The Epstein Files Reveal What Trump Knew
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If the Jeffrey Epstein case has a leading reporter on the national scene, her name is Julie K. Brown. An investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, Brown has interviewed dozens of Epstein’s victims and has meticulously anatomized how Epstein managed to win preposterously favorable treatment in the courts. Brown’s reporting on Epstein is credited with reopening the 2008 case against him. Her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” was published in 2021.
The millions of documents recently (and chaotically) released by the Department of Justice have left Americans reading myriad e-mails and text messages that seem to describe, in their aggregate, a range of élites eager to curry favor with a criminal beyond the imaginings of the police blotter or the Marquis de Sade. The dreadful cast includes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, as well as various Wall Street wizards and real-estate magnates. And yet Brown’s main focus is on the names that fewer people know: the many girls and women who were treated for years with such cruelty.
When I spoke with Brown last week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, she was just about to publish an article in the Herald about President Trump’s telephone call to the Palm Beach police chief around the time of Epstein’s arrest in 2006. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Julie, as somebody who is almost single-handedly responsible for thrusting this terrible subject into the light, what does it feel like to see this gigantic onslaught of files after all this time?
Well, I wish I could say it was somewhat satisfying to finally see some truth in this, but the way that this is being handled right now by the Administration is very chaotic and messy. And it’s very hard to figure out what’s what when half a document is redacted, when the recipients and the person who sent the document are redacted. So I think in some ways this raises more questions and makes the public more distrustful. It was supposed to be an act of transparency. And I don’t see it as that, quite frankly.
Would you say that the release of these documents is purposeful, or chaotic on purpose, or chaotic because of a chaotic Administration?
I think it’s both [purposeful and chaotic]. I actually think part of it was done on purpose because it’s sort of what this Administration does: distract, try to take people’s minds off of things, confuse. So, I think part of it is purposeful. But from what I’ve read so far I also think that it also has to be a reflection of the fact that the Justice Department has never really organized themselves well enough to figure out how to go about this investigation. It is so massive. And I think that it was just something that they just never got a handle on to begin with.
How many documents are there?
They’re saying six million, because they released three million and they say that there are two to three million documents left. Remember, though, part of this is a lot of repetition—some of these documents, you see multiple times. But the other interesting thing is: We haven’t seen any of Epstein’s e-mails from around the time that he was buddies with Trump. Not that Trump used e-mail, but that was when Trump was in his orbit, so to speak. So we’re not getting any view of what was going on during that time period, which would’ve been, like, the early two-thousands.
Well, let’s start with what we know about the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. What is Trump saying it was, and what’s the reality? What are we learning?
Trump has said that he really wasn’t as good of friends with him, that he had a falling out with him, that they had some events together—he was at Mar-a-Lago at some events, but he’s downplayed that, I think it’s fair to say. From what we have seen, they were much closer—certainly much closer than I thought they were when I did this story originally. I think we’re getting new information that shows that maybe they were closer, but we don’t find any evidence thus far that he was involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.
Can you be a little bit more specific about the relationship, what it consisted of?
Well, I think that they were sort of competitors, in a way. They were both very wealthy, connected men, and I think they competed. We know that there was this real-estate deal in the early two-thousands in Palm Beach, and then Trump jumped on it, and it ended up in a bidding war, and Trump won. And then he sold the property—it was this massive mansion—for oodles and oodles of money. Of course, Epstein was really mad about that. So I think Trump wanted to show off his wealth to Epstein, and Epstein wanted to show off his wealth.
That’s a situation of rich guys, whose is bigger, et cetera.
Yes.
What about their social relationship? And they seem to bond—to put this delicately—over the question of women.
Yes. They definitely did. Trump did an interview saying that [Epstein] likes women and he really likes them young. And so that was the same way they competed over money. They were also, I think, to some degree, competing over their prowess with women.
How did Trump feel about him liking them young? Was he repulsed? Was he jealous? What was his attitude toward that?
He would say he was repulsed, I think, but I think the culture at the time—it probably wasn’t as frowned upon. Not that being with an underage girl is ever something that you shouldn’t frown upon. But it was a different time, and I think that when an underage girl showed up or was in their midst it wasn’t a case where they kicked her out. They were probably just amused by it, and Epstein more so.
What specifically have you been able to look at that surprises you, in all the documents that have come your way? What have you found out?
