“The Jeffrey Epstein Case Was Cold, Until a Miami Herald Reporter Got Accusers to Talk”, The New York Times

Published July 10, 2019

By Tiffany Hsu, July 9, 2019

Julie K. Brown, an investigative journalist for The Miami Herald, expected to spend the week on the same emotionally brutal endeavor she has pursued for more than two years: interviewing women who say that, as girls, they were part of a sex ring run by the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Months ago, she published a meticulously researched series of articles about a secret plea deal, engineered by a current member of President Trump’s cabinet, that helped Mr. Epstein evade federal charges related to the women’s accusations. Her work identified some 80 alleged victims and earned a slew of journalism prizes, including a George Polk Award in the category of Justice Reporting. She worked on the award-winning series with Emily Michot, a visual journalist at The Herald.

While Mr. Epstein moved about freely, reportedly building a new compound in the Virgin Islands, Ms. Brown continued to dig, accumulating enough documentation to fill a spare bedroom in her Florida home.

Things changed on Saturday, when Mr. Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey after flying in from Paris on his private jet. The Daily Beast and other news outlets reported that he faced sex trafficking charges. Law enforcement officers forced their way into his 21,000-square-foot mansion in Manhattan and found hundreds of photos of nude or partially nude young women and girls.

The charges, which federal prosecutors unsealed on Monday, accuse Mr. Epstein, 66, of orchestrating a “vast network of underage victims” involving girls as young as 14.

Ms. Brown’s articles, collected under the title Perversion of Justice, quickly resurfaced on social media. “This is what happens when a reporter refuses to give up on a story,” The Columbia Journalism Review wrote on Twitter on Monday. Geoffrey Berman, a federal prosecutor, said at a news conference that his team had been “assisted by some excellent investigative journalism.”

On Sunday, Ms. Brown, 57, and Ms. Michot, 50, flew to New York to cover the new developments. Monday was a day of running around the city, with reporting stops and an appearance on CNN. On Tuesday morning, while having breakfast in the restaurant of the hotel where she was staying in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Brown deflected praise for her work as her phone, in a pink case, buzzed repeatedly, its ringtone set to the “Sex and the City” theme song.

“The story is not about me,” Ms. Brown said, as a nearby TV screen showed Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, speaking about the case on CNN. “It’s about the victims.”

Ms. Brown was not the first journalist to report on the allegations against Mr. Epstein, who pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence. She got to work in 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump nominated Alexander Acosta to be secretary of labor. Ms. Brown knew that Mr. Acosta had handled Mr. Epstein’s prosecution while serving as the United States attorney in Miami.

“Sometimes a story deserves a new look,” she said. “There were all of these puzzle pieces that were out there, and when you put all of these puzzle pieces together, with the passage of time, there was this really damning story.”

As part of her work, Ms. Brown tried to persuade law enforcement officials and women with allegations against Mr. Epstein to speak with her. Some resisted, she said, afraid that she would focus on the more salacious elements, or that her reporting would never make it to publication. She was told the story was stale. But as she looked into the prosecution of Mr. Epstein that led to his imprisonment last decade, Ms. Brown discovered that, in 2007, Mr. Acosta led a team of federal lawyers who secretly negotiated a deal that granted the financier immunity from federal sex trafficking charges.

In February, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors had violated federal law by keeping victims in the dark about the plea deal. That same month, the Justice Department said it had opened an investigation into how Mr. Acosta’s team handled the case to see if there was “professional misconduct.” Mr. Acosta is facing calls to resign.

Ms. Brown, who grew up outside Philadelphia, said she had always been sensitive to injustice. She was often bullied in the neighborhood for being one of three children raised by a single parent. Once, when her mother was unable to pay the electricity bill, the power company came to her house and took away all the furniture, Ms. Brown said.

She left home at 16 and worked as a server, a flower delivery courier and a lampshade factory worker until she could afford to go to college. She graduated magna cum laude from Temple University in 1987 with a journalism degree. She said she felt she had to “work harder than almost anybody to get the big stories, the scoops.”

She started her career as an editor at The Pendulum, the student newspaper at Pennridge High School. While at The Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid, she wrote articles on firefighters infected with hepatitis C that helped make testing mandatory among public safety workers. In her 19-year career at The Miami Herald, she has covered hurricanes, the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting and corruption in the Florida prison system.

She has compared her work on the Epstein series to “what a cold-case detective does.” Early in the process, she received a heavily redacted police report that was more than 100 pages long and mentioned more than 100 Jane Does. She combed through the document for names and other identifying details that had not been blocked, creating spreadsheets to track her progress.\She spoke with experts in sexual trauma, including psychologists and an F.B.I. investigator. But interviewing Mr. Epstein’s accusers was still difficult, she said.

“They blame themselves,” she said of the women. “That was actually the hardest thing for me to deal with.”

At a time when regional newspapers are struggling across the country, it wasn’t always easy for Ms. Brown and Ms. Michot, who filmed much of Ms. Brown’s reporting process, to keep up with the ambitious investigation.

Ms. Michot, the only remaining female visual journalist at The Herald, said she sometimes returned from a wrenching interview with one of Mr. Epstein’s accusers and was immediately assigned to something unrelated, like a piece about the most outrageous food available at a county fair.

The two reporters tried to keep costs down by renting less-expensive rooms at Airbnbs, booking low-cost flights and occasionally not filing expenses. And they tried not to fall down any rabbit holes.

“A lot of other local journalists aren’t given the luxury of the time I had with this, even though they are the last line of defense against corruption, against taxpayer money being wasted,” said Ms. Brown, who wears a beaded bracelet that spells out “brave,” a gift given to her by an 81-year-old friend while she was in the thick of reporting. “This has helped the public see we’re not the enemy of the people.”

She added that she had spent more than $100 certifying letters to send to Mr. Epstein, his lawyers, his handlers and other people in his orbit. She tracked his flight plans and showed up at his home when she knew he was present. No one responded, she said.

In April, the lawyer and social commentator Alan Dershowitz, who helped broker Mr. Epstein’s plea deal, wrote a public letter to the administrators of the Pulitzer Prize urging them not to reward what he called “fake news and shoddy journalism.” (The series was not a finalist.)

The morning that her first article on Mr. Epstein was scheduled to be published, she brought bagels into The Herald’s newsroom. When the piece became the most-read article on the paper’s website, surpassing a story about a woman who had passed gas in a convenience store, her colleagues broke into applause.

Ms. Brown plans to continue covering Mr. Epstein and his social circle, which has included Mr. Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. Last week, amid urging by The Herald, The New York Times and other publications, a federal appeals court in New York ordered up to 2,000 pages of judicial documents about the case to be unsealed.

“This is a search for the truth,” Ms. Brown said. “This is about sexual abuse and power and people who cover it up. Sexual abuse doesn’t discriminate on political party.”

On Monday, at Mr. Epstein’s bail hearing, she got the closest she has ever been to the man she had spent years investigating. Seeing him seated before the judge in a blue prison jumpsuit, she thought he looked small.

The New York Times