Perversion of Justice review – how local journalism helped catch Jeffrey Epstein

Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown (HarperCollins), £20.

The whole story of Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking racket and his gross personal exploitation of minors has yet to fully unspool. There are still many murky corners of the tale to see the light of day, and quite a number of people in high places in the US, UK, and Europe will be pretty keen on making sure no one discovers the full details.

The business, orchestrated by the eccentric financier and a few close staff, had hundreds of victims. Most were minors when many of the alleged acts took place at an estate in Miami, various capitals and Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Isles. It went on for the best part of 30 years, in which time Epstein courted the high rollers in finance, politics and the law, including two presidents – Clinton and Trump. How much they all knew of the seedy side of the financier’s extremely active private life is far from clear, most deny any serious knowledge at all.

Epstein might have got away with it and still be at liberty but for a few twists of fate. The arrival of the #MeToo movement, the Harvey Weinstein scandal refocussing attention on his previous brushes with the law and the persistent and dogged reporting of Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald and her videographer partner Emily Michot. If not for their reporting, Epstein may never have been arrested at Teterboro airport in New Jersey on 6 July 2019. One of the prosecutors at the final Epstein arrest said, “we were assisted by some excellent investigative journalism.”

Perversion of Justice is Julie Brown’s story, and it is one of the greatest first-person accounts in contemporary western journalism. It is a thriller on the scale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate epic All the President’s Men. But it is so much more too; it is an important slice of media, social and political history that is far from over and a battle against the odds. Countless times she is faced with being closed down, confronted by bullying lawyers and officials of dubious probity.

This is the Miami Herald of Carl Hiaasen, where margins are squeezed, bureaus closed down, jobs lost. Julie herself has to face pay cuts – all the while getting her daughter and son through college as a single parent. Then there is the alleged hectoring and bullying of Epstein’s celebrity pals and lawyers, including Kenneth Starr, former moralising special counsel of the Whitewater story, and Alan Dershowitz, Harvard professor and celebrity defender of the likes of O J Simpson. Dershowitz seems to go to extraordinary lengths.

Woodward and Bernstein esteemed themselves pretty important people at the time of Watergate – and even more today. They had the backing of one of the grandest of Democrat patronesses, Kate Graham, a leader in the Washington media establishment. Julie Brown had no such advantage.

She fetched up at the Herald after a decent run at the Philadelphia Enquirer and was pretty uncertain about the future. She tried and failed to get on investigative teams at the Washington Post and, tentatively, the New York Times. In Miami, she was on the prison reporting beat.

When her success came in breaking open the Epstein story, it is fascinating how grudging the grander papers were about it all. She missed out on the Pulitzer prize – Alan Dershowitz had added his contribution by a letter to the Pulitzer jury.

This gives Perversion of Justice even greater strength, depth and reference. 

It is about the crisis and urgent need for local and regional newspaper reporting in our time – not just in Britain and America, but across the world. The book is a rough and ready, straight-to-the-point account of what happens – it is a real reporter’s notebook.

The turning point for Brown was when Epstein was arrested in 2006 for sex offences. He was already fabulously wealthy. By 2008 he was serving an eighteen-month sentence, two-thirds suspended and allowed to work in an office by day under negligible supervision. But he was put on the sex offender’s register which irked him, so he spent the next few years and a lot of money trying to get off it.

The 2008 plea bargain, as it came to be called, stuck in Julie Brown’s memory. It was odd because a lot of it wasn’t made public. Above all, the principal victims, teenagers at the time, weren’t informed. The deal was crafted by one Alex Acosta, a big buddy in Florida of Donald Trump, himself, in turn, a big buddy of Jeffrey Epstein. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump had said earlier, “it is even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do and many are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Acosta was appointed Labour Secretary by Trump in 2017. He was even mooted to be a possible Attorney General – and could conceivably have gone higher, emulating his mentor Samuel Alito as a judge on the Supreme Court. But by 2018, his involvement with Epstein got in the way.

