover text that was supposed to be hidden, feeding claims that authorities were hiding names or cutting deals.
  • The January 2026 dump was so large (millions of pages) that it ensured the “Epstein files” would stay in the news and on forums as people tried to sift for names and patterns.

Because of that, when someone on a forum asks “when did the Epstein files start,” other users usually answer with either:

  • “When Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025” (the legal starting gun), or
  • “When DOJ dropped the first batch on December 19, 2025” (the moment the public actually saw documents).

If you’re writing or posting about it

For a blog, social post, or forum answer, you can safely phrase it like:

The Epstein files, meaning the big DOJ document dump everyone’s talking about, really “started” on December 19, 2025, when the Justice Department released the first batch under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, about a month after Trump signed the law.

That captures the key date, the legal trigger, and why it suddenly became a trending topic instead of just a long‑running background story. Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.