Book Interview: Exposing Jeffrey Epstein - and examining his ties to power
A protest group called "Hot Mess" hold up signs of Jeffrey Epstein in front of the Federal courthouse on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
- Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story
- Julie K. Brown
- Harper Collins, €19.50
In August 2019, while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges, 66-year old American financier Jeffrey Epstein, was found hanging in his cell in a Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Julie K. Brown says “that neither the F.B.I nor the U.S. Justice Department have convinced me that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.” “Why would Epstein give up before he even got to court?” the 59-year-old American journalist asks rhetorically.
She also points to other suspicious details: Epstein breaking three bones in his neck before he died. And how two prison guards keeping a watchful eye on Epstein in his Manhattan jail cell mysteriously fell asleep at the same time.
“It just defies common sense,” says Brown. “And why are the [U.S.] authorities not making the information they do know about Epstein's death public?” In Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story Brown explores numerous leads that tries to answer that question. One idea is that the deceased financier and convicted sex offender was perhaps connected to Israeli intelligence.
“It's not beyond the realm of possibility that Epstein had connections to the [Israeli intelligence community]” Brown explains via Zoom call from her home in Hollywood, Florida. “Robert Maxwell certainly had those kinds of connections, and Epstein had a close relationship with Robert Maxwell.” Brown also claims Epstein began helping Maxwell to hide money in numerous offshore bank accounts back in the 1980s.
Maxwell was born into a poor Jewish family in Czechoslovakia in 1923. But he later became a British media mogul and flamboyant billionaire. Maxwell also briefly served in the House of Commons as an M.P. for Britain's Labour Party. The final years of his life were plagued by financial trouble though. Maxwell defaulted on two billion dollars worth of loans and subsequently raided millions of pounds from his company's retirement fund— and even stole from his own staff's pensions and shares in Britain’s Mirror Group.
In November 1991, at 68, Maxwell was said to have drowned while falling from his £15m yacht, Lady Ghislaine, near the Canary Islands. Rumors about Maxwell's death have never gone away. One theory claims Maxwell was assassinated by the Israeli intelligence agency he was secretly working for, Mossad. Brown's book notes how Maxwell invested a great deal of money in Israel. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Many members of Israeli intelligence attended Maxwell's funeral: where he was eulogised by Israel's then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Following Robert Maxwell's death, Epstein became romantically involved with Robert Maxwell's ninth child: Ghislaine. She was known to be her father's favorite, and his most trusted confidante. Brown believes Ghislaine Maxwell may have been aware of many secrets her father took to the grave relating to his controversial political, financial, and espionage life. After her father's death, Ghislaine Maxwell moved from London to New York, reinventing herself in the city's buzzing celebrity social circle.
This was a crucial component of Epstein and Maxwell’s complex relationship: she connected him to powerful figures that were then beyond his reach, like the Clintons, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew. Epstein bankrolled her in return. The rest is history.
The 59-year-old outspoken British socialite is currently residing in a New York prison awaiting trial: it's set to begin this coming November. She is charged in the United States with lying under oath and recruiting, grooming, and trafficking girls to be sexually abused by Epstein from the 1990s through 2004. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty. But if convicted, Maxwell could face up to 80 years in prison.
“So far Maxwell is playing the same game with her defense [lawyers] as Epstein did: they are throwing every motion they can against these prosecutors to try to wear them down,” says Brown. “But it probably won’t work because the prosecutors that are handling [the case] this time around are much more dedicated and are not going to give up as easily.”
Brown has a detailed understanding of how prosecutors can be corrupted in a high-profile case relating to sex trafficking accusations. It is, after all, the main story she tells in her current book, which began as a three-part investigate series of articles she wrote for The Miami Herald in 2018: they exposed a secret plea deal that was arranged by Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers who undermined and manipulated the United States' criminal justice system so their client could get a softer prison sentence, and ultimately escape federal prosecution.
Brown showed how back in 2007 Epstein was accused of assembling a cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, as often as three times a day. Brown's articles noted too how F.B.I. and court records showed Epstein was suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Based on a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein back in 2008 could have potentially ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life. But the non-prosecution agreement Epstein's lawyers secretly cut with federal prosecutors at the time shut down an ongoing F.B.I. probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes. The deal required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in a state court, and to agree to serve just 13 months in a county jail in Palm Beach, Florida.
None of these details were public knowledge until Brown’s explosive expose was published three years ago. It led to Federal prosecutors in New York opening a fresh criminal investigation, which resulted in Epstein being subsequently arrested and charged in the summer of 2019. It also led to R. Alexander Acosta resigning as labor secretary in the Trump administration in July 2019. Crucially, Brown's story explained how Acosta had helped cut the dodgy deal with Epstein's legal team back in 2008, when he was then U.S. attorney in Miami.
“When [President] Donald Trump nominated Alex Acosta to be his labor secretary in early 2017, I immediately recognised Acosta's name as being the prosecutor who was responsible for the [non-prosecution] deal,” Brown explains. “And I just wondered: how do [Epstein's] victims feel about this because Acosta was responsible for the Labor Department which supervises human trafficking and child labor laws?” Brown notes that Epstein's fortune (then estimated to be approximately $500 million) enabled him to hire a so-called legal dream team to make sure he could get immunity. It included high-profile lawyers like Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz.
“Dershowitz has his own political connections and knows a lot of different people in the U.S. criminal justice system,” says Brown. “But he is going to be watching Maxwell's court case closely to see who she names, and what information she really has.” Brown's book also points to accusations that subsequently surfaced relating to the Epstein case that link Dershowitz's name directly to Epstein's sexual pyramid scheme.
The allegations came from Virginia Giuffre: an advocate for sex trafficking victims who claims Maxwell groomed her when she was still a teenager to be a sex slave for Maxwell, Epstein, Prince Andrew, and other prominent powerful men, including Dershowitz.
Brown says all the accused have the right to be innocent until proven guilty.
But the journalist stresses why all of these allegations need to be urgently investigated.
“The FBI, the federal authorities, and law enforcement authorities in Europe, should all be looking at the financial and social connections Epstein had with all of these people,” says Brown. “This was an international sex trafficking organisation, that was similar to an organised crime family. He did not do this alone.”