By 2006, the Epstein operation was well in place, and one of the enablers appears to have been Ghislaine Maxwell. She would cruise spas, sports clubs and hotel swimming pools to recruit young “masseuses” for “an old friend” who was very keen to hire and train them. Many of the young victims were tempted by the money, usually about two hundred dollars a visit. They were asked to go on trips and recruit other teenagers – it was a sex trafficking Ponzi scheme. As they were discarded they drifted into drugs and correctional schools and prison – some didn’t make it at all.

This marks the difference between Epstein’s victims and those of Harvey Weinstein. The latter were often aspirant stars seeking showbiz, video glamour and fame, but it was almost as if the Epstein victims were entirely dispensable.

 His success in business and social climbing was based on two things. Epstein was a brilliant mathematician who would work the algorithms and markets through recession and slump. He had no high-class degree, which made his association with Ivy League celebrities the more intriguing. He could be astonishingly manipulative by charm and guile – hence he could draw in the likes of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Kenneth Starr, Alan Dershowitz and Bill Gates. He even drew in the celebrity psychologist and linguistics expert Steven Pinker – who once complained of the linguistic verbosity of the complaints and depositions against Epstein.

Faced with such a phalanx of celebrity in the law, finance and politics, it is a wonder that Julie Brown didn’t give up. She was sustained by a handful of colleagues and friends, principally Casey Frank, the Herald’s assignments editor, and Emily Michot. Two cops didn’t like what they saw around the Epstein Miami residences. They stuck with it through thick and thin. Joe Recarey died in harness, never seeing the investigation fully resolved. His boss, Michael Reiter, later retired and has continued to give friendly support. Several lawyers never backed down – especially Brad Edwards.

Casey Frank decided to give Julie and Emily full backing when Acosta was appointed Labour Secretary. Julie and Casey went back through “the sweetheart deal” of the 2006 case and the light sentence in detention. What was disclosed, what was sealed and hidden?

None of the subsequent unravellings could have happened, but for the star witnesses, the victims who braved bullying and a lot worse and were prepared to go public. Epstein and his associates tried to bribe, bully and strongarm them into silence. But a number came forward, and they are correctly and handsomely acknowledged by Julie Brown. They are led by four or five extremely articulate ladies whose lives had been made living hell; Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Courtney Wild, Michelle Licata, Virginia and Sarah Ransome, Anne and Marie Farmer.

These women continue to be extremely important to the story. They were prepared to confront Epstein in full court after his last arrest. But they were deprived of that opportunity by his mysterious death. The authorities admitted to lax prison surveillance but still concluded a verdict of suicide, “though a lot of bones had been broken in his neck.” The women, however, did not forego the chance to appear in court as the indictment was read, despite the accused being deceased.

By this time, witnesses had come forward providing graphic testimony. Some of the most lurid was from those involved in Epstein’s private flights to St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, where he would transfer groups of young teenage girls to his private property at Little St James, almost inevitably named “paedo island” by the locals. One security man on St Thomas noticed the girls followed a pattern, “petite, blonde and very, young – around fourteen.”

Two of the female protagonists are set to play a pivotal role; Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Courtney Wild. Despite everything, including successfully relocating to Australia and raising a family there, Virginia Giuffre is now pitched into a round of civil litigation, most notably involving Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew. It has certainly got the steam rising from Alan Dershowitz. The importance of this bold approach, writes Julie Brown, is that Virginia Giuffre aims to get sealed testimony in hearings and legal investigations unsealed – in other words, fully disclosed. Maxwell’s team wants to block this.

From unsealed testimony so far, Brown reports, the links, social, professional, legal, innocent or otherwise, are revealed between principals such as Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Epstein, Dershowitz and Giuffre herself. Joining the dots may just show purely social or business links, but testimony from elsewhere suggests that Maxwell may have played an active role in the procurement and seduction process. Virginia Roberts Giuffre aims for full disclosure and compensation for herself and her fellow victims in the sexual abuse of minors.  

