Julie K. Brown Continues to Break Open the Epstein Story

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You know, this whole business of sex trafficking, pornography, the internet,

I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and I don't know the answer

to trying to reel this in.

I do know that the answer is not to take the officers that police this, you know,

from the FBI and Homeland Security and put them someplace else.

The answer is to put more people on this problem.

Hi there, everybody.

Welcome to this week's episode of the Best People Podcast.

This week's guest is to the Epstein investigation, what Woodward and Bernstein

are to the Watergate investigation.

She has blown every door open and they weren't doors that were left a jar.

They were doors that were sealed shut, covered over, papered over,

until her intrepid reporting blew them open for the victims and for the public

and now for the entire country without any further ado.

This is the Best People and this is Julie K. Brown.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

I'm such a fan and you're incredible reporting in the Miami Herald on Epstein

has changed the weather.

I mean, it has changed everything that we think and feel about the story.

And I wonder if you can just first speak personally about what that is like.

I try to stay grounded and focused, to be honest with you, if I think too much up in the

clouds that I'm not really doing my job, I want to stay focused on trying to continue

to make people understand the importance of this story.

I still think there's a segment of the public that do not understand how important

this story is in so many different ways.

So I've been trying to cover different aspects of it so that people understand

because it is a huge story and a very complicated one.

I want to go back to the beginning and sort of how you

blew open the sweetheart deal.

But I want to start with your most recent reporting because I think some of our best

visibility into how powerful people treated Jeffrey Epstein is from some of your most recent

reporting about how people, even though he was a child sex trafficker, which is the piece

that I can't get my brain around, I can't even believe I said even though ahead of it,

there were still powerful people in his circle.

How does that happen?

He was really a master manipulator.

He was very wealthy, so he dangled a lot of money out there or connections.

You know, sometimes connections are almost as important if not more important than money.

He was adept at finding someone's weak spot.

You know, I always tell this story about these victims' lawyers.

There were many of them back in the day that represented these victims.

And he wanted to meet with these lawyers personally.

He wanted to size them up.

And there was one particular lawyer who had a favorite cookie from New York.

When he appeared for this meeting with Epstein, he had a whole tray of these

cookies that Epstein found out that he loved from New York.

And I think that that kind of says a lot about what Epstein did and how he manipulated people.

He would find out everything he could about someone and then find their weak spot or their

need or how he could use their various skills to help him.

And he was just like a chess game in a lot of ways to him.

It seems to me that there's a class element that doesn't get enough attention,

that these were smart girls and women.

He seemed to pray almost exclusively on women with massive potential,

but women not from the same socioeconomic classes he and his peers were in.

And I wonder how much that played a part in his ability to sort of carry on in full view.

Like a lot of the victims will say, you know, anyone that walked in or out of the mansion

would see all these young women around like, what did they think we were there for?

Right. Well, I can relate to this because to be honest with you,

I came from that class of people.

I came from a working mother, a single working mother.

I was very smart in school, straight A's.

But when you're young and you're the product of a broken family,

your mother is always struggling.

My mother worked two or three jobs sometimes so she wasn't a home lot.

And a lot of these young women and girls were in this category.

And I think sometimes you feel lost and he was able to convince these girls

that he was going to help them in a way that their parents would probably never be able to.

In other words, for me, it was always a question of whether I was ever going to be able to go to college.

You know, my mom didn't have any money.

And so here he comes in like this white knight saying, you want to be a model?

I have connections in Victoria's secret.

You want to travel to Thailand?

I'll help you do that.

I mean, he was serving them their dreams on a silver platter.

And when you're young and impressionable like that, it's very easy to believe.

He was very believable. He was very charismatic.

He, especially in the very beginning when he was trying to sort of trap them.

He told them everything they wanted to hear.

What is your sense of how much remains unknown about his crimes and his victims?

I don't think we have a handle yet on exactly how big it is and how much it involved.

You know, initially I was a little skeptical about whether he was in intelligence, for example.

Now I'm less skeptical the more that I dig into these files, which by the way,

I'm in the most every day, hours and hours and hours.

