Live Archive) Julie K. Brown: The Jeffrey Epstein Story
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The depths of the Jeffrey Epstein story may never have been known without the work of Florida investigative reporter Julie K. Brown. A reporter for the Miami Herald, Brown and her explosive reporting for the Herald helped bring Epstein to justice (before his death) while exposing the powerful people and broken system that protected him.
For many years, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's penchant for teenage girls was an open secret in the high society of Palm Beach, Florida and Manhattan. Charged in 2008 with soliciting prostitution from minors, Epstein was treated with what critics called unheard-of leniency at the time. The media virtually ignored the failures of the criminal justice system, and Epstein's friends and business partners brushed the allegations aside. But when in 2017 the U.S. attorney who approved Epstein's plea deal, Alexander Acosta, was chosen by President Trump as labor secretary, Brown was compelled to ask questions that other journalists weren't.
Despite her editor's skepticism that she could add a new dimension to a known story, Brown determined that her goal would be to track down the victims themselves. Poring over thousands of redacted court documents, traveling across the country and chasing down information in difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, Brown tracked down dozens of Epstein's victims, now young women struggling to reclaim their lives after the trauma and shame they had endured.
Brown's resulting three-part series in the Miami Herald was one of the most explosive news stories of the decade, revealing how Epstein ran a global sex trafficking pyramid scheme with impunity for years, targeting vulnerable teens, often from fractured homes, and then turning them into recruiters. The outrage led to Epstein's arrest, the disappearance and eventual arrest of his closest accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and the resignation of Acosta. The financier's mysterious suicide in a New York City jail cell prompted wild speculation about the secrets he took to the grave—and whether his death was intentional or the result of foul play.
Brown's new book, Perversion of Justice, builds on her original award-winning series, showing the power of truth, the value of local journalism and the tenacity of one woman in the face of the deep-seated corruption of powerful men. Julie Brown joins us virtually to discuss her role in the Epstein story and what it means for the media and the country.
NOTES
Brown photo by Eileen Soler.
SPEAKERS
Julie K. Brown
Investigative Reporter, Miami Herald; Author, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story; (Participating Virtually)
Robert Rosenthal
Board Member, Center for Investigative Reporting—Moderator
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📆 UPCOMING EVENTS: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events
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The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum 📣, bringing together its 20,000 members for more than 400 annual events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy.
Founded in 1903 in San Francisco California 🌉, The Commonwealth Club has played host to a diverse and distinctive array of speakers, from Teddy Roosevelt in 1911 to Hillary Clinton in 2010. Along the way, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have all given landmark speeches at the Club.
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Transcript
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Introduction
i guess i'm supposed to look at the camera
hello hi julie hi so good afternoon and
welcome everybody to this afternoon's program
at the commonwealth club my name is robert rosenthal and i'm a board member and long time
journalist and i'm now a board member at the
center for investigative reporting uh earlier in
my career i did work in philadelphia and we were
not in the same newspaper but we certainly just
reminisced about some places we loved in philly
including cheese steaks without julie's really
heroic journalistic efforts at the miami herald
we may never have known what we know today about
jeffrey epstein and while of course much remains
a mystery about epstein we know more about his
victims and the failure of the judicial system
than we ever did because of julie's reporting
based on a reporting julie's new book was
published this week perversion of justice the
jeffrey epstein's story and it's uh it reads i'm
sorry to say it's not fiction but it's true but
it reads like a novel and it's not only a story
about what it really takes to be do great
investigative restor reporting it's a story
about passion taking risks the challenges
a single mom faced doing this kind of work
uh it's a story about what's happened to the
newspaper industry in terms of its downsizing
and really it's a story about the
role of the press and a democracy and when people like julie and miami herald did
what they did it truly makes a difference so
i'm honored to be here today with julie
and i really hardly recommend this book for a mirrored reasons uh so before we jump in a quick
note about today's format i'm particularly pleased
that today represents one of the commonwealth
club's first hybrid virtual programs since the club reopened earlier this month that means that
we two things first we have a live audience here
in san francisco hi everybody and viewers
around the country watching vi via youtube
all of you no matter how you are watching can
submit questions to either julie or me if we
are watching online please post the questions in
the chat format of youtube or zoom those will be
brought to me throughout the program for on-site
questions we may use one of the microphones
and we can we go to the audience as well cards
will also be written and brought up to me so
julie uh as before we start i just want to frame
what we're going to do today and i know you've had
a lot of interviews so give you two minutes to
rest but i wanted to read from the preface in
your book because it sort of frames what
we're going to be talking about today and
i thought it would just set up what we're doing
and this is julie wrote this in the preface
this was only written a few months ago
this book as i said came out this week this is what julie wrote the jeffrey epstein's
story epitomizes our nation's lopsided system of
justice and how victims of sexual assault
especially those who are young and poor
are discarded shamed and mistreated by the
very people who are supposed to protect them
epstein got away with his crimes because nearly
every element of society allowed him to get away
with them professional legal and moral ethics
were set aside for a broken system of values
that places corporate profits personal wealth
political connections and celebrity above some
of the most sacred tenets of our faiths our
teachings in our democracy when i became a
journalist i learned that the most rewarding part
of my work was in writing injustices for those who could not fight for themselves few people seem to
recognize that fc not only beat the system but he
was probably still hunting terrorizing and abusing
young women and girls i would face many obstacles
on my path to the truth i would be attacked
by the legal forces who failed their solemos
by the defense attorneys who profited off of
epstein's crimes by some of those within my
own industry who thought that what i was doing
was nothing more than a rehash of an old story
so julie uh you've been in this business a while
and uh like every great story it has a beginning
The beginning of the story
can you take us to the point
where you first really got hooked into doing the story and also about some
of the events that already had transpired that
you may or may not have been aware of well in
