Julie K. Brown | |
---|---|
Born | 1961 (age 61–62) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Temple University |
Occupation | Investigative journalist |
Employer | Miami Herald |
Children | 2 |
Awards | George Polk Award, 2014 George Polk Award, 2018 Sidney Award, 2019 |
Julie K. Brown (born 1961) is an American investigative journalist with the Miami Herald best known for pursuing the sex trafficking story surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 was allowed to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution offenses. [1] [2] She is the recipient of several awards including two George Polk Awards for Justice Reporting. [3]
Brown was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. [4]
Brown was raised near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by a single parent. She left home at 16 and worked in menial jobs before she could afford to attend college. She graduated magna cum laude from Temple University in 1987 with a degree in journalism. [1]
After college, Brown worked for the Philadelphia Daily News before joining the Miami Herald a daily newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company, around 2000. [1] [5] [6]
While at the Miami Herald, Brown spent four years investigating patterns of abuse in the Florida prison system. [7] Her reporting work prompted a 2018 federal investigation into civil rights abuses in Lowell Correctional Institution in Central Florida. [8]
Brown has been credited with re-opening the Jeffrey Epstein sexual abuse case with a series of reports published in November 2018. [9] [10] [11] She began investigating Epstein in early 2017 and persisted in uncovering facts about the large number of accusers and the pressure campaign to silence them. [12] [13] Brown uncovered 80 potential victims (as young as 13 and 14 years old when the abuse occurred) and documented the eight individuals who agreed to tell their stories. [13] In 2008 Epstein had been allowed to plead guilty to only two state-level prostitution offenses, even though sex with underage girls is legally rape. The secret deal that then-US Attorney Alex Acosta struck with Epstein made federal sex trafficking charges disappear, shut down an FBI probe that might have uncovered dozens of victims, and granted immunity to any possible co-conspirators, a clause that allegedly protected powerful men. [2] Her 2018 reporting on the deal and Acosta's role in it sparked criticism of Acosta, who by then had become the United States secretary of labor, and there was pressure for him to resign. He eventually resigned after Epstein was arrested and charged in July 2019. [14] After Epstein was re-arrested, many commentators praised her and the Herald for their reporting. "This is what happens when a reporter refuses to give up on a story," The Columbia Journalism Review wrote on Twitter following Epstein's arrest. Geoffrey Berman, a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, also commented at a news conference that his team had been “assisted by some excellent investigative journalism.” [1] But she tweeted in response "The Real Heroes Here were the courageous victims that faced their fears and told their stories". [15] Brown’s articles were collected under the title "Perversion of Justice" and resurfaced on social media.
In July 2020, Brown’s book, Perversion of Justice, based on her reporting on the Epstein case, was published by William Morrow and Company. [16] The book will serve as the foundation for a limited series on HBO to be executive produced by Brown, along with Kevin Messick and Adam McKay. [12]
Brown won a 2014 George Polk Award in Justice Reporting from Long Island University for "Cruel and Unusual," her series of articles on "the brutal, sometimes fatal mistreatment of Florida prison inmates with mental illnesses." [17] [3]
Brown received a second George Polk Award in the category of Justice Reporting in 2018 for her investigative journalism on "Perversion of Justice." [3] Her series covered the extensive number of accusers in the Epstein case and the role of federal prosecutor Alex Acosta who permitted a non-prosecution agreement that protected four named conspirators and "granted immunity to any possible co-conspirators, a proviso that seemed to protect the powerful men Epstein partied with." [1] [3] [2]
In April 2019, Alan Dershowitz (an associate of Epstein who was one of his attorneys during his criminal investigation in 2006-2008) tried to pressure the Pulitzer prize committee to shut out Brown and the Miami Herald for her investigative reporting that reopened the Epstein case. [18] [ unreliable source? ] In an open letter Dershowitz wrote that Brown should not be rewarded for her work. She was not. [19] [20] At the start of her investigative reporting on Epstein, Brown had been warned by former Police Chief Michael Reiter to expect pushback as other members of the media who attempted to report on Epstein had been reassigned following a phone call to their publisher. [13] Reiter stated “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.” [13]
Brown received the National Press Club Journalism Institute's 2019 Neil and Susan Sheehan award for investigative journalism in October 2019. [21] [22]
In December 2019, Brown and her Miami Herald colleague Emily Michot were jointly recognized for their five-part series "Perversion of Justice," with a Sidney Award, the Hillman Prize for Journalism in the Common Good, from the Sidney Hillman Foundation. [2]
Brown has two children, one daughter and one son. [12]
David Boies is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. Boies rose to national prominence for three major cases: leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp., his unsuccessful representation of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and for successful representation of the plaintiff in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which invalidated California Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Boies has also represented various clients in US lawsuits, including Theranos, tobacco companies, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein's victims including Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
The Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting has been awarded since 1953, under one name or another, for a distinguished example of investigative reporting by an individual or team, presented as a single article or series in a U.S. news publication. It is administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and former law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.