And as you're looking for things to do with that piece, you inevitably find another piece.

And then you're off to the races on the next piece.

So there's so many pieces in here and unfortunately nobody has really put them together,

including the Justice Department and our own government agencies.

It's clear that they never explored any of these angles and that they just,

I don't know what they were doing, just throwing these documents in a file drawer somewhere

because it's just amazing to me that there's so many threads of inquiry that I don't see any evidence

that they followed.

Is it as simple as they didn't believe the women or was there something else going on?

I think that was part of it.

I think especially early on in the case, they didn't find them credible and they thought

they were really, you know, prostituting themselves, which was ridiculous because

they were 13, 14 years old, so it's absurd.

But even I think as the years went by, I think, you know, there's a lot of men in our government.

And I do think there was absolutely a bias not only on the part of failing to recognize

how serious this crime was, but also the female prosecutors in this case were also treated poorly,

I think. And their male counterparts weren't really, I think, listening to them quite frankly.

When you go through the files, are you seeing things that confirm leads you had in your original

reporting or that answer? I mean, I picture you like Carrie Matheson from Homeland, right,

with all of these different threads of the story in your head or somewhere physically.

And as some of the files have been released, that you're able to go through and pursue investigative

threads that you may have started a decade ago. I mean, can you just tell me what it's like to go

through what has been released?

It's sort of in epiphany sometimes because and it'll come from different places.

Sometimes it'll come because I stumbled upon it. But, you know, I get these tips from these

people that just send me notes on signal, you know, Michael, if you're out there, hi. I mean,

there are these people who they actually look for things for me. They're just really into it.

And I said, I think I saw this document. I don't know where I saw the hardest part is really

staying organized because you see things and then you might move on and then you think, where did

I see that? And so I do have some people that have been very helpful in helping me find some

of these documents. But it's a whole range of ways. But yes, a lot of it does trace back not

only to my initial 2018 investigation, but I subsequently did a lot of work between then and now

on the US Virgin Islands. For example, you know, they let him get away with doing this there too

when they knew what he was doing. I just recently found a document that actually

not disputed what I reported, but changed a couple of the documents have changed the way

that I thought about it back then. Can you tell us what those are? Well, one of them is the

original lead prosecutor Maria Villafagna. All the documents that we initially had from that case

were from a lawsuit. And in that lawsuit, which was filed by two victims against our government,

they were trying to prove that they broke the law by making this deal with that scene. And one of

the ways that they broke the law was that they didn't inform the victims that they were negotiating

and had done this deal. In fact, they didn't deal without ever telling them. So all the correspondence

and the emails that they had connected to that document painted these prosecutors in the light

that they were trying to hide this, you know, from the victims. And while I still believe that's

what their goal was, it portrayed the lead prosecutor Maria Villafagna in a way that she was

part of the whole conspiracy. And now that I can see some documents in here, more documents,

I can see she really did fight for those girls. So there's certain things in there. And when you

see the whole picture, it might look a little different. Another aspect of the story is Sarah

Kellen, who is a one of his assistants who arranged his schedule and had a lot of these girls come in

and subsequently they were abused. Sarah Kellen is now considered by at least later the justice

department came to realize that she herself was a victim. And if you look in there and see what

she's gone through in her life, yes, she should have never continued to do what she did. But you

look at these people in a different way when you can see the full picture. When you hear from the

women who were girls at the time, as well as the women who weren't, but who were abused and

and you hear them describe the lane Maxwell. In a lot of ways, the monstrosity of her crimes

feel like an equal or greater betrayal to the victims and survivors that she participated in the

rape and the sex acts, but that she also groomed them and spotted them and scouted them and brought

them in. How is it possible that she's getting this favorable treatment in prison that Donald

Trump's deputy attorney general goes and visits her? There are things happening around her that are

as shocking as everything that's been alleged about him. Well, let me tell you something. She knows

everything. She knows everything and she has emails and she has texts and she, you know, she's a very,

very shriek woman, very smart woman and I'm sure early on she started saving all that material

because for one thing, Epstein was starting to hang her out to dry a little bit toward the end

and I'm sure she was smart enough to start getting some material together as protection for herself.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took them this long to put her into a cushy prison. You know,

I think she really does know everything and there's a little bit of a big question mark there

about what Trump is going to do and I think depending on what he does, we'll show whether he

is implicated to be honest because I think there's a very good chance that he's going to pardon her.

