Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Do Not Mess with the Reporter Who Took Down Jeffrey Epstein About this episode Julie K. Brown went from working in a bell factory to ringing the alarm on masters of the universe and (finally) winning a Pulitzer. The Miami Herald reporter visits Pablo to shed light on the culture of silence that protected Epstein for so long, the legal dream team that struck his secret deal, then how Epstein pulled out all the stops... to stop her investigation. Plus: the whistleblower who gave away the A-Rod steroid scandal, sneaking into a hospital to interview Joe Frazier... and the maddening therapy of Philly sports.
• Take the PTFO audience survey https://forms.gle/i2K6FecAbvBqDxRK9
• Read "Perversion of Justice" by Julie K. Brown https://www.harpercollins.com/products/perversion-of-justice-julie-k-brown?variant=44010796908578
Previously on PTFO:
• Part 1: We Investigate Harvard's Hidden Epstein Files https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlmMmJkZWMzZDIxZWUyMjhjNmFiMjRh
• Part 2: How Harvard Whitewashed Jeffrey Epstein's Millions https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlmNDAzYzg3MGU2M2NlYWEwMDIwYWJi
• Plus: The NBA Player, the Congressman and the Epstein Files https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjkyZjVhZWVmYjZlYThlMzc4YzYxY2Rk
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 Hell no, I'm not going to a party with Jeffrey Epstein.
0:10 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
0:14 Speaker 02 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.
0:28 Speaker 03 Everybody, listen up.
0:29 Speaker 02 Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed and the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
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1:55 Pablo Torre? I love that you're wearing the cardigan.
1:58 Speaker 01 Picked it out specially for you.
2:00 Pablo Torre? This is a pro-cardigan journalistic institution. Pablo Torre finds out. And Julie K. Brown comes wearing. Could you describe what you are adorned with today?
2:09 Speaker 01 Well, this is sort of like an old-fashioned Letterman sweater, but it is adorned with Phillies, Philadelphia Phillies logo, and scrolled across the back. It's very girly looking, though. It has pink and roses on it, but...
2:25 Pablo Torre? But underneath any cracked Liberty Bell insignia, and the rose on the script P, is of course the implicit threat of not [bleep]ing with the city of Philadelphia.
2:39 Speaker 01 Yes, I would say so. Or not [bleep]ing with me.
2:44 Pablo Torre? Which is a lesson all of us should heed, I think. But we are meeting because I've been a fan of yours for such a long time.
2:52 Speaker 01 Thank you.
2:52 Pablo Torre? And one of the great delights in my discovery of not just your reporting, but the person behind the reporting, is that you're an actual unhinged Philadelphia sports fan.
3:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. Well, we almost all are. It's not like I'm unique in that category. I mean, I'd say I cover a lot of tough news and subjects that are very sensitive and hard. And Philadelphia sports just helps me just distract from, you know, covering sexual assault and crimes and misconduct and corruption. And, you know, although there is corruption in sports, as you know, which is why I appreciate your work.
3:34 Pablo Torre? Thank you.
3:35 Speaker 01 It is a good distraction for the most part for me.
3:38 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say, if you want to know how dark the worlds that Julie K. Brown has been investigating can be, the Phillies. And the Sixers can be a welcome respite.
3:50 Speaker 01 Yes, that's one way to look at it. Hey, I look at every home run as like, wow, that's a happy moment for me.
3:58 Pablo Torre? For people who don't know you, I just want to give the back of the baseball card summary here because you are the woman whose reporting led to the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the resignation of the US Secretary of Labor, the first arrest of a British royal in 400 years. It led to the Epstein files being released in the way that America has now been grappling with. It has turned politics, academia, media upside down, and it goes on. And yet, one of my favorite chapters in your sort of coverage came recently because you finally got the award that you deserved long ago. Congrats on your Pulitzer.
4:38 Speaker 01 Thank you, thank you. Yes, it was only seven years later, eight years later.
4:45 Pablo Torre? But who's counting?
4:46 Speaker 01 I mean, this story has had a lot of impact, and that's a reward in of itself. I mean.