That this is a lot bigger, and it spans the globe more so than I ever thought before. And I say this because even from my early reporting I had spoken to investigators who looked into Epstein who said that he had recruiters, for example, and scouts in other countries to get him women. We are now seeing from some of these e-mails that he had not just a couple scouts. I mean, he had scouts, it seems like, in almost every country.
What does that mean? He had people looking out for teen-age girls to bring to the United States?
Yes. And he hired lawyers, by the way, who did their visas to get them over here. Or work permits. I mean, he used his modelling agency as a way to get them over here, but it was clear that they were not just here to do modelling. In my original reporting, I reported that there was a bookkeeper for that modelling agency who did a deposition, and she said that that was not what this was about—that there were these so-called parties and events that were held that they would send models to, essentially, to have sex.
You’re publishing a story that has implications for the President of the United States where the Epstein case is concerned. What does it say?
We have found a document in these files that is an interview that the police chief of Palm Beach gave to the F.B.I. And in that interview the police chief, Michael Reiter, told the F.B.I. that back when Epstein’s case had first come to the attention of the police, and Epstein was first reported as a suspect in doing this—
What’s the year?
Around 2006. Around that time period, Trump called the police chief and he said to the police chief, “Thank God you’re doing something about him, because . . .” And I’m just quoting off the top of my head. I don’t have the document in front of me, but he said, “Thank God—everybody knew this.” He also knew about [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s role [as Epstein’s associate], calling her “evil.” We have this F.B.I. report of this interview that the chief gave to the F.B.I. where he is recalling this conversation that he had with Trump many, many years ago about Epstein. So it does raise some questions about how much Trump knew—whether he knew the extent of Epstein’s crimes.
So, in 2006, Donald Trump has what kind of communication with the police chief?
He called the police chief on the phone.
And there’s paper on that?
There is. There’s an F.B.I. report. It’s an interview that the police chief gave to the F.B.I.
So what does that suggest to you about Trump—that he was doing the right thing or that he was complicit in some way?
I think people are going to look at it one of two ways: A) that he was somewhat of an informant for the police, in that he called them after this case became active and he became aware of it, and admitted, “Wait a minute, I know he was doing this.”
Or you could look at it another way, in that he was also one of those people who knew, and really didn’t go to the police before then to tell them what he was doing. The police were sort of hearing that there were things happening at Epstein’s mansion well before this, but, every time they went to investigate, all the women who were coming and going who they saw on the street and stopped were of age. So they couldn’t find any evidence that a real crime was being committed. But if in fact Trump knew that there were some crimes being committed against underage girls, and he knew about it and didn’t tell them ahead of time, I guess people will look at that from a different vantage point, in that he should have told the police sooner.
Your sources are not just law enforcement; you’ve talked to a lot of survivors. How are they reacting to these documents?
Well, they’re disturbed and very upset because their names are still in there. I mean, the F.B.I. had only one job here, and that was to take out the victims’ names, and their names are sprinkled throughout these documents. So they’re quite irate about the fact that they have so many redactions of people—other people—but yet many of the victims’ names are still in these public documents.
Julie, as you know, initially there were a lot of voices in MAGA demanding that these be released. You had the Attorney General saying, The report’s just on my desk, and I’m going through it. And then there was a delay. What do you know about the dynamics of why these things were finally released? Because Donald Trump himself does not seem thrilled about it.
I just think that it got to be such a big story. And, as you know, there’s been sort of a crack in the MAGA movement pertaining to this story. And you have people like Joe Rogan saying, “Why aren’t they releasing it?” It just became this battle cry for people. In some ways, this is the one thing that America agrees on: that these files should be made public. So I just think that it was something that they could not stop from happening without there being an even bigger crack in MAGA.
What are the stakes for Donald Trump? Trump says he wants the country to move on from this story, but, as you report, Trump is on an F.B.I. list of people suspected of possible wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The D.O.J. says that there is no credible evidence to pursue. So where are we?
Well, I think that they should pursue everybody. That’s all the victims want. They want a credible investigation, and they’re not seeing it. And, quite frankly, thus far, I haven’t seen it. Because you can say that someone’s not credible, but there have to be some kind of notes. There has to be a report. There has to be some evidence that they went and talked to these people. Or if they couldn’t talk to them, why? And we’re not seeing that. And I think that’s part of the problem here. The government can say all they want, “There’s no credible evidence, nothing to see here, nothing more to investigate.” But this case from the beginning has been a thorn in the Justice Department’s side, because the public doesn’t trust that they did what they were supposed to do—that the investigators were thorough.
