Damian Williams
Snapshot
| Field | Documented information |
|---|---|
| Public identity | Damian Williams, American attorney and former federal prosecutor |
| Principal Epstein role | U.S. Attorney leading SDNY during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, posttrial litigation, sentencing and direct appeal |
| SDNY leadership | October 2021 through December 13, 2024 |
| Predecessor | Audrey Strauss |
| Successor at departure | Edward Y. Kim, Acting U.S. Attorney |
| Earlier SDNY role | Assistant U.S. Attorney from 2012 to 2021; Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force chief from 2018 to 2021 |
| Maxwell verdict | December 29, 2021; guilty on five of six tried counts |
| Maxwell sentence | June 28, 2022; twenty years in prison, five years of supervised release and $750,000 fine |
| Trial prosecutors | Maurene Comey, Alison Moe, Lara Pomerantz and Andrew Rohrbach |
| Direct appeal | Second Circuit affirmed the judgment on September 17, 2024 |
| Current professional role | Partner at Jenner & Block; co-chair of its Litigation Department and Investigations, Compliance, and Defense practice |
| Documentary caution | His name on filings identifies the office head; it does not establish personal authorship of every submission or participation in every courtroom exchange |
| Last checked | October 7, 2026 |
Damian Williams led the federal prosecutor’s office that obtained Ghislaine Maxwell’s December 2021 conviction. He succeeded Audrey Strauss shortly before the trial and publicly announced both the verdict and the sentence. Court documents also identify his office as the government’s representative during the challenges to the verdict and the appeal decided in 2024.
The sentencing record makes his institutional responsibility concrete. Prosecutors working under his name sought a sentence of thirty to fifty-five years. Judge Alison J. Nathan imposed twenty years. His office defended the conviction, but its positions remained subject to a judge’s rulings, including rulings that rejected particular evidence and prevented separate judgments on overlapping conspiracy counts.
His current Jenner & Block profile identifies him as a private practice partner. He is no longer the U.S. Attorney. His appearance in Epstein-related court files reflects his prosecutorial position and should not be mistaken for evidence that he participated in Epstein’s abuse or social circle.
Important Points
- Williams headed SDNY during Maxwell’s trial and sentencing. Geoffrey Berman headed the office when Epstein was charged in 2019, and Audrey Strauss headed it when Maxwell was arrested in 2020.
- A U.S. Attorney’s name appears on filings prepared and argued by assistant U.S. attorneys. The trial record distinguishes those roles.
- Maxwell’s December 2021 jury verdict was not a conviction on every count. She was acquitted on one of the six counts tried.
- The final judgment contained three convictions. The court declined to enter separate judgments on two overlapping conspiracy counts, and the severed perjury charges were dismissed at sentencing.
- Williams’s office requested a substantially longer prison sentence than the twenty years Nathan imposed.
- His office agreed that a limited hearing into a juror’s questionnaire answers was warranted while opposing Maxwell’s request for a new trial.
- An October 2021 evidence notice bearing Williams’s name proposed introducing certain emails. The judge later excluded them; the proposal did not determine what the jury heard.
- The 2024 appellate opinion upheld the judgment, including the rejection of Maxwell’s claim that Epstein’s Florida agreement barred the New York prosecution.
- Later Supreme Court and collateral-review proceedings took place after Williams left SDNY. They should not be described as decisions he made or proceedings he personally handled.
Legal Career and Appointment
The Justice Department’s March 2022 biography records Williams’s Harvard undergraduate degree in 2002, Cambridge graduate degree in 2003 and Yale law degree in 2007. He clerked for then-Judge Merrick Garland and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, then worked as a litigation associate at Paul Weiss from 2009 to 2012.
Williams joined SDNY as an assistant U.S. attorney in 2012. He led its Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force from 2018 to 2021. That was his documented specialist leadership position during the earlier Epstein investigation. Holding a senior post in the same office does not, without case-specific evidence, make him the prosecutor who initiated every case the office brought.
The Senate’s October 5, 2021 business record lists confirmation of his nomination as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He succeeded Strauss that month and became the first Black U.S. Attorney in the district’s history, as the later Jenner & Block appointment announcement records.
Garland’s November 19 investiture remarks recognized Strauss’s prior service and emphasized prosecutors’ obligations to apply the law impartially. The ceremonial investiture date is distinct from the October confirmation and transfer of leadership. Maxwell’s trial followed later in November.
In March 2022, Garland also appointed Williams chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys. That national policy role provides career context. It is not evidence that he directed unrelated Epstein investigations outside SDNY.