What is your sense of what happened with the three missing documents that included the allegation

against Donald Trump of sexual and physical abuse against a girl who was 13 to 15 years old at the

time? Well, I have to be careful because I have sources involved in this case and they've told

me a lot about what it is, but what I will say is I think that there is still a lot of people

that want to discredit women and what people have to realize about this is when I first started

this case, the victims that I looked up now, of course, this was years later. They were in their

late 20s, early 30s, but the whole trajectory of their lives had changed after they met Epstein.

I mean, they had been subjected to a physical abuse, a couple of them were in prison,

Courtney Wilde, very vocal victim who is part of my original story. She was in prison on a drug

charge and she spent longer in jail than Jeffrey Epstein did with his sweetheart deal.

If we discount every victim who then subsequently gets involved in drugs or gets involved in some

kind of legal activity, it doesn't discount the fact two things can be right. They could still

have been sexually abused and yes, they could have a criminal record. That doesn't mean that they

weren't sexually abused especially when they were younger because most victims of sexual abuse

when they are children, they don't go public with their abuse until they're well into adulthood.

So I think it's really important for people to understand that this woman, I'm not saying what

she said about Trump is true, but what I'm saying is we don't know for sure that it's not true

just because she has some kind of a strange or iffy background or by the way, I couldn't find any

evidence that she does have a criminal record even though the Justice Department said she

quote unquote has an extensive criminal record. I wrote the White House and I said can you show us

her extensive criminal record because I haven't seen it and we've looked very hard and so have

other journalists and I have not received a response. What is your sense of how much Trump has

influenced what has been released and when it's been released? I don't know, all I know is what

I keep thinking about was what he told Marjorie Taylor Greene, which you know, he was upset that

she was going to vote for this bill that released the files and he told her, you know,

words to the effect that this is going to hurt some of my friends and so that to me means he's

protecting someone. I mean, I don't know of any other way you can construe that.

What is the experience you have when you see that Alex Acosta, who's the architect of the Epstein

sweetheart deal, ends up in Donald Trump's cabinet? I mean, the Trump story requires you to either

believe in extraordinary coincidences or start asking questions. I don't know. A lot of things

happened around that time. I was already working on that story before he nominated. Think about

this. I decide that I'm going to look at this because essentially at the time, I had already been

quite aware of the Epstein story and I always found it pretty disturbing that he got away with

his crimes essentially. So I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, you know, this is, I don't even know

if it's a story and then he nominated Alex Acosta, I'm thinking, okay, now when he goes before

the Senate for his confirmation, everybody's going to throw all these questions at him about this

and they really didn't. It was as if the story was buried and everybody had forgotten about it,

which maybe want to then talk to the victims about what they thought about this man who was going

to head an agency by the way that has oversight of human trafficking and he's the very person that

let their predator, you know, somewhat off the hook. So yeah, I don't really believe in coincidences.

I don't know if this was anything more than that. I haven't found any evidence of that,

but you have to admit the story is filled with an awful lot of coincidences.

You just, you have to, I mean, that's the fork in the road that the Trump story puts you at.

You either have to believe in extraordinary coincidences or you have to ask the sort of

difficult questions that you've been asking. We'll take a quick break right here when we're back,

much more with Miami Herald Investigative Journalist Julie Kay Brown. Stay with us.

