Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.
This conversation was taped before President Trump authorized the Justice Department to seek the release of grand jury testimony in Epstein’s case.
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Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Julie K. Brown: Thank you.
Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.
I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I’m really hoping that together we can walk through the story — the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein the man became Jeffrey Epstein the mythic villain of the early 21st century. I want to start in the middle for him or maybe near the end for him but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you as a journalist to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?
Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.
But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.
So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed.
So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more.
It took a long time, quite frankly, to figure out who the victims were because it was so long ago, and all their names were redacted from all the documents. So it just kept snowballing. I became really interested in the fact that these girls’ lives were essentially ruined, even if they had only gone to his house one time. It affected the rest of their lives, and their stories that they were telling me were just very powerful.
Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?
Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.
It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed.
And as a result of that, a lawyer for one of the victims filed a lawsuit. And that lawsuit had been ongoing when I took up the case in 2016. But, the nature of the lawsuit was that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, by doing this all in secret, had violated what’s known as the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
And under that law, you’re supposed to be informed of all proceedings or any plea deals. And they didn’t do that. It was another year before that plea deal was unsealed and made public. By that time, he had already served this cushy jail sentence, which was not a sentence at all, because he was allowed to leave the jail and go back to Palm Beach, to his office or his home or The Home Depot. He had a chauffeur picking him up at the Palm Beach jail every morning, and they didn’t return him to the jail until 10 o’clock at night. So he essentially only slept there.
Douthat: And so from your perspective as a reporter, at that point, as you’re digging into the story, what was your theory of why he got this plea deal?
Brown: Well, the theory was always — here we are getting a little bit into the conspiracy thing — but the theory ——
Douthat: We’re going to get further, don’t worry.
Brown: The theory always was: Who was the person in our government that let Jeffrey Epstein off? I really didn’t know, but I wanted to try to get to that place if I could. That was my goal — to track everything that happened. I looked at it like a cold case, pulling out all these files. A lot of them were in paper because it was so long ago. And I had just piles and piles of boxes and boxes, and I just started from scratch and thought: Maybe I can find out how. My goal was to find out how this happened and why.
Douthat: What did you find out?
Brown: Well, I found out that Jeffrey Epstein, of course, had a lot of resources, both financially and politically. He cultivated people on both sides of the political aisle — and people across the world, really. He was very wealthy, but there was no real indicator of how he made his wealth. I just learned that he was able to hire essentially a dream team: Kenneth Starr, Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz. A lot of these had contacts with the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.
Douthat: This is a very prominent law firm.
Brown: And Epstein was very shrewd. Every lawyer that he hired had a tie to one of the prosecutors on the case. Alex Acosta had worked for Kirkland & Ellis. And he was very ambitious at the time. He really was a rising star in the G.O.P.
Ironically, one of the ways that he was rising was he was handling a lot of child pornography cases. He was part of a team of prosecutors that was prosecuting child porn. So Epstein knew exactly who to hire. I mean, he even hired a lawyer that had dated one of the prosecutors. So every single lawyer had a tie to the prosecutors in some way and was sort of — if you’re a prosecutor, you want to eventually end up somewhere in a good law firm and make more money. So some of these prosecutors were star struck by some of these lawyers like Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz.
Douthat: So in that sense it looks like insiders and power create a kind of path of least resistance for the prosecution where you get some kind of conviction. You don’t have to end up at war with this legal all-star team spending all kinds of resources.
Brown: That’s right. And they were relentless. Relentless in their pleadings, in their motions that the prosecutors of course had to address. So we were able to get the emails that went back and forth between Epstein’s lawyers and the federal prosecutors assigned to the case, and they were very eye-opening because of how chummy they were, asking, how was your weekend?
They were working hand in hand really. They weren’t treating Epstein as if he was the criminal that he was.
Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And how long was his sentence?
Brown: Eighteen months.
Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims.
Brown: Right, because the nature of Epstein’s crime was that he would bring one young girl in there. We believe that Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, who was a British socialite and was his girlfriend at one point, started by recruiting young people from spas in the Palm Beach area, mainly young girls who were very pretty, who worked at the spas.
And she didn’t tell them that they wanted these girls to have sex with this guy. It was: We want to give this guy a massage. So once they got there and they realize — you know, they go into this mansion, and they go up the stairs, and they’re in this dark room, and he comes in in a towel, and they’re in this place, and they realize: Well, nobody knows I’m here. Who is this guy? They get really upset.