The Case Williams Inherited
SDNY’s July 2020 charging announcement identifies Strauss as the Acting U.S. Attorney when Maxwell was arrested. The initial case included enticement and transportation charges, corresponding conspiracies and perjury allegations arising from civil depositions. Rossmiller, Moe and Comey were then named as the assistant U.S. attorneys in charge.
The March 29, 2021 second superseding indictment added trafficking allegations and expanded the charged history. By the time Williams assumed office, the court had already decided major pretrial issues and scheduled the trial. The official case chronology records the separation of perjury allegations from the remaining trial counts and the postponement of an earlier July 2021 trial date.
Williams’s role is therefore best understood as leading the office through the trial and subsequent litigation of an already pending prosecution. It is inaccurate to place him in charge of Maxwell’s 2020 arrest or Epstein’s 2019 charging announcement merely because his name appears on later documents in the same investigative history.
The distinction also protects against an opposite error: treating an inherited case as outside the succeeding U.S. Attorney’s responsibility. The prosecution’s formal submissions during his tenure were made under his office’s authority even when assistant prosecutors drafted and argued them.
Proposed Evidence and the Court’s Limits
An October 11, 2021 letter preserved as EFTA00080134 notified Maxwell’s lawyers that the government might offer seven email exhibits. The two-page primary-document reproduction identifies Williams as U.S. Attorney above a signature block for assistant U.S. attorneys. It sets out the prosecution’s proposed theory that certain emails could help establish Maxwell’s intent or related issues under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b).
The letter was an evidence notice to defense counsel. It was not a judicial decision that the emails were admissible, and its allegations about the meaning of the messages were the government’s position. The distinction matters because summaries of the files sometimes treat a proposed exhibit as if the jury necessarily saw it.
The November 15, 2021 pretrial transcript, Document 465, records the actual admissibility dispute on pages 55 through 57. Moe argued for the government. Nathan questioned the connection between the emails and the crimes charged, including the inability to establish that the women discussed were below the age of consent. She concluded that the asserted probative value was substantially outweighed by the danger of confusing the jury and excluded Government Exhibits 401 through 404, 409, 410 and 413.
That sequence documents a prosecution attempt to introduce material and a judicial refusal. It does not support a claim that Williams secretly kept those emails from the jury. It also does not turn references to other people in the emails into criminal findings against them. The court’s evidentiary ruling concerned Maxwell’s trial and its permitted scope.
Trial and the December 2021 Verdict
The official court chronology places the trial’s commencement on November 29, 2021. The case was heard in Manhattan before Nathan. The public prosecution team consisted of Comey, Moe, Pomerantz and Rohrbach, as confirmed by SDNY’s account of the resulting case.
Williams’s December 29 statement characterized the verdict as accountability for Maxwell’s role in the abuse of children and thanked the survivors who testified and the career prosecutors. It was the office head’s public response to a jury decision. The statement should not be substituted for the verdict’s count-by-count legal effect.
The court’s subsequent opinion records guilty verdicts on Counts One, Three, Four, Five and Six and an acquittal on Count Two. The tried charges addressed conspiracy, transportation, enticement and sex trafficking theories. The two perjury counts had been separated and were not adjudicated by that jury.
A verdict also has boundaries beyond count numbers. It resolves the charges tried against the defendant under the applicable burden of proof. It is not a determination of every allegation about Epstein, every person mentioned in discovery or every alleged episode excluded from the trial. Williams’s public assurances about pursuing justice do not expand the judgment beyond what the court record establishes.
The Juror Challenge and New Trial Litigation
The government’s posttrial memorandum, Document 615 filed February 24, 2022, bears Williams’s name and lists Comey, Moe, Pomerantz and Rohrbach as counsel. It responded to Maxwell’s challenge arising from Juror 50’s public remarks and his questionnaire answers. The juror’s personal history is relevant only to the legal question presented; it does not need to be retold in unnecessary detail.
The prosecution opposed a new trial but agreed to a limited hearing to resolve the apparent inconsistency. It proposed that the judge conduct questioning and resisted a wider inquiry into jury deliberations or other jurors. That position is more precise than saying the prosecution refused all investigation of the issue.
The April 1, 2022 opinion followed an evidentiary hearing. Nathan denied the motion after assessing the juror’s explanations and impartiality. The decision belonged to the judge, not Williams. The government’s earlier advocacy and the court’s later findings must be kept separate even where the result favored the prosecution.
The 2024 appellate opinion later upheld the handling of the new trial motion. Its analysis did not hold that inaccurate questionnaire answers are automatically harmless in every case. It reviewed the particular record, the hearing and the legal standard applicable to Maxwell’s appeal.