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Let me ask you to sort of go back in time and take us back to 2018 when this turns into a,

you know, even in the time of Trump, a a four alarm fire scandal politically. Just talk about

what you reported and the reaction. Well, I didn't predict, obviously, by the way, I should

mention that I had a reporting partner, Emily Michelle, who worked on this. She was my videographer

and photographer for this project. We took some wonderful, um, we called them mini docs,

mini documentaries. I was young. I was scared. I knew these people were powerful. I didn't know

what would happen if I said no. I didn't know what would happen if they reported, if I reported

them that 16-year-old girl just let it happen. She did a wonderful job with putting together these

documentaries that in just a few minutes kind of encapsulates the injustice and the trauma and

just the outrage of this story. But Emily and I sort of felt like sometimes we were on an island

with this story because, you know, we had a lot of support with the Miami Herald. But unless you're

in the thick of a story like this, it's very hard to communicate with people exactly why it's

important until you get it on paper and and print it because I think even I was unsure about

the story until I interviewed the very first victim. We went to Tennessee to interview her and

after we did her. I mean, I get emotional now just thinking about it because it was an incredible

interview. Once she spoke, it was like, this is freaking unbelievable. It was the story that she told

and how it affected her life and how they felt betrayed not only by, you know, the criminal justice

system, but to some degree by their own lawyers, by their own families. There was just so much betrayal

to these young women. So many people at every step of the way in many cases took advantage of them

and, you know, so it's understandable why many of them are so afraid to speak out.

How did you get them to trust you? Well, first of all, I did some homework. I spoke with

therapists and a one man who was very helpful to me was a former FBI. He his job really is most

his whole career was to talk to child victims of sexual assault. And he just explained things,

you know, in the therapists that I talked to, the psychologist really explained to me the nature

of trauma and what the triggers could be. And in the end, what I just decided to do was not to

ask too many questions, which is against our nature, as you know, but I always tell young reporters

that one of the things that is sometimes more important than asking the questions is just being quiet.

And letting the white noise settle so that they can think through what they want to say because

this happened when they were so young. And it's just amazing. I think it gave them the freedom,

the breed, and to just talk, tell me what you want to tell me. What, you know, I didn't,

you know, I told them if they didn't want to talk about the actual abuse, they didn't need to

because this story was really about the corruption on the part of the government and how that impacted

them. So I think, you know, I know after I interviewed Michelle, who was the first victim in Tennessee,

my phone rang and we were in the car, Emily and I on the way to airport. I thought, okay,

here goes she's going to say she doesn't want us to use it because we sort of had said if,

even after they had done the interview, we weren't going to say if they said, we don't, I don't

want it in. I changed my mind. We weren't going to publish it. And she just said, I can't tell you

what a relief this is. And I just first out crying because, you know, just the way she said it was

like, I've been wanting to share that for 15 years, you know, so I think they did want to talk

you know, they did want to say they wanted somebody to really listen, you know, and you know,

that's what I think Emily and I tried to do. How many Michelle's do you think there are? Oh gosh.

At the time I did the series, I would track down almost 100 names and out of those 100, which

I wrote letters to all the women that I could track down and out of full them, Michelle was the

only one that answered my letter. And then I had reached out to the lawyers for Virginia's lawyer,

David Boyes and Sigurd McCauley. And then, Courtney Wilde, that was Brad Edwards. And at that

point, I was a little disappointed that I only had four. The other one was Gen Elisa Jones,

who came to the interview I had with Virginia because she had contacted Brad. So we had four,

and at the time I was sort of thinking, oh gosh, I wish we had more because I knew there were a lot

more. Yeah. And I kept trying to get more, but they didn't want to go public. And, you know,

I even was in touch with the farmer's sisters. And they weren't able to do the interview,

weren't ready to do it. You know, so I was a little disappointed, but after this whole thing was

said and done, to be honest with you, I'm really, really happy I had only four because they were

each in their own way, so special. And I just think if you have so many, it would have perhaps

been a little diluted. You know, I think it was just perfect actually. Can you remind us of all

their stories? Well, Michelle just, she came from a big family. I don't remember how many brothers

and sisters, but a lot of brothers and sisters. And she was a good student, but she felt lost

her parents worked a couple jobs. And she wanted to buy them Christmas presents. And one of her

friends or acquaintance came to her at high school and said, do you want to earn some extra money?