One of the people in Donald Trump’s orbit, in his Cabinet, who comes up a lot in the new documents is the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. Tell me about that.
He was a next-door neighbor, as I understand it, to Epstein, in New York. And it sounds like he had been invited with his wife to Epstein’s mansion. He mentioned in an interview that he felt creepy when he got into the mansion. I don’t know if you’ve seen photographs of this mansion, but there are some creepy aspects to it: photographs on the wall, paintings, eyeballs, just very weird things in his house. And so he said, after he had that brief tour, he felt like, “This is horrible. I don’t want anything to do with this man again.” And he said this publicly, and then we found documents in these files that showed that not only did he continue to communicate with him after this allegedly happened but that he even got an invite to the island and took his family to Epstein’s island. So you have to wonder, why he would—
This is where I have to stop you. And you have no reason to know the answer, but I have to bring it up. Why would you bring your family to Epstein’s island? There are a lot of islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere. You can take your family anywhere on vacation when you have the money that Howard Lutnick has. Why would you bring your children there?
I can’t answer it. There were plenty of other people in that category, too, that brought their families there.
Not exactly Disneyland.
No. I can’t really answer that question.
Julie, I want to play you a clip of the congressman Ted Lieu, from Southern California, speaking on February 3rd:
Why are Republicans so interested in Bill, Hillary Clinton? It’s because they’re trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children; of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage the press to go look at these allegations, and I’m highly disturbed that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got the law wrong. Yesterday, he said, essentially, that it is not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, that’s actually not correct. If Jeffrey Epstein was human-trafficking minors for these sex parties and you show up and patronize the establishment at that party? Yes, you’re guilty, because patronizing is part of the law, the federal sex-trafficking law. So Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got that wrong, which maybe explains why they aren’t investigating all these folks, including Donald Trump.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with Lieu mentioning allegations of Donald Trump raping and threatening to kill children. What is he talking about?
Well, when the F.B.I. arrested Epstein in 2019, they put out a big call. They wanted more victims to come forward. So they put out this 800-number tip line that you can call for the F.B.I. The F.B.I. got, I want to say, hundreds of tips. And there were a couple that mentioned Trump. Now, some of them were a little bizarre—you would sort of think, no way. Eating, I don’t know, babies. Or there’s some strange ones in there that you could see were just crazy.
Who’s saying these things? Who’s making these accusations?
Well, these are people who called the tip line, like, “I have a tip on Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump . . .”
It could be any malicious lunatic out there. Let’s be very clear.
It could be. But my point is, there was one, I know, that involved a thirteen-year-old girl, where they said that she was giving Trump oral sex and she bit him, and he slapped her. This is one of the tips that came in. And what the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are saying—this tip list, by the way, they didn’t mean for it to be put out there in this tranche of documents. My point is that we can’t see whether they followed up on all these tips. And certainly they should have followed up on the ones that had names attached to them.
Well, I guess this has to stay in the category of “we’ll see later what becomes of it,” but it is worrying. One of the most shocking revelations in this document dump was how many prominent people continued to engage with Epstein after—after—he was registered as a sex offender. I’m not asking you as a psychologist or a sociologist. But how do you explain that? And what was known to the general public about his crimes at the time?
Well, that’s really a good question. You have to sort of break it down. You have to remember that when he was in Florida and he served that year, thirteen months, in jail [starting in 2008], he had pled guilty to essentially what was a prostitution-with-a-minor charge. When he came out of jail, he really mounted a P.R. campaign, hired a lot of people who can help him with his image, to point out that this was—
Like Peggy Siegal, the P.R. person.
Yeah. And he did a press release—we could see it, in the history, that he was doing all these things. Donating tons of money to all these causes, and trying to just improve his image. And when you think about it, if all you knew at the time was, “Oh, well, the charge on paper was that he solicited a minor for prostitution . . .” But, as the years wore on, by 2010, 2011, there were more than a dozen underage girls who filed civil lawsuits against him. And there was a huge lawsuit that was filed against the United States government for giving him this plea deal [in which, in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to state prosecution charges in 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office ended the federal investigation]—which, by the way, they kept secret for a whole year until he got out of jail. And that was by design, because they did not want the victims to know that they did this deal, because they knew the victims would protest. And then the judge would say, “Well, wait a minute. I’ve got twenty-five victims in court here who are protesting this. I’m not going to approve this plea deal.” So his lawyers were pretty brilliant and figured out a way to make it look like he hadn’t really committed as serious of a crime. They limited the scope of his crimes.