Overlapping Counts and the Final Judgment
The April 29, 2022 opinion, Document 657, resolved an important limit on the verdict’s consequences. The prosecution conceded that Counts One and Three overlapped, but argued that Counts Three and Five involved distinct conspiracies. Nathan disagreed with that latter position and concluded that the conspiracy counts charged the same continuing unlawful agreement.
The court therefore would not enter judgment on Counts One and Five. It rejected Maxwell’s remaining challenges to the convictions on Counts Three, Four and Six. This explains why the jury returned five guilty findings but the judgment ultimately contained three convictions. It was not a jury acquittal on the two overlapping counts, and it was not a wholesale reversal of the prosecution.
For a profile of the supervising prosecutor, the ruling is a useful corrective to celebratory shorthand. Williams’s office won the central case but did not prevail on every legal contention. The government’s authority to charge and advocate did not displace the court’s responsibility to prevent multiple punishments for the same conspiracy.
The Sentencing Request and the Sentence Imposed
The June 22, 2022 government sentencing memorandum, Document 670, asked for a prison term within a proposed range of 360 to 660 months, equivalent to thirty to fifty-five years. It was submitted under Williams’s name, with the four assistant prosecutors listed as counsel. The memorandum emphasized the seriousness of the crimes, harm to survivors, deterrence and the prosecution’s view of Maxwell’s responsibility.
The memorandum also disputed Maxwell’s arguments for leniency, including claims about detention conditions and her effort to shift responsibility to Epstein. Those passages were sentencing advocacy. Where a prosecutor states a contested fact or asks for an enhancement, the requested conclusion is not automatically the judge’s ultimate finding.
The June 28 sentencing transcript, later filed as Document 737, records the competing positions. At pages 18 and 19, Nathan summarized the defense’s proposed guideline range, the government’s calculation and the probation department’s recommendation. At page 96, she imposed concurrent terms of sixty, 120 and 240 months on Counts Three, Four and Six, respectively, producing a total of twenty years.
The sentence also included five years of supervised release and a $750,000 fine. Those amounts are established by the transcript and appellate opinion. The government’s requested range should not be presented as the sentence Maxwell actually received, and the concurrent terms should not be added together as if they were consecutive.
Williams’s same-day statement praised the survivors’ testimony and described the sentence as accountability. He announced the outcome; Nathan imposed it. The transcript also records Moe’s motion to dismiss the severed perjury counts and the judge’s granting of that motion. Maxwell did not receive jury convictions on those charges.
Victim Participation and Its Boundaries
The official June 2022 case notice described the process for requesting an opportunity to make a statement at sentencing under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The prosecution’s role included receiving submissions and addressing the court’s procedures. The surviving historical notice should not be read as a current invitation to use expired deadlines or attend a proceeding that has already occurred.
The sentencing transcript preserves the court’s reception of survivor statements and the arguments made by counsel. These statements and the judge’s assessment of harm formed part of sentencing. The material does not justify identifying people behind trial pseudonyms or reproducing details unrelated to the legal issues.
Williams’s public messages repeatedly credited survivor participation. That is a documented feature of his public role. It is distinct from claiming that every survivor approved the prosecution’s strategy, the scope of the charges or the length of the sentence.
Direct Appeal and Later Proceedings
The Second Circuit’s September 17, 2024 opinion lists Rohrbach as arguing for the government, with Comey, Moe, Pomerantz and Won Shin on the brief, for Williams as U.S. Attorney. The court affirmed the judgment. It rejected Maxwell’s argument that Epstein’s Florida nonprosecution agreement bound SDNY, as well as her challenges concerning limitations, the juror, the indictment and sentencing procedure.
The opinion is direct evidence of representation and outcome. It does not show Williams personally argued the appeal. Its findings concern the legal issues presented by Maxwell, not a general review of every decision taken by federal authorities in the Epstein matter.
The Supreme Court denied certiorari on October 6, 2025, in No. 24-1073. That denial left the appellate judgment undisturbed without producing a Supreme Court merits opinion. Williams had already left SDNY.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer denied Maxwell’s later Section 2255 petition on August 25, 2026. This later collateral proceeding also occurred after Williams’s tenure. Any subsequent appeal from that order requires separate checking; the order alone does not establish the absence of further litigation.