She said, sure. And it turns out that she said, all you have to do is massage this old man. And

then he's going to give you a couple of hundred dollars. She said, sure. So she gets there. And of

course, you don't know what you're facing. She didn't tell anybody she was there. And you just,

they take you up to this creepy room and they leave you alone with this guy and you're thinking,

I'm going to die. And so he, he molests her and she left there feeling like she was never going

to find anyone to love her ever again because of what had happened. She felt stupid. She felt

dirty. She felt all those things you do, you know, when you're sexually assaulted. And

from that point, her life began spiraling out of control just from going there one time.

Same with Jenellisa. Jenellisa was a similar story. She went there only one time and it affected

the rest of her life. And then, of course, Courtney was the one who was suing to her credit.

From prison, she was suing the US government because they had done this deal in secret.

And she, she was just a one woman fighting machine in that she wasn't letting up. She had a

very great lawyer right at Edwards on her behalf fighting this lawsuit. For a decade, at the time,

I took up this case, that lawsuit was almost a decade old. So it wasn't going anywhere fast.

And then Virginia. And we all know Virginia's story. And she had been out in the public before.

But I do think that the way that Emily in particular did her documentaries and gave her a voice

on camera that way. I think really showed the power of Virginia's story in a way that hadn't

been done before, even though there had been stories written, especially in Europe about her

accusations against the Prince. I think seeing her on camera in life, that was very powerful.

What do you think she would have experience to see Andrew arrested?

She's smiling down from heaven, I think. Even to this day, there are people out there that are

trying to discredit her. It's incredible to me. I am seeing things in the file. I have a whole

file set aside of documents. I found that back up what she said. It happened. It happened. She

was abused by these men. I do not understand why it's so hard for people to not know that this

happens in America. This is what happens all over the world, actually, where young women are

impressionable or underage, and they are being trafficked to very wealthy and powerful men.

It's real people. It's real that this happened.

One of your stories, I think, well, two of your stories changed how I saw this. I mean,

the reporting about, is it Kathy Rumler, Rumler, Bama's former Chief White House Council,

who ascends to the highest levels of New York City, legal and financial circles at a law firm,

and then I think it's Coleman Sachs. Her email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein, she's

texting with him, and then her email exchange after there was someone who was going to go in and

cooperate, where she wasn't his lawyer. There was no legal reason for her to be weighing in or

helping him. We don't know what she does, but she tells Jeffrey Epstein, I'll make a call.

Why can she be corruptive with the Birken bag?

It's hard to know without knowing what was going through her head and also what her personal

demons are. I would imagine that there's some kind of backstory there that we probably don't

know about, but there certainly is no real good excuse for something like that, especially

the enormous volume of emails and the content of the emails that went back and forth.

Maybe she thought nobody would ever find out.

What is your sense of how successful he was? Because you have some reporting on this as well,

since some of the files were released, in getting law enforcement to look the other way,

federal law enforcement and bringing young women to the island for abuse.

I just don't understand it. I really don't. I haven't been able to make sense of it.

I do know after my peace ran, I got quite a bit of pushback from other journalists, for example,

sort of dismissing the work. I sort of think that there is still a segment of people out there

who just don't get it, who still think, well, they got money. They knew what they were getting into.

It was consensual. I just think that there is still a segment of America and the media,

quite frankly, who still don't understand the gravity of this crime and what he did.

Easiest way to explain it sometimes, especially to men, is, do you have a daughter?

I mean, that's what I said. Nine times out of ten, the person that is saying this stuff to me

doesn't have a daughter, so they don't get it.

But if you do have a daughter and your daughter at 18 or 19 years old is invited to some

50, 60-year-olds mansion and she comes back broken, I don't know a father who wouldn't go there

and avenge her pain. I do not understand why this isn't universally toxic for all these fancy

people to associate it with them. I want to ask you if you can unpack part of how the sweetheart

deal is peddled by Epstein. How does Epstein make friends after being convicted in 2008? Does he

cover it up? Does he wear his ankle bracelet like a badge of honor? Does he just say, oh, I guess

someone... I mean, how does he re-enter or stay in his circle?

