Legal disclaimer: This article is based solely on documents released in the federal EFTA (Electronic Filing and Text Archive) production, made public through litigation, supplemented by the archive's entity index. All facts are drawn from those documents. This article does not assert guilt, wrongdoing, or criminal conduct on the part of any individual. Language such as "documents indicate," "records show," and "alleged" reflects the evidentiary basis and does not constitute a legal conclusion. Minors are not identified in this reporting.
Roy Black, the Miami criminal defense lawyer whose firm Black, Srebnick, Kornspan & Stumpf, P.A. has represented some of the country's highest-profile defendants, appears in 1,013 records in the InvArchives entity index, with a full-text search of the archive returning more than 1,800 documents mentioning his name. The record places Black at the center of Jeffrey Epstein's legal team from at least 2005 through the 2008 federal Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA), a series of Justice Department "Notices of Breach" in 2009, and — years after the agreement was signed — a multi-year fight in federal court to keep the negotiations that produced it confidential, culminating in a 2013 appeal to the Eleventh Circuit.
Get the full documents delivered to your inbox — subscribe to the InvArchives newsletter.
The earliest document reviewed for this article predates the NPA by nearly three years. A November 4, 2005 engagement letter from the crisis-communications firm Sitrick And Company, addressed to "Roy Black, Esq." and countersigned on behalf of "Black, Srebnick, Kornspan & Stumpf" as Epstein's attorney, retains Sitrick as "corporate communications advisor, specialist and non-designated expert consultant" in connection with Epstein's legal matters (Sitrick And Company engagement letter, November 4, 2005). The document shows Black's firm coordinating public-relations strategy for Epstein at the same time state and federal investigators in Palm Beach were building the underlying criminal case — more than a year before the September 2007 Non-Prosecution Agreement was reached.
A June 2008 email chain captures the closing days of that negotiation. On June 23, 2008, an Assistant U.S. Attorney wrote to Jay Lefkowitz of Kirkland & Ellis — one of two other attorneys who worked the matter alongside Black — stating that "the Deputy Attorney General has completed his review of the Epstein matter and has determined that federal prosecution of Mr. Epstein's case is appropriate," and setting a deadline of the close of business on Monday, June 30, 2008 for Epstein to comply with the agreement, "including entry of a guilty plea, sentencing, and surrendering to begin his sentence of imprisonment" (AUSA email to Jay Lefkowitz re: Jeffrey Epstein deadline, June 23, 2008). The following day, Black forwarded that message and arranged what he called a "wrap up call," writing that he wanted to "conference Jack Goldberger into the call" — Goldberger being Epstein's local Palm Beach counsel, who represented Epstein at the June 30, 2008 state plea hearing that followed.
Six weeks later, with the state plea entered, U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta wrote directly to "Jay and Roy" to report the outcome of a hearing before U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra: the court had ordered the government to make the confidential Non-Prosecution Agreement available to the plaintiffs in a pending civil suit, "pursuant to a protective order limiting the disclosure to the victims and their counsel only," and to any other identified victim who agreed to the same protective order (Acosta email to Lefkowitz and Black re: hearing with Judge Marra, August 14, 2008). The email shows Black, alongside Lefkowitz, as a direct recipient of the government's reporting on the earliest court fights over how much of the Epstein agreement victims and the public would be permitted to see.
The archive contains a June 15, 2009 letter from Acting U.S. Attorney Jeffrey H. Sloman, addressed jointly to Lefkowitz, Black, and Goldberger, that catalogs what Sloman described as "a continuing pattern" of breaches of the Non-Prosecution Agreement by Epstein. The four-page letter recounts five separate written Notices of Breach the government had issued since the agreement was signed: over Epstein's use of "best efforts" to enter his plea on schedule in 2007, over the state plea paperwork's conflicting with the federal agreement, over an obstruction allegation the letter attributes only to "Mr. Epstein's counsel" generally — without specifying which of the three attorneys addressed in the letter it concerned — regarding the government's ability to notify victims, over a related item in which the letter states that Goldberger and a colleague identified as "Tein," not Black, approved the dissemination of a victim-notification letter that Lefkowitz and Epstein separately disputed as inaccurate, over representations to the court that a motion to quash subpoenas remained pending, and — following disclosures Sloman wrote the government did not learn "from Mr. Epstein or his attorneys" — over Epstein spending "more than twelve hours each day outside the Palm Beach County Stockade" during work release, and a state-court modification of his sentence that Sloman said contradicted the federal agreement (Sloman letter re: Notices of Breach, June 15, 2009). Nothing reviewed for this article ties either the obstruction allegation or the disputed victim-letter dissemination to Black individually. Sloman wrote that the letter was "being provided to all three of you with the recommendation that you circulate it to any attorney who is acting on Mr. Epstein's behalf," and that any future breach would factor into what remedies the government pursued.
