Chapter 1: What recent developments in the Epstein case are being discussed?
Hey everybody, with all of this Epstein stuff that's been coming out over the holidays, it's been kind of tough to process everything and like understand what's really going on. And I assume for some of y'all, like you've been relatively new to the story and not been following it minute by minute over the past decade. And so it's a little bit head swirling.
So I wanted to bring on Julie Brown, who has been covering the Epstein case for from the jump, having written the critical story that led to his second indictment. And so I want to grab her to talk about these recent files, but also just kind of take the lens back for everybody and kind of rewind back to that period from 2015, 16, 17, 18, when the attention started to come back on to Epstein.
He had been first, he was first in front of some of the 90s, and then he first got that sweetheart deal and the aughts, and then the story comes back into focus thanks to Julie Brown and the teens. So I wanted to kind of start there and give everybody a little bit of a timeline, a little bit longer lens perspective on this, and then we get into the news as well. So
So much has been happening for Julie. She's so busy right now. I appreciate her taking the time to talk with all of us about that. I hope you enjoy it. Up next, Julie K. Brown. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Could not be more delighted to welcome to the show someone I've got to know a little bit over the past few years. She is a writer for the Miami Herald.
She wrote the Perversion of Justice series and a book on all the things related to Jeffrey Epstein. It's Julie K. Brown. How you doing, Julie?
Hi there. I'm doing good.
You know, sometimes in podcast land, you glaze the guests a little bit. You know, you want to make them feel important and seem important to the audience. So you kind of talk about their highlights. I don't know that that's necessary here for you. And your role in the Epstein Files was just so significant.
And as we were kind of looking through various things that came out, there's this one email that caught a couple of people's eye that I wanted to read about the significance of your work in that perversion of justice series at the Miami Herald.
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Chapter 2: How did Julie K. Brown's investigation impact the Epstein case?
We'll get into all the redacting. They're redacting who these emails are from and to for some reason, but it's an internal DOJ email. And one person emails to someone else, are we open on this? Can we be? Like, are we open on investigating Epstein? And then it has a link to your story. And then the person replies, yes, we're open as of today. It's on the DL for now.
And so, you know, this is a guy that had been investigated many years prior, got out, was dormant for a decade. And then you begin this series and it kind of starts this cascade, including the investigation that ends up getting him arrested. I assume you knew all that at some level, but that was pretty remarkable to see.
And I'm just wondering if you could kind of take our listeners back before we kind of get into the new stuff to that period. And like what was happening at that time that got you back into the story?
Well, there were a lot of things. Donald Trump was running for president for the first time. And I saw an article that had been written about this woman who had filed a lawsuit against him and Epstein accusing him of, you know, raping her, essentially.
This was Katie Johnson.
This is Katie Johnson's case. Yes. And. It sort of just brought it up again in my head. It wasn't like I said, oh, I'm going to investigate the Katie Johnson story. I sort of thought, I remember reading about this guy and that he had sexually assaulted all these underage girls in Palm Beach. And whatever happened to this guy? I mean, it seems like he's still out there.
And so I just started sort of looking into, you know, what had happened. And it just seemed... You know, like, why did this guy get away with this? If he raped all these girls and there seemed to be just tons of information and court records that showed that they had a lot of evidence to convict him. So I thought, well, the only way I'm going to really...
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Chapter 3: What role does Ghislaine Maxwell play in the Epstein scandal?
understand this as an investigative reporter, instead of reading what everybody else has written about him, I wanted to look at all the raw material that they had from the very beginning and evaluate it from that perspective rather than just writing what other people had written or taken everything that had been written as being a complete record of why he got away with it or how
The crimes were committed. So it essentially was sort of a fact finding mission. You know, to me, it seemed like a cold case. Nobody was really looking at it at this period of time, even though there now was a woman that was accusing him and. The soon to be president of sexual assault. It was pretty graphic lawsuit that she had filed about what had happened.
So I thought, I'm just going to start at the beginning and find out who this guy is and how he got away with this crimes.
Yeah. And so if that's 2016, this article comes out in 2018, then there's a period of time that you, and also it's related with Alex Acosta as the person that's referenced in this initial story about who is the prosecutor in Miami gets appointed to the Department of Labor. So it's Trump and Acosta.
As I was working on this, coincidentally, he nominated Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. And by that time, of course, I knew that Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami who approved of his so-called sweetheart deal. And I thought at the time that he was maybe not even going to get confirmed because this was a pretty serious blight on his record.
And so I thought it was possible, but it just seemed like they kind of smoothed over it. He sort of used the same lines he had always used, like, you know, we didn't know there were so many victims or A lot of the victims didn't want to cooperate. I mean, there was this whole line that he had over the years about why he decided to give him this deal.