Julie, when you inevitably punched your own name into the search engine of these files, what did you discover?
Well, just like everything, Epstein wanted to control the narrative. And he wanted to meet with me after my series ran.
Your series ran in the Miami Herald. What was the date?
It ran November, 2018.
Did he reach out to you personally?
No.
So he never did try to meet with you?
He was advised that it probably wasn’t a good idea. His idea of doing that was—
For once, he got good advice.
Yeah, and followed it, I guess.
Yeah.
I guess.
If you had met with him, what would you have asked him?
That’s a good question that I hadn’t really thought about. I guess I would just ask him, “What were you thinking?” I mean, these were girls. Did it ever occur to you—the fact that when they were scared and when they were there and they were uncomfortable, that perhaps this . . . He did this over such a long period of time. Did it ever, at any point, cross your mind that this was not only criminal but it was just amoral? It was just like being a monster?
I have to confess that I punched my name in there, thinking it would come up zero. And there it was, multiple times—it was just articles that people had sent him, my writing about Russia, whatever it was. And then at one point my name appears on a long list assembled by a P.R. person of people you might invite to some sort of social event with, you know, two hundred other people. I never got such an invitation, I’m not worried about it—but it was a bit startling to see that. And I wonder if you think that there are people who are more implicated, who might’ve stupidly gone to a dinner and then never seen him again, who are somehow implicated, injured by this process. What do you think about that?
Yes. I definitely think that there are probably some people in that category who made a bad decision to go to an event where he was a prominent guest, or one of his dinners at his own mansion. And they went because somebody invited them and told them, for example, the Prince was going to be there. But the people in that category aren’t mentioned repeatedly in these files.
Hundreds of times.
Yeah, hundreds of times. It’s different if you just see one person you knew had dinner with them one time and you don’t see anything else in there.
What did the Biden Administration do about all this? Why did the Biden Administration sit on these documents? They had access to these files, too, didn’t they?
Definitely. And one would hope that they would’ve really pressed and continued this investigation. We don’t know that they didn’t. We don’t know that they weren’t still investigating some of this. It’s just not clear from the files whether they did or they didn’t. And the other thing to remember is: they did convict [Ghislaine] Maxwell, and she did appeal that conviction. So technically the case was still an open case. So you usually don’t open your files when you still are investigating or litigating a conviction. So that’s one excuse I guess they could use. But I do think that the Justice Department failed these survivors through almost every Presidential Administration that we’ve had. I mean, this should have been investigated throughout this time.
And now what’s really horrible about it is, as you know, when a crime is committed, especially against young people, children, as they get older, their memories fade, the evidence isn’t as readily available. The diary that maybe these girls kept when they were sixteen about this, they probably don’t have anymore. So had the prosecutors done their job back in 2007, there would’ve not only been far fewer victims here but he could have gone to prison and we wouldn’t even have this happening right now. We wouldn’t even be talking about him.
Let’s talk about the prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who arranged, let’s just put it this way, an extraordinarily lenient plea deal that Epstein made in 2008. Can he be compelled to explain how and why he made that deal? In your 2018 reporting, you speculated that the plea deal could have been linked to Epstein giving information to the government in someone else’s trial for financial crimes.
Well, I don’t think that was it, but it was something that was in the files that I felt a duty to mention—that there was an F.B.I. document that indicated that he was going to provide some kind of inside information on this case, which involved Bear Stearns, who Epstein used to work for, and it was a fraud case. And I just don’t think that Acosta would’ve fallen on his sword for a fraud case that didn’t really have anything to do with him. It would’ve been silly, quite frankly, for him to do that.
Epstein hired some of the most powerful lawyers in America. Kenneth Starr and Jay Lefkowitz were part of Kirkland & Ellis, which was a law firm that Acosta had worked for before. And it is one of the premier law firms, and both Starr and Lefkowitz were part of the Federalist Society. And Acosta’s real goal seemingly was to become a Supreme Court Justice. So if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you don’t want to piss off powerful members of the Federalist Society.
And is that an inference you’re drawing on your own, or sources with reason to know helped you to reach that conclusion or possibility?