Nothing reviewed for this article documents how Black or his co-counsel responded to this specific letter. The document establishes only that Black was one of three attorneys the government held jointly responsible for Epstein's compliance with the agreement he had helped negotiate.
Years after the plea, Black returned to federal court in a different posture: not negotiating the agreement, but defending it from being unwound. In Doe v. United States, No. 9:08-cv-80736 — the case in which Jane Doe #1 and Jane Doe #2 sought a ruling that the government's secret handling of the NPA violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act — the civil docket shows Black filing a formal notice of objection on March 28, 2011 to the plaintiffs' motion seeking to use correspondence between Epstein's lawyers and prosecutors to prove the CVRA violation and to unseal related pleadings (Civil docket, Doe v. United States, No. 9:08-cv-80736). Ten days later, on April 7, 2011, Black filed a Motion to Intervene on behalf of himself, Boston attorney Martin G. Weinberg, and Lefkowitz — all three appearing as non-party "Intervenors" seeking to protect what the docket describes as their communications with the government during the plea negotiations from disclosure.
The docket shows that fight continuing for years. In April 2012, Black, Weinberg and Lefkowitz — captioned in filings as "Intervenors Black, Weinberg, And Lefkowitz" — briefed a motion for a protective order specifically covering the confidentiality of the 2007–2008 plea negotiations. When Judge Marra ultimately ruled against sealing those materials, Black filed a Notice of Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit on June 27, 2013 as "Third Party Intervenor," paying a $455 filing fee, with the docket recording "Attorney Roy Eric Black added to party Jeffrey Epstein (pty:intv)." Black continued litigating discovery and protective-order disputes in the case at least through a May 2014 motion for a protective order and an April 2016 entry referencing a settlement conference.
Correspondence in the archive shows Black remained a working point of contact for Epstein personally, not only in a formal litigation capacity, years after the 2008 plea. Two brief 2012 messages from Epstein's scheduler, Lesley Groff, to Epstein — copying Black — relay logistics for phone calls and travel: a January 3, 2012 note that "Roy is in a meeting" and would call back (Groff to Epstein cc Black, January 3, 2012), and a February 21, 2012 exchange in which Black confirms he will be in Miami before leaving "for palm beach for a trial" (Groff to Epstein cc Black re: Roy's schedule, February 21, 2012). A June 2013 email to Black references his ongoing work on a "motion to stay" in the civil docket, with the sender noting Black was believed to be in Montana at the time (email to Roy Black re: motion to stay, June 24, 2013).
A note on the record: the InvArchives entity index groups documents by name, and a separate October 2020 email thread in the archive refers to "an investigator named Roy Black" reviewed for privilege in connection with Epstein's estate — a private investigator distinct from the attorney profiled here. That document is not cited above and is not attributed to Roy Black, Esq. in this article.
Nothing reviewed for this article documents Black's knowledge of, or involvement in, the underlying conduct that led to Epstein's criminal charges. The record here is confined to Black's function as one of Epstein's retained attorneys: coordinating public-relations strategy in 2005, participating in the close of the 2007–2008 federal plea negotiation, being named as a joint recipient of the government's breach notices, and — for several years afterward — litigating on Epstein's behalf to keep the negotiations that produced the Non-Prosecution Agreement confidential. Readers should treat the "documents indicate" and "records show" framing throughout as a description of what the underlying paper trail contains, not a legal conclusion about Black or any other individual named here.
Share this investigation