New York (CNN) Hundreds of people could be implicated if court documents in a 2015 defamation case between Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's alleged madam, are unsealed, a lawyer said in federal court Wednesday.

Jeffrey Epstein and alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell.

"There are hundreds of other people implicated," Jeff Pagliuca, Maxwell's attorney said, citing court filings associated with the case.

US District Judge Loretta Preska didn't issue a ruling on the unsealing of documents but asked attorneys to confer with each other to create a road map for how to proceed in the unsealing process.

The names of individuals contained in the court documents aren't known, but an anonymous John Doe, who isn't related to the Giuffre-Maxwell case but fears he could be implicated in case documents, pleaded in a Tuesday filing that non-parties to the case should be protected "against potentially life-changing, unfair and irremediable disclosures."

Unsealing references to non-parties would throw those individuals into the middle of a media "frenzy, and unfairly do irreparable harm to their privacy and reputational interests," Doe's attorneys argued in their filing, citing more than 17,000 articles regarding Epstein having been published over the past few weeks.

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