And so once again, I thought, well, wait a minute. By that time, I had gotten the police report and the state attorney files. And to me, it didn't look like that at all. It looked like they had a lot of young girls that were ready to cooperate. So I still had my day job, so to speak, because You know, we had the Parkland shooting in the midst of this.
I remember taking a break to help with that coverage. And as you know, Miami is, you know, always full of crazy news. So I'd be doing other stuff in the middle of it. But I just kept coming back to this case.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the DOJ's document release?
And so you mentioned how you knew that there had been the other young girls that accused Epstein and had been victimized by him. So then part of that like period is you're cultivating relationships with them. Right. Or with some of them.
Well, that took a long time. That was a really long process because all their names were redacted from all the files. So I didn't know who they were. So I sort of came at it about three different ways. One, I tried to contact the lawyers who represented some of them who by now were filing civil lawsuits against Epstein. Number two, I
Just did an old-fashioned spreadsheet and started finding their names just organically in the files. Whenever they were talking about redactions with the Epstein files, as you know, a lot of the victims' names weren't redacted from this batch that we just got. over the past week and a half or so. So it was the same thing back then. There were mistakes that were made with the redaction.
So I did get some names from the records themselves. And then once I got maybe five, six, seven names, I was able to figure out who their friends were through social media. And Epstein had a strange reputation. sort of obsession with girls that looked very, very young, blonde haired, petite, often blue eyed.
I mean, he had a type, so it wasn't hard to figure out when you look at who their friends were, who possibly else could have been a victim. So it was a big puzzle that I sort of had to put together.
Yeah. I remember the last time we talked about this a couple of years ago, you said that like you were, you literally wrote some of them letters to try to get them to talk like handwritten letters.
Yeah. I wrote snail mail letters. Yep. I've got to address this. And I wrote about 80 letters and I only got like two responses, but they were key. One of the girls was in my series and she was, she was, she was a wonderful young woman who very articulate and who was key to my, to my series and,
And so I'm wondering then, as you start to talk to all those, I want to get to kind of present day and what we've learned in this latest batch.
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Chapter 5: How are victims reacting to the ongoing Epstein revelations?
But I'm just curious about their perspective in all this. I assume that many of them you still talk to and communicate with and hear from. I can imagine a bunch of different things, like being sick of it, being passionate about wanting justice, not trusting anybody, feeling like it's all political. What is your near experience with the victims?
What are they thinking right now as this all is back in there?
I think it's all that. It's a range of emotions. You know, most of the ones that are pretty in contact regularly, they want justice. That's why they contact me regularly. They point things out to me that they see in the files. Or, you know, they just want to vent.
You know, it's almost like I have another source who was involved in this story from the very beginning of this case, a law enforcement source. And we talk all the time because it's almost like we were there from the beginning. And this, remember, now it's been eight years. So... And it's sort of like we're in a club, you know, that we never really asked to join, but we're in this Epstein club.
And there's very few people really that know this story, like every single document or most of the documents like I do. So there isn't a whole lot of people that are in this group that see something and will say, oh, my God, did you see this? And it will be, you know, something new or unnerving.
That's interesting. So some of the victims are like going through this like research, like reading stuff and looking for clues or looking for.
There's a couple of them that are really good investigators who spend time on the computer and look these people up and find out who who's this person. And oh, yeah, quite quite a number of them are like that really invested for obvious reasons. I mean, to some of them, I'm sure it's somewhat therapeutic.
So I want to get through what we've learned in this latest batch. The first, you're central in part of it, though. So I guess we should just cover that ground first because this was a weird one. One of the things in this latest batch of files was an American Airlines flight record from 2019 with your name on it.
Include your maiden name so you're sure that that's your flight, not another Julie Brown.
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Chapter 6: What connections exist between Epstein and political figures?
It was a flight that I had booked. OK, but it was a flight for one of the victims that I was supposed to interview. Ironically, the day after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, this whole interview was planned well before. I mean, I actually booked the record, I think, in June, but the flight was for July and it was for an interviewee, one of the victims.
You know, I could say her name because she's been out there publicly. It was for Annie Farmer, who I planned to interview. I had never interviewed her or her sister Maria, who was the first to report Epstein way back in 1996. So, you know, it was hard to see because, you know, like everything with this... document reveal by the DOJ.
It is like they put everything in a salad bowl and just threw it online. So it's hard. We still don't have the grand jury subpoena that pertains to this record that they obtained from American Airlines. The record is heavily redacted, except for, of course, my name.
