The Documentary Podcast

The personal correspondence, photographs and papers of the late convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein have been released to the public in stages, beginning in December 2025, after an almost unanimous vote in the US Senate.
The released files run to three and a half million documents — emails, letters, photographs, videos, financial records, flight details — all are now open to public scrutiny. Many files remain heavily redacted, but what can be read has already had repercussions globally and revealed Epstein’s web of connections to powerful figures around the world.
Abdirahim Saeed, BBC Arabic, and Luiz Fernando Toledo, BBC News Brazil, share what they found about the files related to their regions.
The Fifth Floor is at the heart of global storytelling on the BBC World Service, bringing you the best stories from journalists in the BBC's 43 language services. We're here to help you make sense of the stories making headlines around the world; to excite your curiosity and to get to grips with the facts.

Recent episodes have investigated Russia’s youth armies and how they make soldiers of Ukrainian children; featured the BBC team who were the first journalists to the site of the Nigerian school kidnappings and reflected the effects of internet blackouts in Iran, Uganda and India.

If you want to know more about Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, and the legacy of Hugo Chavez; or how Vladimir Putin’s network of deep cover spies operates; or why Donald Trump signed an executive order granting white South Africans asylum in the US, we have all those stories and more.

Imagine being dressed up for a night out with friends and being thrown out of a bar because your wheelchair is considered a fire hazard. When 18-year-old Maddie Haining was ordered to leave a nightclub in the UK it prompted a wider discussion about disability and accessibility in different countries around the world. Four wheelchair users - Maddie in the UK, Brian Muchiri in Kenya, Nadia Leila Carelse South Africa and Haleigh Rosa in the US - share some of the obstacles they have encountered when trying to socialise. Their experiences range from drunks in bars grabbing their wheelchairs to people praying for them in public. Even a simple visit to the toilet can become a problem. “I’ve encountered issues, even in a restaurant that’s accessible, where the wheelchair accessible bathroom has been used as storage,” says Haleigh Rosa, from Florida, USA.

Pastor Jane Codrington grew up in a conservative faith environment before leaving the institutional church to found We Are Church - a community for those excluded by traditional structures. Set within a quiet, gated Johannesburg neighbourhood reflecting the city’s wealth and social divides, the church brings people together to connect, belong, and celebrate community. Jane emphasises this is not a ‘queer church’- though LGBTQ members are welcome, but a space for anyone pushed to society’s edges. Some consider what she is doing blasphemous. She has faced accusations of “harbouring sin” or “leading people to hell,” alongside hostility for her radical inclusivity. Jane reflects on the personal cost of leaving the institutional church and the heartbreak she has experienced in her family. She speaks candidly about grief, doubt, and how her faith has been reshaped by both loss and radical inclusivity.

Forty years after Chernobyl, Poland aims to open its first nuclear power plant. Shortly after the disaster, only 30% of Poles supported nuclear power. In 2022, the support hit a record 75%, almost doubling just from the year before, according to public opinion polls. Poland’s nuclear revival attempts to solve several issues at once: it will make Poland more energy-independent, especially in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it will also help the country move away from coal per the EU’s climate policies. That’s according to the officials, but what do people living near the new site think about its construction? Journalist Zuza Nazaruk sets out to discover whether the ghosts of Chernobyl still haunt the areas surrounding the spot picked for the new plant.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the wonders of the natural world. In 1875 in the western Pacific, the crew of HMS Challenger discovered the Mariana Trench which turned out to be deeper than Everest is high, by two kilometres. Trenches like Mariana form when one tectonic plate slips under another and heads down and there are around fifty of them globally. While at one time some thought it was too dark and deep for life there and others wildly imagined monsters, the truth has turned out to be much more surprising.