Well, the genius of the sweetheart deal, and when I say the genius, I mean the genius on the part

of his lawyers, was that they manipulated that deal all the way to the finish line and beyond

the finish line. And the way that they did it was they picked a charge solicitation of a minor

for prostitution and they attached one victim to that and it was not the 14-year-old who was the

first to report it, but the 16-year-old. And that was a very designed for reason because in some

states, 16 is the age where you don't have to be monitored at least at back then. You don't have

to be monitored the same way you do as a convicted sex offender as you do in other states. So,

technically on paper, he was convicted and pled guilty of that crime. And he was able to tell people

at least initially, look, it was just one girl and she was 16. I didn't know she was 16. She looked

like she was of age. And this is what his stick was, you know, to get back initially to the party

scene and to the elites and to the wealthy. And then he did, you know, what all the very powerful

people do. He hires, you know, Peggy Siegel and other people to start repairing his reputation.

He's donating millions of dollars to every cause. There's press releases after press release.

He's giving just millions and millions of dollars way to every kind of organization imaginable.

So he had a plan to repair his reputation. And then when these victims started coming forward

to sue him as the years went on, the media had forgotten about the case. So nobody was really

scrutinizing, you know, they were reporting these, oh, another lawsuit was filed today by another

victim who claimed she was molested. The victims had no voice. Their stories were told through

lawyers and through lawsuits. And so the story kind of quieted down because it became just another

lawsuit story and nobody really, very few people anyway, but nobody in mainstream, you know,

like the Washington Post or the New York Times or anybody in mainstream was really covering it

rigorously. So, you know, at some point though, it was clear because Virginia went public and when

Virginia went public around 2011 or so, that's when, you know, it hit the fan and she was naming

the prince and she started mentioning people. And then at that point it became more public again.

But then again, it died again, you know, even after my story ran, it got quiet for a while again.

So it's just been kind of a roller coaster for these poor victims.

My conversation with Julie Kay Brown continues right after the break. We'll be back in one minute.

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What in your view blows it into the open in the last 14 months? Like I know when I started covering

every day, it's when Elon Musk tweeted an all-cast Donald Trumpus in the Epstein files and I was

covering Doge every day. And I was like, what? Yeah. How does he know? And I was covering stories of

all the access unauthorized or legally emotional access. Elon Musk had all the government everything

and Elon Musk tweets that. But is there something else that thrust this into the center ring for you?

Well, that was a big moment because when Donald Trump was running against Biden,

I know that there was a lot of information on social media about, oh, now we're going to find out

about Trump. And I was one of the reporters that kept saying, wait a minute, because there was

a lot of propaganda out there and a lot of manipulation, AI manipulation show that was Trump.

And I said, look, honestly, there is no evidence that Trump was involved in anything that,

either trafficking. And so when Elon did that, then it was like, wow, what is he know that we don't

know what's been covered up. So I think that was definitely a watershed moment. But I also think

there were two other watershed moments. The second one was these victims. I don't think that

anybody anticipated how much they would mobilize and become a force to be reckoned with, you know,

politically. And that was a huge watershed moment because as long as these women, and this is

the way Epstein actually treated them when he was with them, he kept them all apart. They weren't

allowed to talk to each other. They weren't keeping their mouth shut. They never really were allowed

to become friends with each other. And so when they finally had the opportunity to actually

mobilize and form alliances with each other and compare notes with each other, they became a

force to be reckoned with. That gives me chills. I mean, I have the sense that that's the case

from interviewing the ones who are willing to not just be public, but be public and come on television

shows. I've interviewed Jess Michaels and Danny Bansky. And I mean, I've been so honored and so

moved by every one of them, but they all describe themselves the way you just did as sort of being

being changed and fortified by this, I think, sisterhood is what they call it. Can you talk a

little bit more about how that is new? Well, some of these women, even to this day, have never

spoken out to anybody. They've never told anybody this happened. So it's been a long journey

for some of these women. Virginia was the exception and look what happened to her. She was so

persecuted and still is to some degree. So they've understandably been afraid because they know

they opened themselves up. Their lives weren't perfect. So when you go public, you know how it is