Courtney Wild is an active campaigner for the protection of minors falling victim to sexual abuse. She was seduced by Epstein when she was 14, “and in braces” she claims, and her story goes back to the 2006 – 2008 case. In 2019, she put her name to the Courtney Wild Victims’ Rights Reform Act to help abused minors. It has gone into committee in Congress. Its future is not clear – remember Jeffrey Epstein was a massive Democrat donor and had big friends on both sides of the aisle.

The story is also that of the teller, Julie Brown; the heroic tale of good basic, gruelling, frustrating, gumshoe, local journalism. She seems to lurch along the cliff edge of personal and financial disaster. She is thwarted. There is a lovely scene when she and Emily Michot head off in an old banger to a remote shack in the middle of nowheresville in the heart of rural Florida. They have had a tip that this is where one of the victims has retired – but she may be prepared to talk. There’s a rusty gate, a lot of overgrowth and undergrowth, and a caved-in shack. They realise their two-day journey had ended in a place that hasn’t been inhabited for years.

Much of the work is the tedious analysis of court documents, depositions, testimonies and affidavits. Some are so heavily redacted there is barely a single coherent sentence on the page. But she goes on. One of the most eloquent testimonials comes from one of the hard-pressed and harassed prosecution lawyers; “you were the only one to call us back, after reading what we sent,” he tells her.

When Epstein was arrested in New Jersey in 2019, the story breaks. Julie and Emily are vindicated – though quickly, various celebrity journalists try to claim the glory and say they had been there all along. But there is a moment of glory in the world of the cash-strapped and stretched Miami Herald. The hits rocket on the website – and circulation of print copies booms. So much so that Julie is instructed to go to the bays of newspaper distribution lorries to see them off with their bumper load splashing her story. She is interviewed on television, and it goes national. And she gets a pay rise.

Even the grandiose New York Times invites her to the inner sanctum of their board room for a personal round of congratulation. It didn’t stop them from lifting one of her better leads or failing to assist her Pulitzer prize nomination.

There is more than a whiff of Erin Brockovich about this story, another saga of a single-minded single mum battling the weaselly authorities. Netflix is interested in a mini-series, for which plans appear well laid. I would like to think that Julie Brown and Emily Michot might play themselves somehow – especially if it takes a biopic format. There is also an irony here – only five or so years ago ABC and CNN refused to air interviews with victims prepared to go on camera – because in the case of ABC, “the material failed to reach our editorial standards”.

This wonderful and magnificently raw book is yet another testimony to the importance of local and regional journalism – especially in print, whether on the page or the web. It holds power to account like no other medium because others don’t have the words or the space to build the context, plot and argument – telling the real story how it is.

This is the argument of Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post in her sparkling and trenchant essay Ghosting the News. She stresses the terrible effect of the closure of local news operations on the wellbeing of all our social, political and personal lives.

Local news has brought its practitioners a lot of grief – there are always grumbles about weird hours, the occasional danger and poor wages. But it brings a lot of fun too. Anyone who gets through the five to seven-year pain barrier of newsroom hectoring and disorientation is in newspapers for life. 

Indeed, by the twenty-year mark, I knew I couldn’t do anything else.

The sheer bizarre joy of local journalism, especially in newspapers, is recounted in Panic As Man Burns Crumpets by Roger Lytollis. The title says it all. The author was a lifer on the Cumbrian News; columnist, feature writer, reporter and obituarist. The horse was shot from under him and his paper closed. Here you get the crazy battles between reporters and subs, the barmy interviewee, the stunt feature and the solace in the pub. It is a complete joy, a gem of a book that should go national and international.

So reporters and their friends and allies of the world unite. And a special toast to Julie Brown and Emily Michot, Margaret Sullivan and Roger Lytollis. And a special thought for Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Courtney Wild and their fellow battling women and comrades in arms.