PERVERSION OF JUSTICE
The Jeffrey Epstein Story
By Julie K. Brown
If you were to ask a random sampling of adults to name the worst person in America, the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein would probably rank high on the list. In an age of intense polarization, here is one thing that everyone, left and right, radicals and moderates, fantasists and realists, can agree on.
Epstein today is so universally reviled that it is easy to forget that things were not always so. Less than a year before he died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, the self-proclaimed financier had many of the world’s richest, smartest and most powerful men on speed dial. He hopscotched the planet on his private Gulfstream. He owned an island in the Caribbean. He bankrolled pie-in-the-sky science projects, longing for immortality.
Journalists were among those who allowed themselves to be snookered. Epstein was a savvy manipulator, and many of us (including at The New York Times) were wowed by access to him and blinded by the cadre of famous men who encircled him. Too often, we viewed Epstein as a source to cultivate rather than as a predator to investigate. It was a big mistake.
Thankfully, there were exceptions. In November 2018, Julie K. Brown, a reporter at The Miami Herald, published an explosive three-part investigation into Epstein. Brown focused on how, a decade earlier, Epstein had wriggled out of a federal criminal investigation by pleading guilty to two state charges of soliciting prostitution. Florida and federal authorities, Brown reported, delivered one favor after another to the politically connected suspect and his politically connected lawyers, overruling investigators and keeping victims in the dark.
Brown’s bombshell shook prosecutors and politicians out of their yearslong stupor. Federal prosecutors in New York opened a new criminal investigation, which culminated in Epstein being arrested and charged the following summer. R. Alexander Acosta, who as the U.S. attorney in Miami had helped cut the sweetheart deal with Epstein in 2008, resigned as labor secretary.
Now, nearly two years after Epstein was found hanging in his cell in what authorities concluded was a suicide, Brown is revealing how she landed the story of a lifetime. Her book, “Perversion of Justice,” is a warts-and-all retelling of what it took to expose not just Epstein but also a badly broken justice system.
Having read the Miami Herald series, I already knew the basic plotline, but that didn’t make it any less maddening to see how Epstein’s fixers — including lawyers like Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz — worked the system to catastrophic effect.
The story of how Brown produced this exposé is at times gripping. She describes the needle-in-a-haystack search for victims. She lets us in on the advice her therapist gave as Brown tried to figure out how to connect with victims of sexual violence. She recounts the thrill of getting sources to talk and the fear that suspicious men — including an unsolicited pizza deliveryman — were surveilling her and her reporting partner, Emily Michot. At its best, “Perversion of Justice” courses with Brown’s adrenaline.
Brown deftly reconstructs the scenes involving Epstein’s victims and allows these young women — some seemingly made stronger by their ordeals, others still quaking from the terrors they endured — to speak at length and in searing, at times graphic, detail.
“I didn’t want my family to look at me in a different way,” one woman, who was 16 when Epstein lured her into his web, told Brown. “I didn’t want them to think I was a whore.” She added, “What I really wanted was my parents to come and ask me what was wrong.” The women’s haunting voices echo off the page; their narratives are devastating.
Elsewhere, however, Brown falters. She weaves her personal stories into the narration of her Epstein reporting, and the crisscrossing timelines sometimes get tangled into confusing knots. She swerves between disarming candor and eyeroll-inducing cliché. At one point Brown begins to describe her understandable disappointment when her Herald articles weren’t even shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize — truly, she was robbed — but then thinks better of it. “I was aiming for something greater than a Pulitzer: justice,” she writes.
Brown awkwardly airs grievances with her editor and other Herald colleagues. (“Editors aren’t always very good humans,” she states.) The effect is jarring, like watching someone bad-mouth a person who is standing right behind her.
Readers hoping for answers to the many questions that continue to swirl around Epstein will be disappointed. How and when did he begin his life of crime? (“It’s difficult to know,” Brown writes.) How did he get so rich? (Brown cites previous reporting that identifies some sources of Epstein’s wealth, but she doesn’t dig further.) Why did Nobel laureates and presidents and billionaires continue to associate with him? Did they know about Epstein’s crimes? Did they participate? We don’t know.
Even a simple question, clearly close to Brown’s heart, is left unanswered: Why did Acosta and his Justice Department colleagues in 2008 let Epstein off the hook? Brown’s series raised crucial questions about what seemed like back-room deals, but in the intervening years she doesn’t appear to have made headway at figuring out what actually happened behind those closed doors. Were these public officials corrupt or inept? Who called the shots? We don’t know.
We are often left instead with insinuations. Brown litters her prose with passive verbs and carefully placed adverbs that give her room to imply cause and effect without proving it. This is the type of writing that I doubt would have survived The Herald’s editing and vetting processes. By design, such scrubbing is painful for reporters, but it bolsters the credibility of the finished product.
There’s a pivotal moment in 2008 when a court in Palm Beach County needs to sign off on the state’s plea deal with Epstein and then sentence him for his crime. The judge presiding over the case had a history of rejecting plea agreements. But the day of the hearing, for reasons that Brown isn’t able to pin down, a new judge is unexpectedly assigned to handle the matter. Brown describes it as “another break for Epstein that probably was no accident.” Unless, of course, it was. Again, we don’t know.
Brown informs us early on that, to discourage his neighbors from sniffing around, “Epstein was known on at least one occasion to send a girl over to the man of the house to keep him happy — and get him to keep his wife quiet.” It’s an enticing nugget. But who is this neighbor? Did he really stay mum because Epstein bribed him with a girl? Did his wife? Brown doesn’t tell us.
A chapter toward the end of the book is titled “Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.” I was tempted to skip to the end to see what Brown had unearthed. She doesn’t have the goods to substantiate the provocative assertion. Instead, she knocks down a straw man by attacking Rolling Stone magazine for criticizing a Washington Post reporter for raising questions about the circumstances of Epstein’s death. (Got that?) “Perhaps with a new administration in the White House someone will finally examine how and why Jeffrey Epstein wound up dead,” she writes.
Another example, less important but still resonant for me, is when Brown recounts visiting The Times’s newsroom after Epstein was charged in 2019. Brown says she mentioned to Times journalists that Epstein belonged to “a secret Billionaire Boys Club.” Over the next few months, The Times published articles documenting the close ties between Epstein and very rich men, including a piece about Bill Gates. Brown asserts that “this New York Times story likely derived from my stupid slip.”
I understand why Brown thinks that to be likely, but it is not what happened. (I was the editor of the article in question. Epstein’s relationships with the rich and famous struck us as an obvious reporting target. I wasn’t aware of Brown’s visit until I read about it in her book.) I found myself wondering what other incorrect assumptions Brown made and that I had glided past, oblivious.
None of this detracts from the magnitude of Brown’s original accomplishment. Early in “Perversion of Justice” she writes that, were it not for her reporting in The Herald, “Jeffrey Epstein might still be jetting around the world abusing children and young women.” It is a touch grandiose. It is also true.
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