And so it is a little unnerving when you see your name, especially when they have your maiden name, which you don't even use publicly, attached to a grand jury subpoena. But it appears that they sort of just sloppily did this subpoena. pertaining to some victims, I suppose. The date of this grand jury is 2010. This was a record that they were signing in 2020, which was 10 years later.
So you sort of look at it and say, what the heck were they doing here?
And do you have any sense what the heck they were doing there?
I've been talking to prosecutors today, and they said that they think that they made a mistake with saying it was from a grand jury in 2010. But what they were probably trying to do, and we don't know for sure, was that they had requestedā
All the flight records probably for Maxwell, who we could see in there as part of these records, and some of his victims with probably one of them was Annie. So her record came up and my name was attached to it because we booked the flight. We paid for the flight for her, for us to meet up with her and interview her. I mean, we really don't know for sure, but that seems to be what it is.
But again, this is a product of the fact that they are throwing stuff out there. I mean, surely this was part of a file that had the grand jury subpoenaed. next to it, right? You know, when you do a file, when you're doing something, you put a file and you say, here are all my whatever it is, and then you have everything in the file.
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Chapter 7: What are the controversies surrounding Epstein's death?
They seem to not be doing that. They're throwing out the returns of the grand jury. Who knows? It could be weeks before we get that actual subpoena because they have it somewhere else. They're throwing things online without, you know, there's been so many strange things. I That he, you know, may have written to Larry Nassar and they just put that online.
And you don't think that that was part of a file of things that they had on his death, you know, that they found in his cell, you know, but they didn't put it online like that. So you don't know whether they even investigated who wrote that letter.
Yeah, and then they come out and say it's not a real letter, but it's like that's the one thing that they're denying is real. And it's not an orderly process. No. To say the least. So the biggest picture then, and it seems like one of your takeaways is that it's a total mess.
Yeah.
But what other takeaways do you have for what we've seen so far in the latest batch of files?
Well, the question is, why is it such a mess? You could just say, well, you know, they had to do it fast, or you can make all these excuses that would provide some kind of idea why they're doing it this way. Or you could say, which a lot of the victims believe, that they're doing this on purpose. One of the ways you be transparent is you actually release the files.
And when you have something like a tip, an FBI tip, You have the paperwork that says right behind it, we verified that this is not Epstein's handwriting and this is where it was mailed and here's what we did about this tip. But they're not doing that. They're throwing stuff out there and they're doing it in such a disorganized manner that it does distract from what the real story should be.
And in this case, the real story should be whether this was a corrupt story. deal and whether this is a cover-up.
And when you're focusing on the shiny objects, such as a Larry Nassar letter, or there's like a million other examples I can give you, you're spending your time looking at that rather than what the prosecutors were doing behind the scenes to make sure that Epstein got a better deal than any other pedophile who ever committed this kind of crime has ever been given.
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Chapter 8: What future developments can we expect in the Epstein case?
It's like a reluctant one because they passed the legislation now. But you look at the files, and in addition to kind of what you're talking about, there's also ā Strange redactions, very favorable to Trump redactions, like we're redacting the picture of him and Glenn Maxwell on Steve Bannon's phone, for example.
There's another, I guess, report from some woman put forward about Trump and touching her nipples or whatever. And like Trump's name is redacted, but it wasn't in a separate file. So you can figure out who it is. And and so that is part of this. And there's a bunch of stuff that hasn't been released. Right. So how do you assess that? Right. you know, like the ongoing cover-up element of this.
That's all you can say, that it is a cover-up because they're not providing the information in a way that the public can really understand. Look, if I'm having trouble understanding what it is, the public sure as hell isn't going to be able to understand a lot of what it is. I see stuff all over the place with them saying, look at this, and they're explaining a document.
I know the document isn't what they're saying it is, but it's not their fault. They don't really understand it. all the details of this case. And the government is making it almost impossible to do that.
So what are some things we've seen that have been noteworthy? Like one thing that jumped to my eye, but again, is maybe not understanding exactly what is there, was one of the DOJ docs references 10 co-conspirators that they were looking into. Right. Massey has said that the survivors have given them the names of 20 men. So I don't know. I guess men might not be necessarily co-conspirators.
I don't know. What did you make of that revelation?
Yeah.
Well, we know that one of the men in that document, because that document, by the way, elsewhere in the record is not fully redacted. And the name in the document that is exactly the same reveals that one of the co-conspirators listed in that document is Les Wexner, who is, as we know, Jeffrey Epstein's longtime client. I mean, when I say client, I mean business. He
He was his only client for, he cleaned for a long time. So we know that one of them is Wexner. I believe a couple of them could be people who worked for Epstein in the sense that they flew his planes. So they were, you know, freeing these girls. And they could have also been a couple of the assistants who were scheduling and recruiting girls. Those assistants' names are now redacted because in
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