that you're going to have people that are going to scrutinize you and try to attack you and find

any little thing that they can. And I think it's a real credit to them and their sisterhood that

they have been supporting each other this way. And there's a lot of them that still are in that

sisterhood, but won't talk on TV, as you know, they'll talk to me on the phone, but it'll be

completely off the record. It's different levels of comfort that they have with talking about it,

but I think when they're all in the room together. And remember, to some degree, they also helped

fill in the blanks for each other because when you get abused that long ago and you go through

that trauma, there's pieces of it that you bury in your psyche. And I think that they're talking

about it among themselves, they're able to put more of the pieces together in their head

and then own their own story. And that's why it was so important for Maria Farmer to get those

reports that she found because she wanted to own her own story. And up until that time,

she had so many people saying, well, we didn't really find this. Your story must be wrong. You

didn't really report this or there was a million things that they told her to make her feel as though

she wasn't telling them the full truth. And it's so important for these victims to own their own

story and to be able to say, yes, this happened to me. Look at me. I am a victim. And you should

just believe these victims really. Right. Well, and to have so many of them tell the same story

or similar stories. Yeah. I want to ask you about the parts of the story that animate the right

because one of the other things that seems to change the energy around the story is that it was

Trump's own coalition that felt betrayed when Pam Bondi made the binders and called all the

right wing influencers to the White House gave them these binders. And then I think six weeks later

said there's nothing else here. What parts of this story sort of lay over the right wing

conspiracies about a massive government cover up and the investigative threads that you've been

pursuing for years and years. Well, I never thought that, you know, that something that I was

fighting for, which was to keep the story in the public eye and to continue to try to shed light

on how it happened and who was responsible. I never thought that I would sort of find it the right

part of my own cause. Yeah. Right. We would have that in common. They were using it for their own,

you know, purposes and some of them may have really had really good intentions, but I also think

some of them really were using it to get Trump elected and thinking because he had said he was

going to do this, that this was a reason to elect him. And well, we found out that that wasn't

really the case. So I was skeptical about that whole thing from the beginning. I knew that

Jeffrey Epstein didn't have his own little client list, so to speak. He wasn't the kind of person

that would have had that written down like here are all the men that I was trafficking women to

kind of list. But I thought any attention that this story gets is good because in my mind,

I needed all the help I could get to try to keep this in the public eye and to get more transparency,

to get these files out there to get, you know, answers. And so in some ways, I was glad, but

it did sort of spiral into a place that I thought, ugh, this is just not the point. This isn't the

point. The point is really transparency and getting justice for the victims. I mean, the Saturday night

live cold open was about the Iran war being started to distract from the Epstein files. I mean,

it's now so saturated pop culture, even one of their manosphere hosts and podcasting world.

So much of their content is now derisive about Trump and furthers for their millions of

listeners that he is orchestrating or part of or benefiting from a cover-up. How much of that

rings true to you having all of the investigative years under the hood of the story?

Well, because I've been on top of it, I'm sort of colored by the fact that I've been on it

working on this for so long. And now you have some of these, you know, influencers, so to speak,

who have just discovered there's nothing so annoying to me of these influencers out there on

public platforms and saying, look what I just found. And I'm thinking, here's the article I wrote

about a three years or 13. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I'm colored by the fact that I feel like

a lot of these people, you know, it's not that they were late to the party necessarily. I just think

that they didn't do their homework. And, you know, I just think a lot of them never really understood

the story to begin with. Conan O'Brien and the Oscars makes a joke about the UK and he says,

well, I think it's about the lack of nominees. He says, well, at least they arrest their pedophiles.

What is the variable between how the UK and other European countries are dealing with people,

anyone with any tentacle into this story so much more harshly than they are here in America?

I do think that our electorate here has, for whatever reason, has given Trump and people in his

camp a big pass. And, you know, the electorate in Britain, my guess is they're not giving these

people a pass. And I think that that is a big factor when people say, well, what can I do? I say,

well, you got to vote, you know, or volunteer for organizations that help battered women.

