Crime reporter Julie K. Brown, who exposed decades-long abuse of underage girls by convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, says Epstein did not orchestrate his massive crimes without help from a legion of powerful, monied accomplices.
“Let me be clear,” Brown told New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat. “Epstein did not do this all by himself. He barely tied his shoes by himself. He had butlers and assistants doing everything for him, including the compiling of his contact lists, his musical playlists. He had people doing that for him. His computers — he had lots of people helping him. So he did not do this alone. There were other people helping him. And there were other men who sent some of these women [for abuse], too.”
Epstein was actually tried twice for crimes connected to his abuse of minors, but his first trial ended with a guilty plea of only two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor. Brown said he got a mere eighteen months for conducted a massive network designed and operated for recruiting and having sex with minors and passing those same minors off to other powerful men for additional abuse.
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But Epstein, she added, “had a lot of resources, both financially and politically.”
He cultivated people on both sides of the political aisle — and people across the world, really,” said Brown. “He was very wealthy, but there was no real indicator of how he made his wealth.”
Brown said he used that unexplained wealth to hire a “dream team” to save him in his first trafficking trial in Florida. This included Kenneth Starr—who prosecuted President Bill Clinton, essentially for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office, according to critics—along with attorneys Alan Dershowitz, and Jay Lefkowitz.
Epstein made a point to make sure every lawyer had ties to at least one of the prosecutors on his case.
“I mean, he even hired a lawyer that had dated one of the prosecutors. So every single lawyer had a tie to the prosecutors,” said Brown, adding that Epstein’s lawyers and the federal prosecutors “were working hand in hand really. They weren’t treating Epstein as if he was the criminal that he was.”
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But Epstein’s power extended far beyond lawyers, adds Brown. Epstein had a network of powerful people upon whom he had a handle, likely because they had incriminated themselves by involving themselves in some way with his massive trafficking network.
A cabal this size leaves countless threads to tug at, she said, yet Trump’s prosecutors aren’t pulling, and she’s not sure why.
“I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is,” Brown told the Times. “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.”
Earlier this year Trump’s appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi, teased that the administration would be releasing previously unseen information pertaining to Epstein, telling Fox News that his client list was "sitting on my desk right now to review." But Bondi tried to walk back those claims, saying that she’d meant to say Epstein's DOJ file — not his famed client list — was what was on her desk, and that there was no client list. Trump clearly endorsed the reversal, stepping in to field questions and dismiss the investigation during a press conference. This has set fire to the MAGA world, which was expecting a list containing high-ranking Democrats, as purported by MAGA generals and influencers for years.
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It’s doubly surprising, said Brown, that the administration is treating this as “a political issue” and not as it should be treated: A crime.
“And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper,” Brown said.
Read or hear the full New York Times interview at this link.