I think both. I mean, I was told that, and then I could tell from comments that Acosta had made in the past, doing just some research on that, and just knowing how Epstein hired. I mean, he hired every single one of his attorneys for a reason, and he wanted an in. He wanted to be able to understand his adversary very well. And one way to do that would be to hire people who had contact with them one way or another.
What were Epstein’s politics, and do they matter?
Let me tell you why I don’t think it matters. Sexual assault doesn’t discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on all sides here. There was not one party or the other, and it kind of frustrates me sometimes when people try to make this into a Republican versus Democrat issue, because it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with power and money and sex. And it really didn’t matter what your political party was. There were people, as I said, on both sides here who were implicated or have been implicated.
When you look at the array of people who spent time with Epstein, who among the high and the mighty do you come out shocked at how they behaved? I mean, look at Bill Gates’s [alleged] behavior, for example. [Epstein, in a note sent to his own e-mail account, wrote that he had facilitated trysts with married women for Gates and helped him get drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls.” Gates has denied these allegations.] I don’t know the guy, but I interviewed him on this program, and he’s been in our lives in one way or another for a very long time. And call me naïve, but I was appalled.
Yeah.
Who’s on that list for you?
He’s definitely one of the people I think everybody was a little surprised at, but—
I wasn’t a little surprised. I was a lot more than that.
A lot?
Yeah.
Well, you know what? I’ve been doing this for so long, and I just know from covering, especially sexual-assault cases, a lot of men act completely different—you wouldn’t even know them when they’re among their buddies just talking about women. So in some ways there really hasn’t been a whole lot that has been surprising to me. Like I said, Gates is sort of this guy who seems like a little bit of a geek, quite frankly, so you wouldn’t . . . But you know what? A lot of these men were older men, too. So it’s almost, like, maybe a club of people that don’t normally get the girls, so to speak.
Despite all their wealth and power, they needed Epstein in some way to do what for them? To hook them up with children?
Yes. Yes. Or young women. But it’s important to understand this wasn’t Epstein going to these women and girls and saying, “I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars if you have sex with me or if you have sex with So-and-So.” That’s not what he did. He used fraudulent means, which is one of the elements of sex trafficking. In other words, he said, “I want to hire you as my assistant, and I’m going to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year,” or “I want to send you to college,” or “You’re a great artist,” or a ballerina or a model. “I know that I can get you into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” That’s how he got these women trapped and that’s how he did it. And then they got kind of enamored with him because he acted sort of like this father figure—“I’m going to change your life.” And “you can do this, that.” There are tons of e-mails between him and women in these tranches that show him talking to these women who he wants to sort of snare.
And then there are other e-mails that are clearly after he already had his way with them, or they got too old for him, where he’s saying, “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do about it. This was your choice.” There are these trajectories that you could see with some of these women—that at first he kind of gets them under his wing and makes them believe that he’s going to change their lives. Some of them fell in love with him. And then you could see in later e-mails that he’s essentially just discarding them.
Let’s talk about conspiracies. QAnon, for a long time, has been full of crazy, lurid imagery about God knows what—human sacrifice, and . . . Watching the grotesqueness of Epstein’s world laid out in these documents, one after the other, I have to think that it fuels conspiracy thinking because, in fact, the Epstein world was full of it.
Yeah. And I’ll point out another part of this that isn’t talked about much, but—some of the victims here were really damaged. He wouldn’t have been able to go after someone who had a lot of confidence and had a real life, who had a future. He purposefully targeted vulnerable girls who came from nothing, or they were homeless, or in foster care, for example. And the damage that he did to some of these girls affected them for the rest of their lives.
Those tips that we saw—they come from people who have been really traumatized. That’s why I’m saying that I don’t think you can discount all those crazy tips. I have found that some of the women who had those crazy aspects to their stories—there was still some shred of truth to what they were saying. It’s just that they were so traumatized. And this is common, by the way. I’ve talked to F.B.I. specialists who interview children, especially, who have been traumatized. Your brain is almost damaged when something like this happens to you as a child.
One of the theories that was going around a lot, as you know, Julie, was the idea that Epstein was not only trying to enrich himself all the time, and also have lots of girls underage and otherwise around him for the obvious purpose, but that he was working for some sort of foreign intelligence agency. I assume you’re discounting that.
This is how I look at that: I don’t think it’s impossible, but I haven’t seen any evidence that shows that he worked, as in was employed by, the C.I.A., or Mossad, or any other government. But I do think that he used his contacts in all these places—in Israel, in Russia, and in London, wherever he had a connection—as currency in order to enrich himself, to make money in some way.