4:52 Pablo Torre? Where were you when they told you that you won a Pulitzer?
4:54 Speaker 01 I was at the airport coming back from Philly. I had just gotten off the, I was just, my plane had just landed, and a friend that I know in high places just sent me a text that had a big heart on it. That's all he sent. And at first, I thought, I wonder what this means. And then I thought, well, it probably means I didn't get it. And he's just like sending me a hug. So I sent him a note. I was getting off the plane. My son was picking me up, and I sent him a note. I said, maybe better luck next year. And he, he said, don't be so sure, my friend. So that's kind of when I started thinking. And then as soon as I got out where my son was standing to pick me up, I got a call
5:38 Speaker 01 from my editor, and she told me, you have to come to the office tomorrow because you're going to get a Pulitzer. And I just started crying with my son. You know, my son was standing there, and I just started crying. And he's like, Mom, Mom, are you okay? And I said, I just found out I won a Pulitzer. And he said, that's great, Mom. Get in the car, let's go.
6:18 Pablo Torre? You're reporting to Miami Herald, "Perversion of Justice: This Series in 2017-2018." I do want to walk through some of that, but I also want to acknowledge that you winning the Pulitzer, beyond being a thing us journalists love to talk about, it's also something that Alan Dershowitz explicitly campaigned against.
6:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:40 Pablo Torre? I just want to read this for a second here. He wrote this post on gatestoneinstitute.org. "April 3, 2019, 10 a.m. Headline: An Open Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee: Don't Reward Fake News." And he goes on to say, "Shame on Julie K. Brown, shame on the Miami Herald, and shame on the Pulitzer Committee if it fails to investigate Brown's reporting and encourages such fake news and shoddy journalism by rewarding it." I mean, frame that.
7:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:10 Pablo Torre? I hope you also can just put that somewhere as proof of something as well.
7:15 Speaker 01 Also, the irony of that is now we have emails from Jeffrey Epstein that were written after this series was published. And Jeffrey Epstein, to his credit, recognized how serious this was.
7:26 Pablo Torre? So this is Jeffrey Epstein, February 23, 2019, a couple of months before Alan Dershowitz's post we just quoted. And he says to Martin Weinberg, quote, "Should we share the Julie Brown text with Alan? She is going to start trouble, asking for victims, et cetera."
7:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:50 Pablo Torre? It's hard to be this vindicated.
7:54 Speaker 01 Well, I'll feel vindicated when they start arresting some more people or at least holding more people accountable because we know that this is so much bigger.
8:04 Pablo Torre? Well, I want to talk about how this started because Alan Dershowitz was a key member of Jeffrey Epstein's legal team. And part of what you uncover that you excavated, I just want to have you help us plainly walk through it. Because what he helped arrange was a secret deal.
8:24 Speaker 01 Right, right.
8:25 Pablo Torre? What did that deal entail? And how did that come to be?
8:29 Speaker 01 They just wanted this case to go away. The prosecutors in Miami and Palm Beach, it was the Southern District of Florida. And they would just realize how Epstein hired this team of lawyers, Dershowitz being one of them, Ken Starr was on the team, Roy Black was on the team. I mean, it was a dream team.
8:50 Pablo Torre? Absolutely.
8:50 Speaker 01 Of the most powerful lawyers you could hire. And he hired private investigators too, by the way, to follow these victims and to get dirt on their families. He pulled out all the stops. And part of that was negotiating a deal. There was so much going on with the victims. They were trying to portray them as prostitutes for one thing, even though they were, you know, 13, 14 years old. And I just think the prosecutors were so dazzled by these lawyers. And they just realized this was going to be a tough case. And they just basically rolled over.
9:31 Speaker 01 His lawyers actually dictated the terms of this deal that was made. They dictated every aspect of that deal to the prosecutors. You know, at the time, they were putting men away for 15, 20 years for just having child porn on their computers. And so it's crazy that they made a deal like this. And they kept it secret. They purposely sealed it so that no one would know about it.
10:01 Pablo Torre? I mean, this deal, which comes after.