late 2016 we were um i was in the middle of a
long-term investigation into florida prisons uh
but it was winding down and i really wanted to
to try to move on to something different so i you
know i had done some work in the women's prison
and i knew that sex trafficking was a real problem
in florida so i started doing some research
on sex trafficking in florida and every time i
googled those two subjects uh jeffrey epstein's
name popped up i read a column by one of our
former columnist fred grimm that really took the
criminal justice system and the prosecutors
in this case to task for how they handled it
nothing that i read seemed to make sense of it it
just here was a man who was accused of molesting
countless girls and uh you know he seemed to get
away with a slap on the wrist wrist so i just
started kind of picking away at it and looking
at it and as i was doing that um requesting
some public records uh donald trump nominated a
man by the name of alex acosta to be his label
labor secretary uh i was aware that a cop by that
time i was aware that acosta was the prosecutor
former miami prosecutor who had signed off on this
um this you know lenient plea deal for epstein so
i watched his confirmation hearings thinking he
was going to be grilled over this deal and to my
surprise hardly any of the senators really brought
much of it up and it was clear from the little
bit that they did question him about it that they
didn't understand this scope or the breadth of
this horrible um this horrible deal that acosta
had signed off on and just so frame it a little
bit because now you're talking about a period
that's uh eight years after the deal is that right
so that's crap this is laying dormant for eight
years and then you start poking at it again
now because it was one of those things
where i would read a story and i think what how did this happen and none of the stories that i
read answered how something like that could happen
so i was curious about that fact and then when
this nomination happened i thought i wonder what
the victims you know this was a crime that
happened 10 years before this would mean
that the victims were now in their late 20s
early 30s and you know the labor secretary uh
post was one with oversight of human
trafficking and child labor laws and i thought
i wonder what epstein's victims think about
um this man who had allowed their predators
essentially almost off the hook now taking over
the reins of this huge um department so real the
The hook
hook for you was empathy and compassion
and thinking about these young women and how they might be sitting there thinking about
what was going on if they're aware of what acosta
had done in terms of cutting this plea deal with
with and letting epstein basically almost walk
right and then i also saw that epstein you know
even though his crime he had already served
the short jail sentence that he had been given
many many years before having been released in
2009 he went back to his jet setting life it was
almost i realized it was almost as if he got to go
back to his normal everyday life um making money
and and hobnobbing with all these important people
and in my mind i'm thinking i bet the girls
you know who suffered this aren't living
the same lives that they had led and that
in my mind i'm thinking i you know i felt
a gut instinct that they were still probably
suffering trauma from this at this point from
the from the court filings and documents that you
were looking at because had you begun actually
you know human sourcing yet or you just were
looking and reading what you was on the record
i was just at that point just looking and reading
the documents because it was a very old case and i was looking for a hook quite frankly if
i wanted to do it you know you always have to
tell give your pitch it to your editor and you
have to have you know some kind of reason for for looking into a case that's that old and it
was just coincidental that akasa was nominated
right around the time i was poking at it number
one and and that um you know i i also saw that
there was one lawsuit a simple lawsuit that
was still lingering uh that it seemed like why
it i wondered why it was hanging on after all
these years and did you at that point know the name of any of these young women or they're
all jane doe's in the in the filings they
were all jane does so take us through okay so
you're you've got this your gut you're tingling
Dozens of cases
there's something wrong here you have a hook
in that the u.s attorney who would basically
let this guy off and in the documents you
were looking at i believe there were dozens of young women who had alleged that they had been
uh or that the detectives had found were going
to testify that they had been sexually abused by
jeffrey epstein and when they were minors is that right that's correct so you had dozens of cases
it wasn't one or two or three or four you you
and i believe the documents hinted that there
were many more that's right it seemed um
there was information in the fbi the little
bit of fbi information that we had was that
these the fbi agents who were investigating
it were interested in traveling to new york
and new mexico which were two other places where
epstein owned homes and while it didn't say why
it was clear to me that they were probably trying
to find out whether he had been abusing girls in these other places so you have a situation where
some of the people in law law enforcement probably
you're wondering where they coerced or went along
with this and probably others from your experience you know might have been outraged what steps
then you do you then take to begin finding the
human the sources who could be who did you who
did you then go look for well i reached out to
first of all i one of the other things i noticed
about it was that the uh you know as a police rep
most of my career was meant uh spent being a
police reporter crime reporter so the first
thing i thought well the police you know who
handled who was the lead detective 10 years ago
who was the police chief and in
doing my research i learned that the lead detected of the case joe ricarey had retired
and so had the police chief mike rider and uh yet
they had never spoken publicly at all about the
case the only public uh information we had were
two depositions that they had given many
many years earlier um i think in like 2010
um so these were even dated uh interviews and they
were court depositions which as you probably know
are are pretty boring documents um and uh i i set
out really first to try to get them to go on the
record so this i i hope this conversation isn't
too inside the newsroom because what i'm really
finding the victims
trying to draw out here is how one reporter one
person who's got instincts and passion and guts
and a very strong will can truly make a
difference and it applies to many things in life
so you have you then go you have a couple of
names they've never spoken on the record outside
whatever they did in a document and how do you go
about finding them and then convincing them based
on probably their own cynicism about no one's
going to do anything about this what's the process
and how long did that take well that process took
a lot longer than i expected um you know i think
my editor was getting a little antsy because
it was taking so long i was trying to explain look these victims names aren't in any of the
documents it's just going to be a painstaking
process to go through all the documents and
basically what i did was started reading everything and you know uh doing this as i said so
many years it's inevitable that they miss a name
you know or they have the first name and not the
last name or they have the first name and then
the date of birth so it was this big puzzle and i
did a spreadsheet and i would put what information
i had on each victim you know it would only be
scraps of information and from those scraps of