Julie, as you go through these documents, as you make your calls, as you make your reporting rounds, what are you still looking for in this case?
I think I’m still trying to understand how he—and this is the bigger picture—how he got away with this for so long. And which people should have held him accountable along the way.
We know that there were several F.B.I. investigations into him over the years. There wasn’t just the 2007 investigation. There were subsequent investigations over the years. He was abusing a lot of young girls, and I don’t understand why they kept, sort of, closing the book on him and moving on all the time, including through the Biden Administration. It might be in the two million or three million files we haven’t seen yet, but it looks to me like they weren’t doing anything, because there would be records showing that they interviewed So-and-So, or that they got some intelligence information about one of these men who was involved.
I can see e-mails there now between Epstein and some of these men, who were clearly working for him in other countries—men and women, by the way, because he used a lot of women. A lot of the women who he abused—when he had nothing left for them and they were older and he was over them—they went to work for him and they helped find him girls. There are tons of e-mails where the woman is saying, “Will you still see me, even though I can’t bring you girls tonight?” It’s just very sad how he manipulated people, and especially girls and young women.
Is there any evidence that you credit that he did not commit suicide in jail?
Well, I don’t think he committed suicide.
You don’t?
No, I absolutely do not think he committed suicide.
What do you think happened and what’s the evidence for it?
Look, I also covered prisons for a very long time in Florida. I did a lot of stories about how crime happens in prisons. And someone who is a pedophile—when you enter that prison, from Day One, you have a target on your back. They’re the lowest people on the hierarchy of any prison—it’s almost a trophy to get rid of them. And so I think that it’s possible he could have been targeted. We also know, for example, the same thing happened with Whitey Bulger. There is a history in our federal prison system.
You’re making a supposition. You don’t have evidence [that he didn’t kill himself].
Well, what’s evidence? Evidence that the guards lied on their reports? That they reported that they made checks on him, and didn’t? Is it that all the cameras didn’t work? They never recovered the so-called noose—the piece of fabric that he allegedly used. They don’t even know which one it was. The fact that if he broke three bones in his neck, which takes a lot of force—this man was a very frail man at the end—even if he was to do that by tying himself to his bunk, every single item on that top bunk was undisturbed. If you’re pulling on a bunk with enough force to break three bones in your neck, wouldn’t you think that the items would have been sort of toppled? I mean, I could just go on and on. The reports are very odd.
He allegedly tried to commit suicide a couple weeks before this, but when he went in to tell them what had happened, when they found him on the floor, the first thing he said was, “My roommate did it to me. He tried to kill me,” and “He had been threatening me for weeks.” An ex-cop who was in jail for killing four people—that was the cellmate who you picked for Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, too many things don’t make any sense. Epstein said he tried to kill him, and then Epstein sort of changed his story and said, “I don’t remember.” But Epstein never said he tried to commit suicide. He only said that he thought that his cellmate had tried to kill him.
Julie, if you had had the opportunity to interview him in prison, what would you have asked him, or what would you have wanted to know?
I think he believed he was above the law, and I think I would have tried to get at that, and why he thought he was above the law. Who are these people who you associated with? Did anybody lead you to believe this? He would have said, “Everybody has a price,” or “I was smart because I got the right people in my corner.” And I think I would have tried to sort of get him to admit that there were other people who were in this to help him get away with these crimes—that it wasn’t just an act of nature that they decided not to go after him.
Julie, you’ve been on this story for years. You’ve spent a lot of time with people who’ve been harmed terribly by Epstein. You’ve been immersed in this, and it’s very hard to explain to civilians what being immersed in a story for year after year can be like, especially something this ugly. What mark has it left on your life?
You have to be a little driven to do this kind of work, and to keep hammering at it. I’ve hammered at it. It wasn’t just the first story. I mean, I’ve hammered at it all this time. And I think really, to be honest with you, it’s the victims—and that’s the case with almost anything that I’ve done. When I covered prisons, I remember some of those inmates who were tortured. And with this story I think about the victims all the time. I just think as if they were a friend of mine, or if it was my daughter. I just feel like they can’t all be lying. This happened, and I just feel driven by the fact that people have covered it up. They’ve covered it up. And I’m going to keep working on it until we find out why they’re covering it up, or who is covering it up. ♦