But we really have to have leaders that want to hold predators accountable. We have to have strong

laws in place and strong punishments and people in the Justice Department willing to go after.

We have to make it politically necessary for our elected officials to go after these kinds of

predators. What is your sense of how much pressure has built? I mean, if you could just put it

into relative terms between a year ago and today, it feels like there's a whole lot more

public awareness. What is your sense of how much more we know today than a year ago and how

much more we'll know a year from today? Well, this brings me back to my third watershed moment.

And that is when these files, fortunately, were released. And what has happened now is

the public doesn't have to rely on Julie Cape Brown anymore to tell them what's in these files.

Yes, we do. But you know what I'm saying? It's like sometimes people have this distrust of journalists

or anybody even on these public platforms, you can actually go in and you can look at these files.

And that is huge because the public can see with their own eyes and they're looking at these files

and they are saying, oh my god, they're seeing this stuff themselves. So I think that that is

huge because it's no longer being filtered that anybody can go in there really. And you know,

it is a lot of work to sort through them like looking for a needle and haystacks sometimes.

But you could put Trump's name in there and you can just look and see what comes up and you

can get lost in them. But I do think that it is a good thing. You know, there's some negatives

to this and that some of these victims' names were not redacted and they should have been.

And there are some people who have been caught up in this that maybe they shouldn't have.

But I do think that it's important that the public is now able to see the truth themselves.

What is your hope for how the public interacts with all this information? And what was your

dream sort of tool be for helping people more easily search through them and to your points

experience them with their own eyes? I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. I'm still

going back and forth between three different programs. One of them that's good for one thing

and the other thing. And then just going in myself cold and trying to find things. That is

really the real challenge right now to be honest with you is to really understand them. And I

mean, I just spent all weekend reading the two statements that were given by the two corrections

officers who worked the night. Each of those statements are 400 pages. What happened that night?

I mean, you're going to have to stay tuned. I'm working on something. But it is not that's

another whole mess. It is incredible that story about what happened that night. And you're going

to have to pre-july cape round to find out. We always rejuly cape round. What did I not ask you about

that sort of keeps you up at night on this story? Everything keeps me up all night.

I don't sleep very well because I'm working on this and my grain keeps going even after I get

in bed. And sometimes I wake up at two, three o'clock in the morning and start working because my

head won't stop. I'll think of remember something that I read somewhere. I have so much stuff in my

head that it's impossible for me not to think about it almost all the time. What can we do as

journalists and hosts that don't know the story as well as you do to support the victims and the

truth? I think that especially you Nicole, there are some people in the media that are really doing

a great job in telling this story and really doing their homework. I think that's the most important

thing before saying anything to kind of at least go Google it first just to make sure there is

an a piece of it because it's such a sprawling story. It is no one person. Even me can know everything.

I get these people that are sending me Clyde so and so. Did you see? Oh my god. And then they'll give me

a whole report on this guy. I've never even heard of them before. I mean, we all are all I think doing

the best that we can with trying to be accurate and to try to put the pieces together. The way the

government has released this hasn't made it easy. It's a big word salad document salad.

And you know, it appears from some in some places that they never followed up on anything,

but we don't know because we don't really have all the file. So maybe they did follow up on some of

this. You know, it's not it's not linear or chronological. I guess my last question for you

is about where we started and the way women are treated and the way their stories are viewed through

such a filter that I wonder if you think there are other Jeffrey Epstein's out there right now.

Oh, I know there are because I keep getting emails about these other Jeffrey Epstein's a couple

of times a week from victims. You know, this whole business of sex trafficking, you know,

pornography, the internet. I mean, it's a multi billion dollar industry and I don't know the answer

to trying to reel this in. I do know that the answer is not to take the officers that

police this, you know, from the FBI and Homeland Security and put them someplace else.

The answer is to put more people on this problem and we have to really globally. We have to address

this as if it's almost like terrorism because it is terrorism against our children in our most

vulnerable in this society, in this world. And it's really a plague at this point.

Your work is so important and I'm such a fan. Oh, thank you. I'm just taking an hour of your time

with somebody. I'm really grateful to have gone. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

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