information um i looked at some of the uh a lot
of these women had sued epstein in the years
since this happened um of course they were all
listed as jane does but i would have to read each
of those uh lawsuits in order to get it i had a
file for jane doe juan jane o2 jane doe all the
way up to 120 something and uh so i would just
keep filling these files and i use social media
you know a lot of these uh women for example if
i found one woman on facebook uh let's just say
she was um you know jan smith i could look at her
friends on facebook and you know it's really kind
of creepy at times because epstein had a certain
kind of type he liked very um petite um blonde
hair blue eyed i mean they are they looked very
similar um so i would just basically look at their
friends who all look you know that look like that
and slowly i began to piece together uh i had a
you know i just the list just goes by now you know
that in the initial go round uh in 2005 six seven
Epsteins lawyers
when epstein was dealing with this and basically
got off very leniently he brought in lawyers
like kenneth starr and alan dershowitz you knew
you were going up against internship you know spaceship galactica galactica right did that
i mean what did that mean signal to you also
well it signaled to me that i better let our
executive editor know what i was doing uh so i
i you know knocked on um mindy's um mindy marquez
uh was our executive editor at the time and
um you know i said look uh do you have a second
i want to tell you what i'm working on and so we
just talked about the case and i told them this is
this is gonna might be a rough one because we're going up some very powerful people and he has uh
illegal arsenal that you know that potentially
would threaten to sue us and but i told
her the story and i told her about the the women and he ultimately said go for it and
you would and so this is around what point 2017
yeah really yeah and so you're you're
basically going through months and months of reading documents trying to figure out
how to find these jane doe's getting sources
mccarty ritter the the former law enforcement
the the chief and this is in palm beach again
uh to try and speak to you and
that's months of work is that right yeah tracking down the women was the most time
consuming and trying to get them to talk was
the most time-consuming part of it so let me
let me ask you a question because you know in the book you you weave in uh something
that i found really interesting and surprising
Julies upbringing
uh your own story you know your family comes
in you're a single mom your kids become almost
second you know characters uh and you also
talk about your own upbringing did did you
were you conscious of the fact that there was
something in there that did you ever think i could have been one of these girls you know i didn't i
wasn't conscious of it when i started the project
at all i didn't become conscious of it until i
started interviewing women and especially uh you
know i interviewed a couple of their moms and
the stories that their moms told me reminded me
used of my own mother you know in the struggle she
had as a single mom and you know quite frankly i
you know i had a tough growing up and i had
put it out of my head it was sort of like a
a reckoning of my own without me really planning
on it that way that i just started thinking about
wow i remember when my mom had to you know work
two jobs she was a waitress part-time and she
wasn't home a whole lot and you know we
were left we were latchkey kids you know and
you know you know as i said it slowly dawned on
me that i had a lot in common with these women
but i didn't do this story for that reason
i just you know it was just it just kind of
happened that way well you know some of the best
journalists you have tremendous compassion and and
Reporting the story
and there are victims in any situation you want to
be able to tell their story and hopefully make it relevant so other people can understand what they
went through and that really came through julie
take us through i mean the reporting here and
it's hard to explain i think to a non-journalist audience that's you know i don't know how
many thousands of pages or documents you read
trying to track people down uh i know one of the
heroines in the story is the librarian i think her
name was uh yeah monica yeah she monica leia i i
felt that i feel so feel that uh librarians don't
get a lot of credit in our business and they're
very important um to what we do um the other real
heroine also was my uh partner emily michaud
who was my videographer and photographer who
uh worked on this project from with me
from the get-go and was a real uh important
uh you know it's important to un to hear this
story uh we work we put together the documentaries
as well as to see the story as much as it is to
read the story uh she made these women very um
three-dimensional and and very um you know no
one could tell the story really better than the
women themselves and these documentaries did that
well and i think i want to get to that sort of the
interview process but is was there a point in this
early reporting where you suddenly felt outrage
or but pretty much from the beginning you know
i i just couldn't i it i was outraged from the
very beginning i just couldn't understand how
someone like that could have gotten away with this uh and that's what made me want to do it because
i to be honest with you i felt like it was like
an unsolved crime that i had to solve and i
thought i knew a lot had been written about
it but as i said i don't think the answers were
really known so i set out to really solve this
mystery and you knew i think that you had to get
as many of these young women now a little older on
Getting the womens trust
the record to tell their story so can you take can
you take this yeah can you can you take us through
how you found the first couple of women and and
what you know what and what you had to do to get them their trust and i think again one of the
most difficult things a reporter a journalist
has to do is uh speak to people who've lost
something victims of something in this case
uh sexual abuse or rape is is really difficult
to win the trust and the sensitivity you need to
do that but can you just take it through through
the process and and at some of the first meetings
well i before i even met with them i i hadn't
initially i knew that this was going to be an
issue where i was going to be asking these
women whom i had never met before about the
worst time of their life and i knew that some of
them had probably never told anybody that this had
happened they were very young and i was concerned
that i was going to perhaps re-traumatize them
so i you know i spoke with some people who do
these kinds of interviews for a living to get
some insight into how to handle it and one of the
things that i concluded was that i didn't need to
force them to talk about the abuse you know the
physical abuse that it was more important that i
that i you know tell them look you don't have
to talk about this there's no question that this
happened you know epstein never denied that
he did any of this that was the other thing
he never denied he did it he once compared what he
did to uh stealing a bagel you know he just didn't
think what he did that he did anything wrong so
there was never a question that this had happened
so i didn't need for them to tell me about the
rapes um i just needed them to talk about what
it had done to them and how they you know were
treated by the criminal justice system take take
First interview with Emily
us through the first interview with with emily
and what you know what that was like and your own
well first of all the one thing i did i i started
thinking this would be like any other story you go
knock on the door and um you tell the person
that you want to interview what you want to talk to them about and then i i you know when
