She Exposed Epstein, and Shares MAGA’s Anger

The reporter who took down Jeffrey Epstein on what’s still hidden.

Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Julie K. Brown: Thank you.

Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.

I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I’m really hoping that together we can walk through the story — the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein the man became Jeffrey Epstein the mythic villain of the early 21st century. I want to start in the middle for him or maybe near the end for him but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you as a journalist to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?

Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.

But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.

So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)

So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)

Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?

Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.

It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)

Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.

Brown: That’s correct.

Douthat: And how long was his sentence?

Brown: Eighteen months.

Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)

Douthat: So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback, and I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it’s the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it’s an example of how Epstein’s story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists.

So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.

How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?

Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.

Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.

Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.

In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?

Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)

Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?

Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.

He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.

He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——

Douthat: Humored him.

Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)

Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.

What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?

Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.

So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.

Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?

Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.

Douthat: Very  suspicious circumstances on a boat.

Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.

Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.

Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.

You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?

Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.

So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.

Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.

Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?

Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.

Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.

Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.

Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)

Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)

So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.

Brown: That’s correct.

Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.

Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.

It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——

Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.

Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.

Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.

Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.

We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.

Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?

Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.

He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.

This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)

Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?

Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.

Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?

Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)

Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.

First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)

Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.

Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.

Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)

Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.

My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.

Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?

Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.

It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.

Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.

Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——

Brown: That’s correct.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; @JudiciaryDems/X via:
[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.]