In 2017, Julie K. Brown, a reporter for the Miami Herald, I was waiting for the response to a selection process to work in Washington Post as he watches in horror the Senate confirmation of Alex Acosta, proposed by Donald Trump as Secretary of Labor. He knew well who that guy was who, as a federal prosecutor in South Florida, agreed to bury the first trial in 2008 against a millionaire named Jeffrey Epstein, accused of abusing dozens of minors in his Palm Beach mansion. Acosta prize with a lenient deal that allowed the defendant to spend just 13 months behind bars.
Brown wondered what those victims felt, seeing the boy who had let his executioner get away with it triumph. So he proposed to his boss that he take up that story again, and he did so “as someone who resurrects an unsolved crime”, as he explained last Friday in a telephone interview. He located about 80 victims, some of whom were 13 years old when the financier attacked them. Him send He finally called to tell her they didn’t want her. “Sometimes things happen for a reason,” he recalls now.
The series of reports he published led to the derailment of Acosta’s career, the second prosecution of Epstein, and the sentencing of his employer, Ghislaine Maxwell, to 20 years in prison. Federal prosecutors in New York used this journalistic material to charge the pedophile financier in 2019, at the height of the Me Too sex trafficking movement, for events that occurred between 2002 and 2005 in Miami and New York. In August of that year, Epstein committed suicide, the medical examiner concluded, in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan where he was awaiting trial.
In recent days Brown has followed with enormous interest both the latest declassifications of documents in the case and the process that led Trump to sign a law that gives the Justice Department 30 days to publish Epstein’s files after months of refusal. “The truth is that I never thought this moment would come,” says the journalist.
Ask. Are you afraid that the Justice Department will take advantage of loopholes in that law to keep information to itself?
Answer. Absolutely. I think they will try to hide powerful men. And as they say: the cover-up is sometimes worse than the crime itself. This has been a phenomenal cover-up operation for decades. I can’t help but be skeptical.
Q. The law requires that materials be distributed in downloadable and searchable formats. What’s the first thing you think of when typing into the search engine?
R. Everyone will be looking for Trump. Maybe “Acosta”.
Q. What do you think led him to do what he did?
R. Ambition. He wanted to advance his career. He wasn’t interested in facing someone so powerful. In the end it was worse for him.
Q. It’s surprisingly absent from conversations these days…
R. It should be at the forefront. And not just him. In one of the latest leaked documents, we learned that Epstein corresponded with another prosecutor in Acosta’s office and had dinner with him in the years after the plea deal. That they have become friends seems very serious to me. There was another who continued to work for Epstein. I don’t understand why the Department of Justice didn’t investigate this further.
Q. The big question is: what is Trump hiding about Epstein?
R. I don’t know the answer. He may know a lot about the case, but not because he resisted so much; what he saw in the files or what he was told was in them. Obviously there are things you don’t want disclosed. And the more the issue gets agitated, the angrier he gets. It’s worse; people are simply more and more suspicious.
Q. Why have the powerful fallen so far done so abroad and not in the United States? I think of the former Prince Andrew, of the modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel (who committed suicide in prison in France before being tried for rape), of Peter Mandelson, British ambassador to the United States…
R. It’s a very pertinent question. Other places may have taken the case more seriously than here.
Q. Or that in the United States money can do almost anything?
R. When I wrote my series of articles, members of Congress were already calling for a more thorough investigation. The Justice Department conducted its own investigation, but held no one accountable. The only person held responsible is a woman: Ghislaine Maxwell. I hope the files that are about to come out explain why only to you.
Q. He now receives differential treatment after working with the Trump administration. Is there a chance she will be pardoned?
R. I think she thinks they’ll forgive her. You have a lot of information and the path to forgiveness is preparing.
Q. It’s the Epstein List a hoax?
R. I think it exists, but not as a specific document. There is a list of people who helped Epstein and I’m sure the FBI, at some point, listed those possible suspects.
Q. Tell me how you approached your research…
R. I knew there were many people involved, important and influential people. And I asked myself: how is it possible that a boy who abuses or rapes dozens of minors remains free? Now we know that the victims are almost 1000. I focused on the crimes for which he had already been tried. I found about 80 victims, but only a handful wanted to talk to me.
Q. Was this a known case in Florida?
R. Yes, but there’s a difference between knowing something (or believing you know something) and analyzing it thoroughly. This is what I did. I started from new information that came to light thanks to various civil lawsuits. I decided to reanalyze everything thoroughly. If he had been imprisoned for human trafficking then, as he deserved, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.
Q. This week the spotlight is on the victims. They showed up in Washington as a group of courageous women… What were they like when you started talking to them?
R. Very different. After my articles were published, Epstein was arrested again. Many of the victims met this way and became friends. Many suffered the trauma silently and alone. They formed a club that none of them wanted to be a part of. Virginia Giuffre (who committed suicide in April) was fundamental, and I miss her very much. At first they were afraid to show their faces and expose themselves as they do now; They feared how the public or their families would react. It takes a lot of courage to do what they did.
Q. Some of them said they knew the names, but were afraid to reveal them because they might be taken to court or their lives would be in danger…
R. Some of these women were trafficked and sold to other men. So obviously they know who they were trafficked to. There were other men involved. And the truth is, if you look at some of these emails, you can figure out who some of them were. I mean, there are cases where in these emails they are very careful not to reveal details, but from the way they were talking… I’m not saying they committed a crime, but it’s clear that some of those men’s lives revolved around sex. That was Epstein’s world.
Q. Reading some of this material, like the book about his fiftieth birthday, allows us to peer into a world where certain things were acceptable, that talked about being with young girls without hesitation…
R. Even if they weren’t directly involved, basically all of those people… I’m sure there are exceptions, but they all knew what Epstein was doing, and being complicit in some way, I think they encouraged it. They knew what he was doing and allowed it right under their noses. If one of those powerful people had told him “You have to stop, I’ll report you”, perhaps something would have changed. Many of the documents that are emerging date back to when he was already a known child sex offender. Think about it. And these people continued to frequent him.
Q. What did they want? Your money? His influence?
R. It was a combination of things, everyone wanted something different and he was like their problem solver. It’s not just Democrats or Republicans. He didn’t discriminate.
Q. The latest reputation to be hit was that of Larry Summers, former Harvard chancellor and member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, another in the news…
R. They brought him with them, but he’s not the only one. There were a lot of people involved. For example, Steve Bannon, who is shown to have tried to help Epstein clean up his reputation after it was revealed that he was a pedophile. Recall that Bannon is one of the inventors of the MAGA movement.