i did that one of the women's fathers answered
the tour and i thought oh my gosh this isn't
going to work because i can't tell her father why i'm there you know he might not even know so
i i had i did another story before that where i um
wrote the victim of a slain navy seal i wrote his
father a letter explaining what i wanted to do and
and it and the father did call me and i got an
exclusive interview with them and uh i so i wrote
60 letters you know to all the women that at that
time that i had tracked down and um included what
i wanted to do i included a couple of clips about
how epstein um had already tried to get his sex
offender registration lowered in new york so he's
trying to really weasel you know uh out of any
kind of um restrictions that were placed on him
after he got out of jail so i i wrote all these
letters and i got one woman called me um michelle
licotta who lived outside of nashville and she
confessed to me that her lawyer told her not to
call me and our lawyer told her not to talk to me
and i just had a you know a talk with her on
the phone and i told her what i wanted to do
and she said okay come and emily and i didn't
know when we set out for uh to travel to tennessee
whether she was actually gonna go through with
it because we knew she had some misgivings and um
we we sat there we interviewed her for oh gosh
it had to be at least three hours uh and it was
just extremely emotional um you know emily and i
really i think didn't really understand the depth
of the trauma that that she and and other women
had gone through she only went to epstein one
time by the way and it just with that one time it
it really almost destroyed her life and to hear
her tell and that's one of the powerful parts of
the book i mean i touched upon that and emily of
course did a brilliant job of it in the in the
documentary but you only get so many you know
minutes in a documentary and so many inches in
a story so in the book i was able to really talk
about that whole interview and you know and with
each of these women their whole story because
it's important to understand that um yes these
girls took money but they were really um misled
uh and they were really um you know why don't
you go into the detail of what the method was
Methodology
i mean i i don't want to assume everybody
understands what was happening here how how
this his system basically worked and how there was
it wasn't just jeffrey epstein there was a whole
infrastructure around him and many many people
were aware of what were going on can you just
describe that for us what was actually the
methodology yeah jeffrey epstein had a whole
ecosystem around him of people that helped him i
mean he was a guy that really didn't even tie his
own shoelaces he had uh you know he had somebody
to do everything for him and so these people
uh that were part of his uh you know his in
his his life you know or this this system
that he had built uh were you know involved
everyone from the butler who answered the door
with where these girls were to a chef who was in
the kitchen who you know made them snacks to the
women of course uh he had other young
women who arranged his schedule to the um
you know the the housekeepers who cleaned
up after you know he did these incidents and
uh the pilots who flew the jets you know where he
had two private planes uh the driver he had he had
drivers you know that they picked up the girls so
it was a whole ecosystem around him of people that
um they really aided um and helped this well also
i think the book in the book you really describe
how in some cases you the actual the first meeting
where somebody a young girl she might be a runaway
she might be in distress she's somewhere she needs
help you had it was almost as if you had you know
a wounded animal or you know i don't mean that but
just somebody and people out looking for the girls
who fit a physical description that he he sought
after i mean they were out right hunting really
that was by design i mean he could have had the
most sophisticated expensive prostitutes that
his money could buy but that's not what he wanted
he wanted scared little girls that was you know
what he wanted and he didn't even want them um one
one or two he wanted a revolving door of them all
the time you know that was part of his sickness
and uh so he like i said he he just had and then
you know the the most insidious thing part of this
of all was when these girls of course became like
you know scared and they didn't want to do it he
said oh don't worry about it you don't have to do it just bring me your friends and i'll pay you
the same amount of money so he had the girls that
he victimized didn't want to be victimized anymore
but they needed the money for whatever reason they
they were on the street or they were in a foster
home um and they just would bring go to parties
and bring their friends or bring not even people
that were their friends people that they would meet acquaintances that they met in the mall you
know or uh at the gym or wherever so he had uh
you know he had a whole legion of of recruiters
yeah and we're not even really getting into the uh
The Virgin Islands
the men in some cases the women who surrounded
him some of the most best known people politicians
businessmen uh you know corporate leaders uh who
were part of this world in some way and i guess
that's still one of the on unclear mysteries um
can you you know there's so much to go to here
uh you know and i i want to sort of try and keep
it a little bit of chronology but can you also
you know one of the things that also was quite
revelatory in the book was your exploration of the two islands in the virgin islands can you
talk about that and and sort of what was going
on there and how that was part of this world of
jeffrey epstein and his friends and what also
his method of indebting himself to local
officials and government people either
through philanthropy or donations or building
something uh this sort of almost 360 degree
system he created right well he couldn't have
picked a better place um to you know further
his crimes than this island that he bought off the
coast of saint thomas uh the only way you can get
to it is uh by helicopter or by boat um and he he
you know it's also a place where the people on st
thomas are pretty poor um and um the politicians
um you know he ingratiated himself with it with
the government officials and the politicians
uh the wife of the then governor went to work
for epstein i think she worked for him for for
many years like 10 years uh so he and then he uh
donated you know tens of thousands maybe even um
you know hundreds of thousands of dollars to uh
build schools there uh you know donated built you
know the first music school uh soccer programs i
mean you just name it it was just anything that he
could throw his money at so um inevitably you know
uh these people came to you know know him as
somebody as somewhat of a benefactor and they
you know turn their eye you know turn their heads
the other way when he was bringing in all these girls on his on his private plane he would fly
into the airport at st thomas on his private plane
and then go to a hangar you know an area that
wasn't real completely visible to everyone um
disembark with the girls and then they would
usually hop on a helicopter that was kept there
and then they they would be flown to the island
and one of the things you that you were i think
Who flew with Epstein
still looking for and maybe you're still looking
for are manifests is that right who flew on these
flights and there's also who flew around and
you've been unable to get a lot of those right in other words who he was flying with and homeland
security has blocked that is that still true
yeah because unfortunately when i started
doing this this was after my series ran and i was trying to get information on that and
i first did the public records request before
