PERVERSION OF JUSTICE

An award-winning Miami Herald reporter chronicles the diligent research that led to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-overdue downfall.

In late 2018, the Herald began publishing Brown’s three-part series on Epstein, articles that helped to land the wealthy pedophile in jail and led to an investigation of Alex Acosta, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Epstein’s sexual exploitation of underage girls, his association with powerful men, and his efforts to suppress accusations against him have been extensively publicized in the media, but Brown, whose investigations won her a George Polk Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, creates a tense narrative detailing how she uncovered not only Epstein’s long career of sexual exploitation, but, equally as disturbing, the “broken system of values that places corporate profits, personal wealth, political connections, and celebrity above some of the most sacred tenets of our faiths, our teachings, and our democracy.” A major donor to Democrats, arts institutions, and scientific research, Epstein seemed too rich to attack. But Brown was relentless: She filled a spare bedroom of her apartment with Epstein’s civil cases and public records, created files for each victim, and combed through mind-numbing police reports and legal documents. She won the cooperation of a police officer and his chief who knew the case intimately, and she interviewed victims, including those who procured others. Epstein preyed on troubled girls, promising to help them, paying them hundreds of dollars for massages and sex, funding their schooling, and buying them expensive clothing. He was a master of intimidation, hiring private investigators to threaten girls who he thought might talk to police or the FBI and assembling a stellar team of lawyers, including Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz. Brown’s fragmented chronology can be disorienting, and her recounting of dead ends is distracting, but overall, she creates a striking, deeply troubling portrait of a man with “a goliath-sized ego” and the women whose lives he destroyed.

A sad, sordid tale and a tribute to dedicated investigative journalism.