Evidence Appearances
| Record | Date and identifier | Significance | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| EFTA00080134 | October 11, 2021; two-page PDF, ending EFTA00080135 | Proposed evidence notice bearing Williams’s name as U.S. Attorney | Notice is not admission of evidence; assistants’ names are redacted in this copy |
| Document 465 | Filed November 15, 2021; relevant pp.55 to 57; final ruling page DOJ-OGR-00007108 | Court excluded the seven proposed email exhibits after argument by Moe | Does not establish a personal exclusion decision by Williams |
| Verdict statement | December 29, 2021; DOJ release 21-366 | Williams’s public reaction and acknowledgment of survivors and prosecutors | Press statement does not replace the count-specific verdict |
| Document 615 | February 24, 2022; begins DOJ-OGR-00009120 | Government opposed a new trial while consenting to a limited juror hearing | Advocacy, not a judicial finding about impartiality |
| Document 657 | April 29, 2022; begins DOJ-OGR-00010367 | Court rejected separate judgments on overlapping conspiracy counts | Does not erase the remaining convictions |
| Document 670 | June 22, 2022; archive copy begins DOJ-OGR-00010536 | Government’s sentencing request under Williams’s authority | Requested range differs from sentence imposed |
| Document 737 | June 28 hearing; transcript filed July 22, 2022 | Actual sentencing exchange, judgment and dismissal request | Hearing date differs from transcript filing date |
| Second Circuit opinion | September 17, 2024; No.22-1426 | Identifies government counsel and affirms judgment | Does not show Williams personally delivered oral argument |
These identifiers refer to selected primary records. EFTA and DOJ-OGR are archive identifiers, while docket document numbers identify filings in particular cases. They should not be treated as interchangeable. A court filing bearing the U.S. Attorney’s name is fundamentally different from a personal email between that person and Epstein.
Chronology
| Date | Event | Relation to the Epstein and Maxwell record |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Williams joined SDNY as an assistant prosecutor | Earlier career background |
| 2018 through 2021 | Led Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force | Separate specialist role before becoming office head |
| October 5, 2021 | Senate confirmed nomination | Succeeded Strauss that month |
| October 11, 2021 | Evidence notice issued under his name | Pretrial proposal later limited by the court |
| November 15, 2021 | Court ruled on disputed email exhibits | Shows distinction between proposed and admitted evidence |
| November 29, 2021 | Maxwell trial commenced | Williams headed the prosecuting office |
| December 29, 2021 | Jury returned five guilty verdicts and one acquittal | Williams issued public statement |
| February 24, 2022 | Government opposed new trial and agreed to limited hearing | Posttrial position under Williams |
| April 1, 2022 | Nathan denied juror-based new trial motion | Judicial outcome after hearing |
| April 29, 2022 | Court resolved overlapping-count issue | Final judgment would contain three convictions |
| June 22 and 28, 2022 | Sentencing submission and sentencing hearing | Thirty to fifty-five years requested; twenty imposed |
| September 17, 2024 | Second Circuit affirmed judgment | Government represented under Williams’s name |
| December 13, 2024 | Williams’s announced resignation took effect | Edward Kim to serve as acting successor |
| June 6, 2025 | Jenner & Block announced his arrival | Later private practice role |
| October 6, 2025 | Supreme Court denied review | After Williams’s departure |
| August 25, 2026 | Maxwell’s collateral petition denied | Later case update, not a Williams-era action |
Departure and Current Professional Role
Williams’s November 25, 2024 resignation announcement set his departure for 11:59 p.m. on December 13 and named Deputy U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim as the acting successor. It was a public personnel announcement, not an announcement that the Maxwell conviction or other completed cases would cease to have effect.
Jenner & Block announced his arrival on June 6, 2025. Its current profile identifies him as a partner and co-chair of both its Litigation Department and Investigations, Compliance, and Defense practice. This is the professional role verified as of October 7, 2026.
His movement into private practice supplies context for present-day references to him. It should not be confused with a continuing authority to speak for SDNY or decide the government’s current position in Maxwell’s litigation.
Related Articles
Source List
- Senate confirmation record, October 5, 2021, Garland investiture remarks and DOJ career biography and advisory appointment.
- Original Maxwell charging announcement, second superseding indictment and official case chronology.
- October 2021 evidence notice and pretrial transcript, Document 465.
- Williams verdict statement.
- Government new trial memorandum, Document 615, April 1 opinion, Document 653 and April 29 opinion, Document 657.
- Government sentencing memorandum, sentencing transcript and sentencing announcement.
- Second Circuit opinion, Supreme Court journal and August 2026 collateral-review opinion.
- DOJ resignation announcement, Jenner & Block arrival announcement and current firm profile.
- Epstein-Data evidence research, used as a lead to the October evidence notice and the actual court transcript rather than as a substitute for them.