epstein's arrest i did get some of it uh but it
was heavily redacted and before i could pressure
and get anything more about it he was arrested
and then of course uh then it was an open criminal
investigation and i wasn't going to get anything
i'm told i need to just move my light a little
closer here it's getting dark here in florida
and and so let me just move my light excuse me
this is better okay how's that
a little bit better anyway
well you look good to me so i mean i can
see you but so i mean so since the uh
is that because of his death though is that
stuff now sealed or can you can anyone get at it i don't want to have anything i don't think
they're going to give us anything on that um
you know i cuz i i know he's he's
gone now but the case is still open
and theoretically i guess they're still looking
at other people besides even uh maxwell who
who is indicted and connected with
uh his his sex trafficking operation
Behind the curtain
you know one of the things to switch direction a
little bit julie in the book uh and i mentioned it earlier what was your thinking as a reporter i
mean a lot of times in traditional journalism you
sort of i'll call it behind the curtain you know
you don't get into your life your ups and downs
the challenges of being a single mom was was
that a decision you wanted to make was that
your editor your book editor can you get
into because your children as i said earlier and there's some wonderful scenes there as
a parent you know uh uh why did you do that
well my editor um i you know it was partially
my editor thought that this story um and i i
fought it actually i didn't want to do that
initially i said look i'll do this i really don't
i don't want to be in the story you know and then
as i was working on it i you know this was around
the time of you know trump um and all the things
that he was tweeting out that weren't true and uh
the the journalists being painted as the enemy of
the people and uh you know after this series ran
i was one of the biggest surprises to me was how
much um fan mail quite frankly that i got you know
journalists never get fan mail but just a lot of
um you know thank you notes from people saying
you know finally this is what journalism
is and and this is why it's important and
it occurred to me that you know journalists aren't
always very good at telling people what we do and
how we go about it we just do it and i do think
that at this time in history that it's important
that we explain to people what we do because uh
for you know because of trump and because of all things that have happened i think a good deal
of america has become distrustful of journalists
and so i i thought maybe i should tell them
what i did so they understand this isn't
you know this isn't an effort to um you know to
cover anything up this is an effort to find the
truth and that's i think what most journalists
do you know and and so i thought i'm going to
put a little bit of this in here because i just
i think it's part it's important for our country
and especially given the fact that newspapers
you know small newspapers all over this country
are disappearing you know and i
don't think the public realizes how devastating that is to our democracy that
we're losing small newspapers all over the country
well i here here i agree uh and your work
certainly shows the difference you can make
The perversion of justice
uh the you know one of the and it's it's really
complicated to get into i mean the perversion of
justice you know i is i think a perfect title
because once you get into this and you see all
the things that happen and it's probably pretty
complicated to explain it here in terms of the system and the players you talk about and some
of the stuff you had access to and explaining
decisions that were made to
protect jeffrey epstein and also one of the things we haven't talked about was the
ferocity of his attorneys going after the victims
yeah and which is appalling when you read about
it and i don't can you talk a little bit about
that and that what that did to some of these
young women in addition to the initial trauma
well just imagine you're 14 years old and you
did something horrible that you are very ashamed
of and the police find out about it and they come
and they knock on your door and they want to talk
to you and of course you got to explain to your
parents why the police are talking to you and you have to confess look i went to this guy's house
i i thought i was just giving him a massage and
here's what happened and then when that after
that happens the next thing you know you have
um you know a man that you don't even know um just
either following you or or knocking or coming into
the little you know bagel shop where you work and
and coming and your boss is standing there and
it's official looking man and he said we need to
talk to you and then it turns out it's a private investigator that's working for jeffrey epstein
and they want to sit down with you and then they
tell you look if you uh basically they tell you
if you work with us you'll be fine and if you
don't work with us then uh you're not going
to be fine and your family might not be fine
or or your father is followed and he there's
headlights in his rear view mirror and he you know
they run them off the road i mean this this was
really happening with these victims and the fact
that prosecutors knew that it was happening and
they didn't do anything to stop it uh is is just
um i don't even know what the words were for it
i was just so uh shocked have any of those people
you been held to account i know several
lost their jobs after your stories came out but in the afternoon initial go around really
nothing happened to anybody no no i you know
what the only people um really who have
paid a price in this whole thing are women
uh from the victims to um you know even the
prosecutors uh the pro and the prosecutors that
advocated for them this both the state lead state
prosecutor and the federal prosecutor were women
but um you know the cases went nowhere because
their bosses who happen to all be men um sort of
you know excuse what he did and said look these
victims aren't credible uh they're prostitutes
uh you know um it wasn't a big deal um you know
there were all these excuses that were made
yeah can you i'm getting more maybe talk about
i mean in every story there's also an editor who
Julies relationship with Casey Frank
sometimes is behind the curtain uh you your
interactions with casey frank are quite candid
and your thoughts about editors are
pretty candid i didn't take any umbrage but talk about casey frank
and the relationship you had
and how that either helped or hindered
or you know the whole back and forth well you know it's it's you know journalism it
can be very messy and especially when you have two
headstrong people i'm very headstrong and you know
i'm quite candid about myself as well i said you
know that i'm a hard person to deal with myself
uh you know i um i wasn't always you know i was an
editor at one point like not long because i wasn't
very good at it and uh i i was tough you know to
some reporters and i regret it um and so it it is
this this dynamic where you're sometimes you know
at you know at cross purposes and uh casey's been
my editor for for probably the whole almost the
entire time uh 13 years i've been at the herald
uh we are almost always on the same page with
the kind of stories that we think are important
but sometimes the way that you know i want to go
about it isn't the way that he thinks i should go
about it so and i as i said i'm pretty stubborn
and headstrong and so is he sometimes so we
clashed and um i was honest about that and um
i don't know i just i i you know in the end um
in my acknowledgements i said however you know
he we would have never had some of the
stories that we had if that didn't happen that
the same thing that made us clash i think were
