This article originally appeared on Julie M. Anderson-Holburn’s Substack, Unveiled and Uncensored
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif., July 19 —Federal transparency records identify Ami Sheth — now Judge Ami Sheth Sagel of the Orange County Superior Court — as a Kirkland & Ellis attorney who corresponded with DOJ officials on Jeffrey Epstein’s behalf during his 2007–2008 non-prosecution agreement, and who was later formally substituted as Epstein’s attorney of record in a civil suit brought by an alleged victim. The disclosure lands amid an unrelated, months-long recall effort against Orange County family and probate judges and ongoing public protest of OC’s family court judges, including Sagel — developments that predate the Epstein documents and are not connected to them.
 |
 |
 |
The documents
Records released by the Department of Justice under the Epstein Files Transparency Act identify an attorney named “Ami Sheth” — an associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York — working directly with federal officials on Jeffrey Epstein’s behalf during the 2007–2009 period covering his non-prosecution agreement and its aftermath. A search of the DOJ’s own Epstein Library returns 21 documents referencing her by name across two of the release’s data sets, spanning draft agreement negotiations, victim-notification logistics, and billing records.
In a June 20, 2008 email to John Roth in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Sheth transmitted a set of documents — a “Principal Submission,” a “Summary of Misconduct,” and responses to federal correspondence — writing “on behalf of Jay Lefkowitz and Ken Star[r],” Epstein’s two lead attorneys. The email is signed with Lefkowitz’s and Kenneth Starr’s names below Sheth’s message. (EFTA00013602, EFTA00013783)
Internal Kirkland & Ellis correspondence from the same period shows Sheth as a recipient and forwarder of substantive strategy discussions, including a November–December 2007 exchange concerning the selection of a special master and the timing of victim notification letters. (EFTA01075860, EFTA01075864) A December 2007 email from Sheth’s Kirkland & Ellis account also notes her bar admission was “Pending in New York” at the time — indicating she was a recently arrived associate rather than a senior member of the defense team. (EFTA00235424)
Attorney of record
Sheth’s role went beyond correspondence. A Notice of Change of Attorney filed May 8, 2009 with the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York — signed by Sheth and stamped with Kirkland & Ellis’s Citigroup Center address — formally substituted her as attorney of record for “Jeffrey Epstein, Nine East 71 Street Corporation and Jeffrey Epstein and Co.” in Cordero v. Epstein (Index No. 113903-07, Justice Lehner), a civil suit brought by an alleged Epstein victim, Ava aka Maximilia Cordero, against Epstein, Victoria’s Secret Stores Brand Management, and Leslie Wexner. (EFTA00728417) A related September 2009 stipulation in the same case, filed with the Appellate Division, First Department, bears Sheth’s personal signature on behalf of Kirkland & Ellis as “Attorneys for Defendants-Respondents Jeffrey Epstein, Nine East and Jeffrey Epstein and Co.” (EFTA00722633–634)
A separate document in the DOJ’s index (EFTA00725368) references what appears to be a similar substitution of Sheth as counsel in another matter, replacing prior counsel “Lefcourt, P.C.” That document has not yet been independently reviewed in full and is not relied on here beyond noting its existence in the public index.
Sheth’s tenure at Kirkland & Ellis, 2006 to 2009, is confirmed independently by her own official biography — the same years in which the firm, led by Lefkowitz and Starr, negotiated Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement with then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, and the same years in which she was personally substituted as Epstein’s attorney of record in related civil litigation.
From defense attorney to family court judge
After leaving Kirkland & Ellis, Sheth — who later married and became Ami Sheth Sagel — served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California from 2009 to 2015, where she prosecuted crimes against children and received the FBI’s “Exemplary Performance in the Prosecution of Crimes Against Children” award, along with a Victim-Witness Assistance Program honor. She later operated a solo practice focused on adoptions, guardianships, and family law before Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to the Orange County Superior Court in 2023. She sits on the Family Law panel, hearing cases involving child custody, visitation, and domestic violence.
Her judicial campaign materials emphasize this record of prosecuting crimes against children and advocating for victims. They do not reference her earlier work representing Epstein.
What voters didn’t know
Sagel has not hidden that she worked at Kirkland & Ellis. A June 18, 2026 profile published on OrangeCountyLawyers.com — appearing after her June 2 re-election, in an interview the outlet described as exclusive — states that she “began as a civil litigator at Kirkland & Ellis law firm in New York” before her federal prosecution and family law career. The firm’s name is part of her public biography.
