Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Balmoral Estate in Scotland (Image: U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York)
Questions around the death of trafficker Jeffrey Epstein just got a huge boost of recognition by veteran reporter Katie Couric.
Couric welcomed dogged Epstein reporter Julie K. Brown from the Miami Herald onto her Slack videocast where the two talked about the more curious details that surround the death. Brown made it clear that she does not believe Epstein committed suicide.
Brown began with the first time that Epstein "allegedly tried to commit suicide. This was on July 23rd, and they found him unconscious in his cell."
She said that she's read through the full report and called it "worth reading." He was found unconscious, she noted. They picked him up off the floor and "he doesn't really say anything until they get him into psych, you know, the psych place that you take people who do this."
Epstein then blames his cellmate, an ex-cop who killed four people.
"Why would you put Jeffrey Epstein in a cell with someone who killed four people? He's this big Italian cop with mob connections, by the way, as I understand it," said Brown. "And so the first thing he says when he's kind of safe away from this guy is he tried to kill me."
This was two weeks before Epstein's death.
"So they're believing this killer, convicted killer," Brown said. "And they're not listening to Epstein. And to me, that's the first fail, because they should have investigated that. His lawyer asked for the video, by the way, of that incident, okay? And the Bureau of Prisons, the people at the prison, gave the lawyer's the cell video, the video camera footage from another floor, they gave him the wrong video, you know. So that's, in of itself, when you do find Epstein dead then a couple of weeks later wouldn't that make you treat it right away — even though you think it's a suicide — wouldn't you treat it as a potential suspicious death?"
The other odd thing is that only one guard saw Epstein "hanging."
"If you read the reports, it was one guard," Brown explained. "I haven't found anybody else because he was the first one in. He said he pulled Epstein down. So that's all we know is from one. That is the sole eyewitness and the sole piece of evidence because, as you said, the videotape, it's missing, right? And the other guards weren't on duty or were taking a walk or whatever. ... They weren't paying attention. And one of them was sleeping and the other one was surfing the Internet the whole time. They didn't do their checks."
She said that there are "so many odd things" that she could write a book just on the death itself because "there are so many wrong things."
Couric asked more about the cellmate, and Brown explained that, to her knowledge, the man is still in prison and hasn't been interviewed about what happened the night of Epstein's death.
"He was in a cell right below Epstein, by the way. He was in a different cell that night. Oh, the night of the death," Brown explained, noting that he is now in a prison in California and is trying to get a pardon from President Donald Trump.
"And he allegedly claims he suddenly found this suicide note in a book that he claims Epstein wrote, but nobody has seen it," said Brown.
She added that there were a lot of people who should have been interviewed after Epstein's death who never were. Those include the two corrections officers who worked that night. No one spoke to them until two years after the fact. There was also no forensic exam of the cell after the death.
"They didn't even know which ligature he used because the guard took it off and there's all this fabric all over the floor and they never identified what specific piece of fabric he allegedly used to hang himself," Brown added.
"That seems so insane, doesn't it?" Couric said.
"You know, they got accused of a crime, so they lawyered up and they weren't going to talk until they got their deferred prosecution agreement," said Brown. It wasn't until they got that they sat down with the office of the inspector general almost two years later.
It prompted Couric to wonder why Attorney General Bill Barr was so quick to get the Epstein death declared a "suicide."
Brown said that she couldn't answer it, "because to me it defies logic."
Couric encouraged Brown to write a book, noting that it's difficult for people to follow the Epstein death reports because there are so many conspiracy theories mixed in with the legitimate evidence.
Live with Katie Couric by Julie k Brown
A recording from Julie k Brown and Katie Couric's live video
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