the was the very thing that made our stories um
so important and so um you know i mean we just
covered all the bases because we had to we had
to come together in the end for the sake of the
story were you able to share your your fears i mean literal fears that you and emily had during
this process and what did he do to either swage
Julies fears
them or help you what what kind of did you set up
a system in case strange things happened or the knock at the door that type of thing well you know
it's funny here i had some you know i had some
weird things happen with the prison stories that
i had done i remember calling casey uh one time
you know after someone had showed up in my
apartment in the middle of the night i was pretty scared during the prison series the epstein
series i don't know for whatever reason i didn't
it i it didn't really spook me until af well after
well after the series ran and i was deep into it
so i didn't really have a reason to talk to
him about that uh emily however uh it was a
lot different than i am she she was a lot more
um paying attention to to what was going on i
was a little bit more busy about the story we're
two different personalities that way so we're a
good balance with each other but she would be
like are you crazy why would you do that you know so and the book goes into a couple of those
anecdotes about emily and i with her throwing
the furniture in front of the hotel room door
and me just falling asleep because i'm thinking
whatever emily uh i you know like i said it wasn't
until after you know we knew that it was really
serious that that that now epstein was going to be
arrested or you know the congress had asked for a
justice department investigation that's when weird
things started happening you know people showing
up uh van parked in front of emily's house around
the clock people showing up outside my apartment
which is not an easy place to to you know it's
not a place that people would be walking by you
have to go in an elevator and come up and you know
it was just odd things look i firmly believe that
um there were people that were investigating
emily and i it just they had to because uh
the case had just gotten so hot and epstein
from the beginning after the series ran
was afraid that he was going to be charged i just
know that because some people around him told me
he was worried he was going to be charged you
explained bruce springsteen's role in your work
um you know just whenever i have a lot of anxiety
i just i always turn him on and uh just listen to
him he's you know after a long day writing and uh
you know i i grew up as you you know we mentioned
earlier in philadelphia and i spent my summers at
the jersey shore and it just you know he's a great
storyteller you know he's brilliant and i think
his stories just helped make me um he comforted me
in some way and so especially when i was writing
the book i was listening i i would after a long
day of writing i just would turn on uh serious
radio and just play him the whole entire night
to the point that my kids were like rolling their
eyes like please mom do we have to really listen
to bruce springsteen again you know kind of thing
so it was it was kind of part of the you know the
fabric of my life when this story was unfolding
and you know it's a very dark story it's a very um
you know people said how did how did you do this
this is really like a uh you know you could really
get depressed doing this and i think just it
was something that helps keep me going kind of
Did Epstein kill himself
yeah it is a dark story i'm gonna get
back to darkness now uh near the end of the book one of the chapters is did
jeffrey epstein did not kill himself uh
so that's a statement and i so can you explain and
take us through either the process of using that
headline or that title chapter chapter title or is
that something you believe i this is what i think
i i used it sort of because that's what everybody
was it was sort of a thing that was all over um
you know social media and everywhere i mean
in our culture you know you turned on tv it was there and the mardi gras parade my son went
to mardi gras and they had a float of jeffrey
epstein jeffrey epstein did not commit suicide
it became this i don't know this mantra and
you know i did look at this and people
would always ask me when i was doing i was doing a lot of college talks at this time
journalism classes and people would ask me and
you know i had to be honest with myself i i
really didn't think he had he was capable of
of committing suicide by himself now could he
have um could it have been assisted suicide yes
um i i think if we want to think that that
he wanted to end it i think someone must have
helped him i just don't think he was capable i
mean and i'm not the only one that thinks this his brother thinks that his lawyers think that uh
the forensic pathologist that was at the autopsy
doesn't believe that he killed himself um you know
there are just too many strange things that happen
i mean uh he had three bones broken in his neck
and dr michael baden the forensic pathologist
at the autopsy said you rarely in in that kind of
a uh hanging have three bones broken in your neck
keep in mind the theory was that he he um did this
with the bed sheets um cutting these uh up and
then he kind of pulled himself against the bunk
he tied it to the top bunk and he would have had
to pull himself with such vote i mean there really
wasn't according to bottom enough velocity enough
room there for him to have done this and broken
three bones and you know the toiletries that were
on top of his bunk weren't even disturbed
so um and then you have two guards that
are asleep at the wheel then you have video
disappear then you find out that you know the guy that was in the cell with him was taking that
taken out just hours before this happened i mean
it's just too i you know i've done crime reporting
and especially prison deaths for a long time
and my god just tells me that that this
was not you know just a suicide that he
did by himself well the way you wrote that chapter
is certainly all these questions you're raising
are laid out in a really coherent way now there is
some there is an inquiry isn't there is or is that
the us attorney's office is supposed to be doing
something is new york on is that happening or do you have any idea new york is looking at um
you know the two corrections officers that were
on duty um already struck a plea deal so they're
quiet here we go again with everything that's
being sealed and nobody's talking about that
part of it and then there's a separate justice
department investigation by the inspector general
of the justice department that is still ongoing
i don't know why it's taking this long uh so
that's still open so you know and even if the
ruling comes out whatever that ruling is i don't
know whether the evidence will ever be made public
yeah that's the as you alluded to what what
let's you know jump more to the present now
Ginny Maxwells trial
uh because slain maxwell uh will you be covering
her trial and what do you think will be coming
out of that well um gailan maxwell is sort
of taking a page out of the jeffrey epstein
defense playbook and that she's hired some very
a team of very high powered lawyers who have
uh justice previous experience in the justice
department and uh you know they are bombarding
the prosecutors with all kinds of paperwork you
know motions and uh just anything that they can
kind of throw at the wall hoping that it's going
to um you know they're looking for uh some kind
of a loophole they're they're they're going
to inevitably argue that she was part of that
original you know in the original uh deal that
epstein struck in 2008 there was this strange
uh sort of codicil to the deal where uh he uh
his co-conspirators four of whom were named there
were four women who helped him with the schedule
uh were given immunity as well as well as some