What is absent from that profile, from her campaign materials, and from every other public-facing account of her career reviewed for this report, is any reference to Epstein specifically, or to her role corresponding with DOJ on his behalf and later serving as his attorney of record in civil litigation. Kirkland & Ellis is a large firm with thousands of clients; naming it discloses nothing about which matters an associate worked on.
More to the point: the DOJ documents that identify her by name in connection with Epstein were not released until after both her re-election and the June 18 profile. Whatever she may or may not have volunteered about that work, the documentary record that would let a voter, a reporter, or a judicial oversight body evaluate it simply did not exist publicly until now. Orange County voters decided this race on June 2 without the information this reporting is based on.
Her 2026 campaign branding — her Instagram account, her campaign website domain, and the endorsement graphics she circulated — presented her exclusively as “Judge Ami Sagel,” without “Sheth.” That is a shorter form than the “Ami Sheth” identified throughout the Kirkland & Ellis-era Epstein correspondence, and shorter than the “Ami Sheth Sagel” that Schneider’s ballot-name ruling found she had used in professional and judicial records. A voter relying solely on her campaign’s public-facing name would have had little basis to connect “Judge Ami Sagel” to the “Ami Sheth” who appears throughout the DOJ’s 2007–2009 Epstein records.
A family court already under scrutiny
The Epstein disclosure surfaces at a moment when Orange County’s family and probate courts are already the subject of sustained public criticism, unrelated to it: recall petitions were served on a series of sitting family and probate judges beginning in December 2025, reaching twelve sitting judges by January 2026, and public protests outside county court facilities, including the Lamoreaux Justice Center, have continued since at least July 2025 — both developments predating the Epstein disclosure by six months to a year, and Sagel’s re-election as well. (See this reporter’s prior coverage of the recall efforts.) That activity reflects grievances specific to individual custody and dependency cases and is noted here only to establish the broader climate around the court, not to suggest any connection to the Epstein material.
A separate controversy: the 2026 ballot-name fight
Sagel’s re-election campaign this year drew its own headlines — not over her Epstein-era legal work, which had not yet surfaced publicly, but over a challenge from opponent Charles E. Pell to how her name would appear on the ballot. Pell argued Sagel’s use of “Ami S. Sagel” — rather than “Ami Sheth Sagel” — violated the Elections Code and was false or misleading. San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Wilfred J. Schneider Jr. rejected the challenge on March 23, 2026, finding “clear and convincing” evidence that Sagel had used all three name variants — Ami Sheth Sagel, Ami S. Sagel, and Ami Sagel — interchangeably for years in professional and judicial records. (Pell v. Page, 30-2026-01553798-CU-WM-CJC.) Sagel won re-election on June 2, 2026, with 68.38 percent of the vote. Full coverage of that dispute, including on-the-record statements from both sides, is available from the Daily Journal.
Sagel’s name — used across three interchangeable variants in her professional and legal records, and used exclusively as “Sagel” in her 2026 campaign branding — is a separate matter from the “Ami Sheth” identity that ties her to the Epstein-era Kirkland & Ellis documents; see “What voters didn’t know,” above.
A request for comment was sent to Judge Sagel’s office. She had not responded as of publication.
Moving Forward
The DOJ’s Epstein Files Transparency Act release was intended to give the public a fuller accounting of who represented Epstein and how his non-prosecution agreement was negotiated. What it does for voters and litigants in Orange County is narrower but concrete: it puts on the record that a sitting family court judge — now assigned to some of the most sensitive cases a court can hear, involving children, custody, and domestic violence — was formally Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney of record, including in a civil suit brought by one of his alleged victims, in the years before his conduct became a matter of national reckoning. That disclosure arrives into a family court system already facing recall efforts and sustained public protest over separate grievances — a reminder that Orange County’s family court is under scrutiny on multiple fronts, not a suggestion that those fronts are the same story. Whether the Epstein history is relevant to her fitness for the bench is a judgment call for voters and for the judicial oversight bodies empowered to make it. This reporting aims to supply the documented facts necessary to make that judgment, not to make it on the public’s behalf.
This article is investigative reporting intended for public-information and public-interest purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, and nothing herein should be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with a licensed attorney or qualified legal professional. References to laws, court proceedings, or legal processes are presented for journalistic and informational purposes.
Julie M. Anderson-Holburn is a California-based investigative journalist reporting on criminal and family court corruption, judicial abuse, domestic violence, child abuse and systemic failures. Her work is published on NewsBreak, Substack, and The Family Court Circus, and has been featured by the Center for Judicial Excellence and National Safe Parents. Julie believes that exposing the truth is the first step toward meaningful reform.
0 comments