ON JULY 27, 2017, an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald named Julie Brown reached out to me. Up to that point, more than one hundred reporters had done the same, all asking for information about some aspect of the cases against Jeffrey Epstein. Some had inquired about the criminal investigation, others about the federal process that had resulted in the non-prosecution agreement, but few had dug deep to try to understand the case we had filed for victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
There was a fair amount of arcane legal stuff in the CVRA case, which meant most reporters were understandably not interested. Still, the case highlighted a two-tier system of justice that worked differently for the rich than it did for common people. That was something we had now proven and that the public deserved to know.
Part of the reason for the case’s low profile was probably me. For the most part, I don’t speak much to the media, particularly during litigation. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but my general philosophy is not to do so unless it gives my client an advantage of some kind, such as the likelihood that helpful new witnesses might come forward. There were times, for instance, when we were looking for witnesses that I would speak to reporters and give them enough information that might prompt new witnesses to call our office or law enforcement. But speaking needlessly about an active case to the media just to get a story out there has never interested me.
When the email came in from Julie Brown, my initial instinct was to ignore it. I knew she was an investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, but it was also evident that she knew nothing about the case. So much had transpired over the past nine years that for her to catch up and write a meaningful and accurate piece—one that wasn’t a regurgitation of previous stories—was, I thought, unlikely. It would also take a lot of my time, which forced me to ask, to what end? What would my clients get out of my taking time to become her source and shape her reporting?
Before I dismissed her altogether, I read the email out loud in the conference room where my team was preparing another matter for trial. Brittany told me, “You should really think about talking to Julie. I read some of her work on abuse in Florida prisons and it was good. She really investigates before she writes.” Brittany was working on multiple high-profile civil rights cases at the time, so she had paid close attention to those articles.
I started to rethink ignoring Julie’s email. I looked at her other projects online and it was evident that she was not half-assed in her reporting. Unlike a lot of others, she also appeared to have the patience to cover a story from multiple angles, and not rush to publish too quickly.
What’s more, there was something bothering me about the case, something that a reporter willing to put in the time could help remedy. From the first cases filed against Epstein, the media had grouped our victims together and treated them as one collective identity whose voices didn’t merit being heard. Even the few girls—now grown women—who had tried to speak were silenced by the bullying lawyers who represented the “misunderstood,” politically connected philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein. Anyone who was identified as one of Epstein’s victims was labeled as nothing more than a prostitute, because the charges that had been conjured up by Epstein’s camp, the federal government, and the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office allowed him to plead guilty for “soliciting prostitution or procuring a minor for prostitution.” Those prior reports lumping the victims together added to their suffering, making them seem like faceless, voiceless, meaningless objects—exactly as Epstein had wanted.
By this stage of the case, when I’d spoken to more than fifty victims, these characterizations of “the victims” as not having individual identities or being real people bothered me a great deal. I knew the backgrounds of the survivors, and who they were before they’d met Jeffrey Epstein. I had learned a lot about their early lives, what problems they had faced, what vulnerabilities they had displayed, and what had happened to them after they’d been abused and had tried to move on. I had known some for years and considered them friends. They deserved an identity, for the world to understand how brave and strong and special they were.
Was Julie the reporter who could help me breathe personality into the empty stereotypes that had been given to the public about the Epstein victims? While I was giving as many clients as I could a voice through the legal process, was Julie someone who could understand the facts well enough to help elevate those voices beyond the legal arena? If the answer was yes, was it worth the risk and the enormous amount of time it would take to help Julie catch up? Above all, I wanted to do what was best for my clients, which I knew might mean meeting with Julie.
I decided to at least respond to her email and invite her over to the office. In many regards, our first meeting was like all the others I’d had with reporters who claimed to want to do what Julie was saying she wanted to do. I had accumulated all of the evidence in these cases and done all of the work. Unable to imagine the scope of that decade-long task, or how voluminous the materials were and how complicated piecing it together really was, Julie, like other reporters, wanted to start with my just spoon-feeding her everything and making it simple.
I wasn’t about to do that. Not because I didn’t want to help, but because that approach wouldn’t get her or me where we wanted to go. Her goal, she said, was to give the public the chance to hear from the victims themselves and to expose how the legal system and the media had failed them. Sure, I could have just let her interview several of my clients and put it into a story. But she would not have put any time into the story herself, so she wouldn’t appreciate the necessary complexities. In turn, the result wouldn’t be very good. Before she left my office, I told her I would help.
I made a list of things that she could review to understand the facts as well as the defenses that had been lodged against us, the labels that had been attached to the victims, and the bullying tactics that had allowed the bad guys to control the message in the past.
With my list as a guide, I told her where to go to find each public filing and piece of the case against Epstein on her own. I told her who to serve with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and where to get the pleadings that contained information she would find useful. Most reporters, I think, would have decided to focus on a short-term aspect of the story or begged for blind victim interviews. To Julie’s credit, she didn’t fall into that trap. She followed the road map and stayed on course.
At the beginning of her investigation, Julie was shocked by what she was finding. At other times, she was amazed. She would call me to ask questions, and her questions were good. She cared about getting the answers right. When I told her where to look to cross-check something, she would typically call back the same day to verify what I had told her. Often during that process she would, of course, discover other information that I had known at some point but had forgotten. As much as I was helping her with her story, if the end product was half-decent it would be enormously valuable to my clients’ pursuit of justice.