So after he molests them, he says: Look, you don’t have to do this again. I’m going to give you the same amount of money for every single other girl that you bring me. So he had girl upon girl upon girl bringing other girls. And it was a revolving door — all day, all night. He was insatiable, really. And it was crazy. They were coming in and out like that — these girls taking taxis, getting rides.
Douthat: And this is mostly happening at his mansion in Palm Beach. And just for overall numbers — I know there’s official legal numbers — but your guess is that there are hundreds of girls?
Brown: Yeah.
Douthat: So you’ve done this reporting and then what are the actual real-world consequences of your reporting? What happens legally to Jeffrey Epstein in the late 2010s?
Brown: Well, the story got a lot of attention. At first, I thought: This is good. I’m getting recognized for my work. But then I started hearing rumors that the Justice Department was looking at the case again.
Over the following decade, several of Epstein’s victims filed civil lawsuits against him. A couple of those cases were still open. And as the victims and their lawyers went through discovery, they were uncovering more and more horrific details about what had happened and what Epstein had been doing.
The victims’ lawyers kept bringing that new evidence to the Justice Department — specifically to federal prosecutors in New York. Because the original plea deal had been made in Florida, they didn’t think they could bring additional charges against him in Florida because of how that deal was structured. So the lawyers kept going to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, and trying to get them to look at it and reopen it. And they kept saying: No, no, no.
Then, after my story ran, a group of prosecutors read it and took it to the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York — Geoffrey Berman. And they told him: We’ve got to do something about this. And Berman said: Go ahead. Look into it. Let’s do it. So Epstein was arrested that July — over the Fourth of July weekend. He was flying home from Paris — he had a home there — and agents boarded the plane and arrested him.
Douthat: And then what happened to him?
Brown: Well, he was put in the federal jail in New York and arraigned and charged with new sex trafficking offenses. And it was funny — the pattern was the same as in 2008. He hired high-profile lawyers. He would have meetings with them almost every day.
His lawyers kept assuring him that the charges weren’t going to stick because he had already been prosecuted and had pleaded guilty to those earlier charges. They believed that the previous plea deal would, in essence, prevent the government from prosecuting him again. I think the lawyers were trying to convince him: Look, this just isn’t going to stick. You’re going to get out.
But then he tried to get bail — and he was denied. All these victims showed up at the bail hearing and testified: This is what he did to me. It was very emotional and gut-wrenching. And I think, you know, there probably wasn’t a judge anywhere who would have let him out on bail. The victims said they were afraid for their lives, etc., so he didn’t get bail.
Douthat: And then what happened?
Brown: And then one day I was scheduled to do an interview on NPR. Actually, let me back up.
The Miami Herald had sued to unseal a very important civil case that had been filed between Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, and a victim by the name of Virginia Giuffre. And on Aug. 9, they unsealed everything — almost everything. And we wrote a story. I was doing an interview about the files that were unsealed that morning on Aug. 10. When I got on the line with NPR for the interview, they told me Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself. That’s how I found out he had died. I couldn’t believe it.
I had a source in the Justice Department in New York, and I said: You have to tell me, how did this happen? And that’s how I found out the next day after I had written this story.
Douthat: Now, I know you’re not a prosecutor or a defense attorney, but at the point when he killed himself, what was your perception of the likelihood that he was going to go to jail for a long time? Did it seem like enough had come out and there’s enough victims that he’s probably facing a long prison sentence? Or was there still a sense in your mind that he has this high-powered legal team, he has this past guilty plea, he’s going to wriggle out of it?
Brown: No, I thought he was going to wriggle out of it — I really did. He was lining everything up, he had all the resources, and he knew people who knew people, if you know what I mean.
Douthat: So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback, and I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it’s the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it’s an example of how Epstein’s story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists.
So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.
How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?
Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.
Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.
Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.
In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?
Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money.
Douthat: Right. And again, all of these stories are — you know, when we had our fact-checking team look at this script, they were like: Well, this is a supposition; this is secondhand; this is hearsay. So you have this narrative before he meets Wexner, starting in the 1980s. He’s really good at moving money around in complex international environments.
One of the, again, secondhand stories is that he does work for Adnan Khashoggi, the fairly famous arm dealer in the 1980s. So there’s this mythos around him as a kind of fixer, and you said that he was really good at giving people what they wanted. You’ve seen these stories that show people would come to him with some impossible problem, allegedly. I’m making this one up — but I have a fleet of Mercedes somewhere in Tibet, and I need to legally get them to Peru. Can you help me, Jeffrey Epstein?