unnamed people that we still don't know
who they were and that her lawyers will
argue that she was one of those people now
whether that'll stick uh remains to be seen
yeah i mean acosta really shows up in this again
and again and there's you know the uh justice department i mean one of the details in the book
he wrote uh did a review and basically found him
making uh guilty of poor judgment but no ethical
lapses and then there's a footnote in that report
that says that many of his emails have vanished
yeah i mean they have they didn't say anybody
else has disappeared it's not just his emails
it's his emails during the period when this
deal was done have vanished so you know i guess it
wasn't like they said well he had a major loss of
all his emails it was the emails during the period
when this deal was negotiated that disappeared
Victims compensation fund
yeah so in epstein's will which he wrote a couple
of days before he was found dead right he he
listed his net worth i think what he's 578 million
now i think you said in the end of the book and
these numbers may have changed that a victim's
compensation fund was created and that i think
you said 175 women have filed claims as alleged
victims and so forth 67 million has been paid out
so those women you were aware of or what's
the process there can you talk about that
well we don't really know a lot about
them but i know some of the lawyers who represented them and these are women
some of whom by the way um um have said that
epstein essentially trafficked them out
to some of these important men but they
are afraid to come forward i mean you look
at someone like alan dershowitz who has
attacked the woman that was um that accused
him uh for years i mean he has sued her he has
i mean he has made her life really uh miserable
and i even got to her when this was happening
i even got um emails and a couple of phone calls
from some people who knew alan dershowitz and said
that they would never say anything about what they
know because they're we're afraid of him you know
and that's what these women's uh these attorneys
who represent some of these women said that they
they're never going to go public because
they're too afraid of what the men uh will put them through you know when you
read the book the list of men who allegedly
were involved here is fairly astonishing uh
and the denial is everywhere and then also
what seems to be some very strong
evidence from some of these women and also the pattern the pattern is there
it's not like necessarily even one-offs
i mean you really establish patterns here
which you must have seen in the reporting
yes i you know it took a while to put a lot of it
together because not all of it was in one place
you know there were different um you know
there was a state investigation the federal investigation and the fbi report then the
civil lawsuits and so there were a lot of
different pieces and and i think that that's
another thing um another piece of that that i
kind of put together in this book because you know
when you're when you're doing a piece like this there's so much information and you can't always
put it everything in the story so this kind of
delves more into some of those details
that i could include in the original story
Final thoughts
you know for you do you do you feel like you're
done with this or are you look you still want
to be engaged i mean now you're i guess you're
starting a book tour or at least a virtual book tour you i'm sure you're exhausted uh you know you
know i want to see it through uh but i i'm also
mindful you know one of the other things i talk
about in this book is how i was on other stories what you know some people said well it must be
nice to do that nothing else well that's not how
it worked i i was doing the parkland uh shootings
i was doing the shooting at the fort lauderdale
airport i was covering other things when this
happened and you know we just unfortunately had
this horrible tragedy here in surfside and um you
know when we're you know when you work for a paper
you know a smaller paper you just don't have the
luxury of just going off on one thing i probably
have a little bit more of that luxury than other
reporters but um you know you you really have to
to to join in on the coverage you just have
to yeah i'll give you for the audience some
context you know 20 years ago or so julie
would have been what they called detached
just to work on this and had the freedom to do it
but these days those newsrooms are about probably
the fifth of what they were so sometimes it's
all hands in even on when she's in the middle of a huge and important story like this so
again i just think it's uh speaks volumes about
your persistence and your work ethic and
your determination uh to do this and i you
know i know what how difficult that is and i
respect the hell out of it um you know there's
some here's a question from the audience uh
and you've touched on it a couple of times
but what are some of the questions
remaining mysteries you know about what jeff epstein that you wonder about and that
you have any potential hope anything will come out
the loose threads time for all that i mean uh you
know i i i think one of the things um for example
is you know didn't anybody keep track here was a
guy who who was a convicted sex offender accused
of molesting girls and he gets out of jail in 2009
and nobody's paying attention to where he's flying
his plane and who's on his plane i mean it's
just mind-boggling to me does anybody watch these
people when they get out you know and make sure
that they're not you know getting other girls
from you know eastern europe and bringing them to
our country it just seemed to me that he wasn't
having any problems after he got out of jail he
returned to his regular life and no one was paying any attention to him so you know that's one thing
i think should absolutely be looked at i mean why
weren't they checking his plane when he got off in
st thomas and asking those girls how old they were
yeah that that one really jumped out and i think
in the book you also show that there were there were in fact young women or girls brought from
overseas uh to new york and then the who's who
New York Mansion
can you go can you talk a little bit about
the who's who uh of the mansion in new york and also one of the details i think in one of
the hearings to not give him bail when he was
still alive was that the assistant u.s attorney
described how in the manhattan mansion they were
they found hundreds of thousands not thousands
hundreds of thousands of photographs of semi-nude
you know 13 14 15 year old girls and i don't know
what that indicated and also a trove of diamonds
you know it is safe i mean uh but what i mean
the new york mansion also i mean well we know
you write about some of the people who went there
including bill gates and i think you know other elected officials prince andrew and um you know um
you know and the people that flew on his plane you
know bill clinton um trump flew on his plane um
you know all these people were in and out of uh
you know his life over this time period when he
was involved with this sex trafficking operation
um you know the victims some of them have
accused some of the men of being involved
um of course we you know this is a crime that
you know doesn't really have any witnesses you
know when you're in a room with a man doing
this to you there's really nobody there
to cooperate it except for of course epstein
who's gone now and um you know there's been
a lot of talk of videos whether whether he had
videos um you know compromise on some of these men
i mean we really don't know for sure i've heard
different things from different people uh but
you know it makes you wonder whether anybody
else is really going to be held accountable
are you still getting tips and leads on this from
people out of the blue yes i just got a couple
