A reporter’s path to uncover the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein
“Perversion of Justice” tells two terrible stories and one uplifting one.
The terrible ones are about the appalling criminal career of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein and the efforts of countless powerful people to protect him from its consequences.
The uplifting one is about the investigative reporter who set in motion his downfall — and about how she achieved it amid a crisis in local journalism.
The author of “Perversion of Justice” is Julie Brown, a longtime reporter for the Miami Herald. Many journalists write books expanding stories they’ve covered, but one thing Brown does differently is show her methods. A basic rule of reporting is to keep yourself out of the story, but here her description of both the hard work of investigation and the perilous state of newspapers adds an important dimension to the story.
In the early 2000s, Jeffrey Epstein was already a marginal celebrity, a billionaire money manager (despite a sketchy background) who owned a huge townhouse in Manhattan, a New Mexico ranch and a private Caribbean island in addition to his Palm Beach mansion. His celebrity connections, many of them clients, included politicians as well as figures from Wall Street, show business and academia.
In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating reports that Epstein had molested and raped a number of young girls between the ages of 13 and 16. The police found almost three dozen victims whose statements, along with those of other
witnesses and supporting records, described Epstein, assisted by several women, bringing the girls to his mansion with the promise they would be paid for giving massages, which turned into sexual assaults. The girls would then be pressured to bring Epstein new victims in a twisted sexual variation on a Ponzi scheme.
Despite substantial evidence of multiple crimes, Epstein was arrested in 2006 on just two prostitution-related charges. He assembled a platoon of lawyers that included Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr.
“Ultimately,” Brown writes, “the FBI would take over the investigation. The man who would oversee the federal case was a young, rising star in the Republican Party who had ambitions to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice.”
That man, Alexander Acosta, would sign off on Epstein’s plea deal when, in 2008, he was convicted and sentenced to 13 months in the county jail. There his cell door was usually unlocked, and he was allowed daily “work release” at an office in Palm Beach — where, it was later revealed, he continued to be visited by young girls.
In 2017, when then-President Donald Trump nominated Acosta to be secretary of labor, Brown was “astonished that Epstein’s name barely came up, and that the questions Acosta was asked showed that the senators didn’t understand the gravity of what Acosta had done. He sailed through the nomination process.”
Brown had been looking for a new investigative project, and the Epstein case was it. The victims became her angle into the story. She followed leads — making phone calls, knocking on doors, sending letters — until she found more than 60 of them, including four willing to talk on the record.
The series she wrote about Epstein for the Herald was published in November 2018. A new federal investigation was opened soon after, and on July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested in New York on an array of federal sex trafficking charges. On July 12, Secretary of Labor Acosta resigned. On Aug. 10, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell.
Woven into these stories is Brown’s own, a story thousands of journalists will recognize. She is fiercely dedicated to her job, even through a decade and more of ever-contracting budgets at news operations, round-upon-round of layoffs and pay cuts, shrinking resources and intensifying competition for them.
Powerful forces conspired to let Jeffrey Epstein get away with every evil act, but a newspaper, and this book, turned over the rock they hid beneath.