Julie K. Brown, the journalist who brought down Epstein: 'I fear the Trump administration will try to cover up

[Uncle Joe]

for powerful men’

The reporter talked to EL PAÍS about the imminent release of the case files against the pedophile and his connections to power. ‘Ghislaine Maxwell thinks she’s going to be pardoned’

In 2017, Julie K. Brown, a journalist for the Miami Herald, was waiting to hear back about a job application at The Washington Post while watching in horror as the Senate confirmed Alex Acosta, nominated by Donald Trump, as secretary of labor. She knew all too well who this man was — the former U.S. attorney in South Florida who, in 2008, agreed to bury the first trial against a multimillionaire named Jeffrey Epstein, accused of abusing dozens of minors at his Palm Beach mansion. Acosta rewarded him with a lenient plea deal that allowed Epstein to serve just 13 months in jail.

Brown wondered what those victims must have felt, seeing the man who let their abuser get away succeed. So she proposed to her editor that they revisit the story, and she did so “as if resurrecting a cold case crime,” she explained last Friday in a phone interview. She located around 80 victims, some of whom were only 13 years old when the financier assaulted them. The Post eventually called to say they weren’t interested. “Sometimes things happen for a reason,” she recalls now.

The series of reports she published ultimately derailed Acosta’s career, led to Epstein being prosecuted a second time, and resulted in the conviction of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Federal prosecutors in New York used that reporting to charge the disgraced financier in 2019 — amid the #MeToo movement — with sex trafficking for acts committed between 2002 and 2005 in Miami and New York. In August of that year, Epstein killed himself, according to the coroner, in a Manhattan maximum-security cell while awaiting trial.

Brown has been following with great interest both the latest declassifications of documents in the case and the process that led Trump to sign a bill giving the Department of Justice 30 days to release Epstein’s files after months of opposing the measure. “Honestly, I never thought this moment would come,” says the reporter.

(snip)

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-11-28/julie-k-brown-the-journalist-who-brought-down-epstein-i-fear-the-trump-administration-will-try-to-cover-up-for-powerful-men.html#

[marble falls]

1. No doubt, they'll try. It will not work. There's just too many copies of the dossier out there ...

... and they're the gang that can't shoot straight.