this week because the book is getting some press
and i'm hearing from people saying you know call
me i i know this so i'll call them all and you
know see if any there's any truth to to you know
their tips um usually as you know when you have a
story like this you know i would say 80 90 percent
of them are are not good good information but
you if you get one or two percent that that make
a difference one of the tips that i did get after
this series ran was the one about the saint thomas airport um an air traffic controller had called
me or a friend i should clarify it was a friend of
an air traffic controller who told him that this
air traffic controller had seen him disembark his
plane with a bunch of girls well talking about
sources you you write a chapter there about a couple of really sketch characters uh patrick
kessler and mark dugan i mean those two i mean
what do you make of that i mean it was almost
like they were planted or they were just what do you think i i just had to include it
because the story is so bizarre it's almost like
if you did a movie about it you wouldn't believe
that these characters actually existed but they really did and you know the new york times did a
whole um you know story about the patrick kessler
which i knew about it as it was unfolding but you
know quite a few people told me that they thought
he was a phony so i just kept thinking uh you
know why is the new york times still pursuing it
because everything i was hearing anything tell us
a little detail about what that what he was up to
he claimed that he had video that somehow he had
gotten a hold of these uh long lost epstein video
that he had uh either helped epstein i'm trying
to remember the details but he had helped epstein
catalog them or hide them or something to that
effect uh the name he was you know a made-up name
uh he he basically uh showed some of the stills
from the video he had to uh two of the lawyers
that represented uh virginia dufrese who's
uh one of the uh victims and it implied that
you know that this was finally evidence against
some of these famous men and it was these videos
of some of these famous men uh that were allegedly
involved and ultimately he never produced it the
lawyers wanted to authenticate the videos that
he claimed he had and he never produced them
and he just disappeared so you know you know the
thought was that he it was just a phony you know
and you have several characters throughout the
book who raise allegations disappear and i it's
almost you i think a couple of times you say that
it was almost could have been entrapment also from
from right lawyers i suspect that they
were trying to crap um david boyes who um
you know represented virginia and was the nemesis
and remains the nemesis of alan dershowitz who
you know right after that happened he filed a
motion in his court case against virginia that you
know involving this patrick kessler thing about
how boys had tried to you know use this somehow
uh to blackmail him or others which was really uh
my research and my you know interview showed that
was not the case i was talking to david boyes
while this was happening and david was telling me the guy is a fake so um you know it's just i
think just the whole story is filled with these
characters and these connections and in
the middle of it all are these women that
that really have never found justice and that's
the sad part about this yeah i think there are
uh actually some hero lawyers as well or who
did the right thing i mean we didn't really
talk about brad edwards who i think was really
crucial to this in terms of the civil suit
cases he filed and hopefully the reader people
will read the book and learn that but i do want to end and we're getting near the end uh a couple of
questions near the end of the book you talk about
the reckoning that's the chapter and in that some
of the young women actually it's not that they're
they find retribution or whatever
but or even healing but they're they're given an opportunity can you talk
about that and that scene in that courtroom
yeah it was right after epstein um died
and uh they were gonna it was just a
you know normally this kind of hearing is just
a formality it was to just for the judge to drop the case essentially there was no more case
because he had died but the judge wanted to give
the women an opportunity to say their peace
to speak about what had happened to them so
quite a number of them showed up for this
hearing and the first thing you notice is they were very still very similar in the way they
carried themselves and they looked they were you
know you could tell they had model postures and
they uh they were very slim and most of them
were blonde and um so it was like you could tell
because they were all looked alike and i think
that you know i i you know quite frankly i went
to the ladies room one time and i could hear them talking to each other and they're sort of saying
yeah i remember you do you remember this and uh
they had this they were starting to form this
bond they had been through something so horrible
together and some of them had never met each other
before but they knew some of the same women or
they knew um maxwell or they knew uh people that
were in that orbit that had um answered the door
or helped schedule them so they were finding this
common ground that was and they were using it to
to support each other and yeah and that day in
court they were actually able to testify to what
had happened to them not in the specific detail of
the an act but just the process in who they were brought to him that they were victims they were
testifying as victims really for the first time
and i think in the courtroom there
were dozens that day and only a few ended up testifying is that right that's right um
well there were quite a number who who spoke out
they not all of them wanted to identify themselves
which is understandable it was very emotional
you know some of them and i go into this in my
book some of the stories that they told were were horrendous you know about how they were
taken advantage of i'm not just talking about
sexually but mentally the mental aspect
of this is is just as important almost
almost as important a component of what
he did he he mentally manipulated them
well as a society now we're hearing more and
more about this unfortunately and uh we this
is the last question julie i know you've been
going all day and it's evening in miami uh
is there going to be a movie and who's going to
play you oh gosh i i there's going to be a um
hbo uh adam mckay the director um is working on a
uh series a limited series for hbo about it and uh
i'm helping with the the script i'm being
interviewed all the time by the screenwriter and
uh we always joke on who's gonna play me and
i i just you know uh you know i don't know
you know i guess um maybe you have a
new career on the on the big screen i don't think so i don't think so i'm not
very uh articulate as you can tell from this
interview i'm oh you've been great well we're
going to end it now and i i really truly want
to thank you for your work uh you've made a
big difference uh you've had a great career and i'm sure there's a lot ahead of you and you've
overcome your persistence in overcoming obstacles
as i said is inspirational uh for a lot
of people and journalists especially
we could have gone much longer and i just
recommend the book for anybody and i want to thank you for joining us today for
this really important conversation
i want to thank our audience here in san
francisco and online around the country the program today will be available as a
video and podcast on the club's website
www.commonwealthclub and i'm robert rosenthal
and now this meeting of the commonwealth club
the place where you're in the know is
adjourned have a good evening see ya
so
bye
Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California
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