And so he would come with these things, but as far as we know from the public record, we’re just trying to get at what we know to be the truth. His primary mechanism of getting rich was his connection to Wexner.
Brown: Yes.
Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?
Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.
He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.
He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——
Douthat: Humored him.
Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money.
Douthat: Do you know what his specific scientific interests were or specific projects he was interested in?
Brown: He was interested in all kinds of things involving babies and how they form intelligence and eugenics and gene research, things like that.
Douthat: And one of the stories I’ve read is that he had these sort of transhumanist ideas. There were also people who said he wanted to seed his genetic lineage into the future. Not in the same style as Elon Musk and his many children but with a similar effect. That he imagined having many children in the future.
Brown: Yeah. He was going to these gatherings that had very wealthy, famous people and they would talk about all these scientific interests, and that was one that he had expressed to a lot of the people that attended these conferences.
Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.
What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?
Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.
So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.
Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?
Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.
Douthat: Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.
Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.
Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.
Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.
You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?
Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.
So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.
Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.
Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?
Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.
Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.
Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.
Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see.
Douthat: People could see it.
Brown: Yeah.
Douthat: So this story has now been pulled into the vortex of Trump and MAGA and everything else. But originally, this was a #MeToo story.
Brown: Yes, right.
Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down.
Brown: Right, because the #MeToo movement happened right before the story came out. The Weinstein thing happened and all that. I started working on the project before then, before the #MeToo movement, but in the middle of it, the #MeToo movement exploded. So it certainly helped my reporting, the fact that it occurred all around the same time.
Douthat: I’m also interested in the space between what we can say for certain about Epstein and the unresolved mysteries. So if you’re trying to take a minimalist view of the story, it’s a story about a rich man with connections, who gets away with terrible crimes because he has these connections for a long period of time. And it’s a story that makes all the people who knew him look bad for the same reason that everyone who knew about Harvey Weinstein looks bad. But it’s not a story at the level of political mythology that Epstein’s story has reached now.
I want to talk about the open questions — the unanswered parts of this story that help explain why Epstein is a bigger and more enduring story than Harvey Weinstein. Obviously, one of the core questions is: Were these girls expected to have sex with people other than Jeffrey Epstein? And I think a lot of people following the story take it for granted that there must have been a bunch of other celebrities who were getting sexual favors.
The debunking response, as I understand it, is that out of all the young women who made accusations, only one — who you mentioned earlier, Virginia Giuffre — made serial allegations that she was pressured into having sex with famous figures. And out of the allegations, there was only one settlement. There was no trial or anything like that, but there was the settlement with Prince Andrew — and the photograph of him with Maxwell and Giuffre.
In the other cases, the men who were named successfully fought back. Giuffre is — well, she’s dead now. She was clearly very troubled, and there are reasons to think she might have been motivated by money or revenge and reasons to be skeptical of some of her allegations. That’s how I understand the case, that it was just Epstein. Do you think it was just Epstein?
Brown: No, it wasn’t, because over the years, a lot of women have come forward, and I speak with the attorneys that represent these women quite often. I was speaking with one who said that he had a client — she was of age, she was on the younger side, and she was trafficked to a very powerful man by Epstein in Palm Beach.
I believe there were others like that, that were trafficked to very powerful men. These women are scared to death. They’re not going to come forward at this point because look what happened to Virginia. It’s just — they’re just not going to, they’re afraid. And so I ——
Douthat: What did happen to Virginia?
Brown: Well, Virginia went public, and she named names. And as a result of that, Alan Dershowitz was really the most vocal. And he attacked her just brutally at every juncture. Every time he was in front of a microphone, he said horrible things about her. It was very, very, very nasty.
Douthat: Well, in fairness — I mean in fairness to Alan Dershowitz — she had accused him of sex crimes.
Brown: Right. You didn’t let me finish.
Douthat: No, sorry.
Brown: Because I certainly agree that that’s enough to drive anybody crazy, especially if you’re wrongly accused. And he certainly felt that she had misidentified him. At the same time, Virginia wasn’t the only one that accused Dershowitz of this. There was one other victim that also accused him. So I agree that it — especially how the whole thing ended it, there’s certainly some question about whether her allegations — whether she was mistaken or not, let’s put it that way.
But I do think that the reason she ended up suffering so much trauma is every time something like this happens to a victim who’s been sexually abused — and she was as a child — you’re retraumatized. And so she had a lot of trauma in her life. And I’m sure that that led to her problems. Her mental health problems that ultimately led to her suicide.
Douthat: Right. So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.
Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.
It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——
Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.
Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.
Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.
Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?
Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.
So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.
Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.
We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.
Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?
Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.
He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.
This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do.
Douthat: When people talk about the Epstein files — this term of art that gets thrown around — some of what you’re suggesting sounds more like you think the government needs to look at material it already has but, effectively, create a new set of Epstein ——
Brown: Well, we don’t know.
Douthat: Like, we’re going to go digging and find new ——
Brown: But do we know? Maybe they did do that. We don’t know what they did and didn’t do.
It’s possible they did conduct a counterintelligence operation. It’s possible they did look into some of these leads they received about what he was doing. These are just some of the questions. When people say release the Epstein files, you’re correct, they might not be able to release all of those files, and it might not even be appropriate for them to do so.
But to completely shut down the case the way they are now — saying, that’s it, nothing to see here — I think that does the public a disservice. Because people want answers about how this man was able to operate like this for so long.
Douthat: And when you say things could be released that wouldn’t be appropriate, that means that there’s information and material that involves both victims and maybe alleged perpetrators — also just people who are connected to Epstein, right?
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And some of that presumably can’t be released without betraying the victims themselves and some of that you wouldn’t want to release because you’d be effectively releasing hearsay and rumor about public figures who haven’t actually been charged with a crime.
Those seem like both impediments to some kinds of release that people want.
Brown: That’s correct, but there’s still a whole set of information that they could release. For example, the F.B.I. has a lot of files that are online in their vault — what they call the vault — and for the most part, when you click on those files, they’re either filled with wall-to-wall, gobbledygook codes or they’re just F.B.I. reports from the investigation way back in 2005, where they’re basically giving status updates on the case.
Those reports are heavily redacted — even Epstein’s own name is redacted in some of them. That investigation from back then — what they did, what they knew and when they knew it — certainly, some of those files could be reviewed and unredacted, so people can see exactly what happened and what the F.B.I. did or didn’t do.
Douthat: Are there similar files from the 2018-ish investigation that that could be released?
Brown: I mean, certainly they would’ve had to have some files, but remember, Ghislaine Maxwell is appealing her conviction right now. So the reason that, of course, they give for not releasing those case files concerning Maxwell is because that case is theoretically still open.
Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?
Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.
Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?
Brown: You’ll have to ask her. She certainly ——
Douthat: We’re working on getting her on the podcast, I promise.
Brown: Good luck. To be honest with you, I think once they got her conviction, that was it. From what I understand from the lawyers representing the victims, they were more concerned about getting Epstein and Maxwell. They never really went there — to go after the other people. And so if you don’t want to go there and you don’t want to do that, there would be ——
Douthat: So if her lawyers had offered, they would’ve just said, no thanks, we’re not interested in giving evidence against someone else?
Brown: I don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.
First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein?
Brown: Yeah, and I’d like to stick with what I know.
Douthat: Yeah, stick with what you know there.
Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.
Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.
Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly.
Douthat: But there’s no reason in the public record in what we know to think that out of all of Epstein’s friends and acquaintances, Trump would be someone who you would expect to have actually been deeply enmeshed with Epstein in some way?
Brown: There was no evidence, right now, that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s businesses or his sex trafficking or his crimes.
Douthat: So then — and again, I don’t want to make you speculate too much — but then to you watching Trump essentially say: It’s time to bury this story. It’s time to get my own supporters to move on from it. What does that look like to you? Similar to the desire of prosecutors not to have to deal with potential fallout from other names coming out? Is that your reading?
Brown: I don’t know, it doesn’t make any sense to me, to be honest with you. I really honestly don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense that you would promote doing this and saying you’re going to do it over and over again and have the people that you appoint go forward with going public on TV in a very public way, promising to do something and then switch gears. I really honestly don’t know why he would do something like that.
Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.
My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.
Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?
Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.
It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.
Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——
Brown: That’s correct.
Ross Douthat: ——of Epstein’s crimes, who should face justice and haven’t.
Brown: Yeah, let me be clear: Epstein did not do this all by himself. He barely tied his shoes by himself. He had butlers and assistants doing everything for him, including the compiling of his contact lists, his musical playlists. He had people doing that for him. His computers — he had lots of people helping him. So he did not do this alone. There were other people helping him. And there were other men who he sent some of these women to.
Douthat: Julie K. Brown, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Brown: Thank you.
Credit...The New York Times
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Katherine Sullivan, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Andrea Betanzos. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Elliot deBruyn and Will DeJessa. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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A correction was made on July 21, 2025: An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. He is Geoffrey Berman, not Jeffrey.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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