Jeffrey Edward Epstein was an American sex offender and financier. Born and raised in New York City, Epstein began his professional life by teaching at the Dalton School despite lacking a college degree. After his dismissal from the school, he entered the banking and finance sector, working at Bear Stearns in various roles before starting his own firm. Epstein developed an elite social circle and procured many women and children whom he and his associates sexually abused.
Jay Lefkowitz is an American lawyer. He is a senior partner at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm, and he also served as President George W. Bush's Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea.
Rene Alexander Acosta is an American attorney and politician, who served as the 27th United States Secretary of Labor from 2017 to 2019. President Donald Trump nominated Acosta to be Labor Secretary on February 16, 2017, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 27, 2017.
Paul George Cassell is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Utah, who is currently the Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and University Distinguished Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. He is best known as an expert in, and proponent of, victims' rights.
Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell is a British convicted sex offender and former socialite. In 2021, she was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In June 2022, she was sentenced in a New York court to twenty years' imprisonment.
Sara Elizabeth Ganim is an American journalist, now a correspondent for CNN. Previously she was a reporter for The Patriot-News, a daily newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There she broke the story that featured the Sandusky scandal and the Second Mile charity. For the Sandusky/Penn State coverage, "Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff" won a number of national awards including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, making Ganim the third-youngest winner of a Pulitzer. The award cited "courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Sandusky sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky."
Nadia Marcinko, also known as Nada Marcinkova, is a Slovakian-born pilot, flight instructor, and the CEO of Aviloop, an aviation website. She is known for being a co-conspirator of financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Ghislaine Maxwell.
Lauren Frances Book is an American politician and former educator who has served in the Florida Senate since 2016, representing parts of Broward County. A member of the Democratic Party, she has been the Senate's minority leader since April 28, 2021.
Michael Reiter is an American security advisor who previously served as chief of police of Palm Beach, Florida, from 2001 to 2009. Having served in the Palm Beach Police Department since 1981, he has been involved in several high-profile criminal investigations in the affluent town with several nationally-prominent residents, including the overdose death of David Kennedy and the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Reiter came to international attention since the mid-2000s when he initiated the first inquiry into Epstein, an investor who was accused of involvement in multinational child sex trafficking and having sex with a minor, and was later convicted for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.
On August 10, 2019, guards found Jeffrey Epstein – the American financier and convicted sex offender – unresponsive in his Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. After prison guards performed CPR, he was transported in cardiac arrest to the New York Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:39 am. The New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department Inspector General ruled that Epstein's death was a suicide by hanging. Epstein's lawyers challenged the medical examiner's conclusion and opened their own investigation, hiring pathologist Michael Baden.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is a phrase referring to multiple conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein that dispute the official ruling of suicide by hanging. Epstein was an American financier and convicted sex offender with connections to powerful and wealthy people, and his reported suicide led to numerous hypotheses about the nature and cause of his death. The phrase became a now very famous and widely accepted colloquialism as well as an internet meme, gaining traction in November 2019 as more of the circumstances around his death became public. The most common theory asserts that the true cause of his death was homicide, via strangulation, arranged by one or more co-conspirators to prevent him from revealing any compromising information. As a result, some people have used "epstein" as a verb to refer to instances of murder— by the arrangement of powerful criminals— of people with compromising information which officials rule as suicides.
Virginia Louise Giuffre is an American-Australian campaigner who offers support to victims of sex trafficking. She is an alleged victim of the sex trafficking ring of Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre created Victims Refuse Silence, a non-profit based in the United States, in 2015, which was relaunched under the name Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) in November 2021. She has given a detailed account to many American and British reporters about her experiences of being trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maria K. Farmer is an American visual artist known for providing the first criminal complaint to law enforcement, to the New York City Police Department and to the FBI, in 1996 about the conduct of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Farmer, a figurative painter, had described her and her sister Annie's experiences of sexual misconduct from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to a journalist at Vanity Fair in 2002 but the publication refrained from including it in their accounts.
Jean-Luc Brunel was a French model scout. He gained prominence by leading the international modelling agency Karin Models, and founded MC2 Model Management, with financing by Jeffrey Epstein. The subject of a 60 Minutes investigation in 1988, Brunel faced allegations of sexual assault spanning three decades.
Towers Financial Corporation was a debt collection agency based in Manhattan in New York City. Between 1988 and 1993, Towers Financial ran a Ponzi scheme that was the largest financial fraud in American history prior to Bernie Madoff's being uncovered.
"Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal" is an episode of the BBC's news and current affairs programme Newsnight broadcast on BBC Two on 16 November 2019. In the 58-minute programme, Prince Andrew, Duke of York was interviewed by Emily Maitlis about his relationship with the American convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew's responses in the interview received negative reactions from both the media and the public. In May 2020, it was announced that he would indefinitely withdraw from his public roles.