10:05 Pablo Torre? Girls had gone to Palm Beach Police, starting in 2005.
10:09 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
10:09 Pablo Torre? Leading the police to investigate. It makes its way, as you put it, to the US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida.
10:18 Speaker 01 Right.
10:19 Pablo Torre? Alex Acosta, who we will return to in a second here. But what this agreement was, was a federal non-prosecution agreement that also enabled a punishment that is remarkable.
10:34 Speaker 01 It wasn't much of a punishment at all. I mean, he got work release and essentially what that meant was, he hired all these Palm Beach sheriffs at, you know, $30, $40 an hour to basically follow him in a separate car, because he had his, the delay pick him up at the jail every morning, take him to a beautiful waterfront office, which was essentially in one of his lawyer's suites in Palm Beach. And he set up this, you know, pseudo-company called the Florida Science Foundation. And he would spend all day, 12 hours a day, pretty much every single day. So he wasn't in jail at all. He just went there to sleep.
11:19 Speaker 01 You know, it was a joke. He had visitors coming in. He had women coming in. Afterward, we found out he was having sex with the women. So, you know, it was more of him manipulating this system. First, he gets the deal, gets it kept quiet. Then the next part is, we want work release, so he's not in jail. He was on community control after that. You're not supposed to go anywhere. It's sort of a house of rest. He's going all over the place, traveling to New York. The Palm Beach Sheriff's Office let him just basically walk all over them, too.
11:55 Pablo Torre? He was getting access to a room where there was a TV that was.
11:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, while he was, for the short time before he got the work release, he was in his own special area of the prison. And Sarah Kellen just testified last week that she had to undress and strip on camera for him while he had this monitor where he could see her. This was while he was in the Palm Beach jail.
12:22 Pablo Torre? I mean, it's an 18-month sentence. He serves less than 13 months. And he's also granted immunity for himself and for his four assistants for any related charges.
12:33 Speaker 01 That's right. And an unknown number of others because the way that it was phrased, it said, and any others, I don't remember the exact words, but nobody knew what that meant. We thought that it's possible that could mean everybody that ever, you know, was, you know, part of his sex trafficking could have gotten immunity because of the way they phrased it.
12:57 Pablo Torre? And so the guy who is the US Attorney at the time in the Southern District of Florida is Alex Acosta. And just to walk people through the timeline, so something fascinating happens in February of 2017.
13:12 Speaker 04 I just wanted to begin by mentioning that the nominee for Secretary of the Department of Labor will be Mr. Alex Acosta. He has a law degree from Harvard Law School, a great student, former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito. And he has had a tremendous career.
13:37 Pablo Torre? And for those who don't know, one of the responsibilities of the Secretary of Labor of the United States would be what?
13:43 Speaker 01 Oversight of human trafficking and child labor laws.
13:47 Pablo Torre? And so the idea that this same guy ends up getting that job.
13:52 Speaker 01 Right.
13:53 Pablo Torre? This feels like something that America should probably know about.
13:58 Speaker 01 Yes, and the other sad part about it is there had been many stories written about Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, I didn't break this story. It was known that he had committed serious crimes against young girls. And so I thought when they nominated Alex Acosta, that the confirmation hearing, these senators would grill him on this. It was the biggest case of his career. And they hardly asked any questions of him. So that made me even dig in more because I'm thinking, everybody must have forgotten these poor victims. They must have completely forgotten who they were and how they were sexually abused.
14:40 Pablo Torre? And I want to make something clear, too, which is that your way in as a matter of reporting here was to pour over all of these documents, all of these Jane Does, one, two, three, four, down the line.
14:52 Speaker 01 Jane Doe 143, you know.
14:56 Pablo Torre? And when you're doing this and you're going through that approach, it's worth noting that you are also requesting comment from Jeffrey Epstein, from his attorneys. And how would you characterize their response to you as you're now hot on a trail that maybe they don't fully understand?
15:17 Speaker 01 Well, I kept it pretty close to the vest when I first started tracking down the women. I did not want them to know because they had, as I mentioned, they had hired private investigators to really stalk these women and their families. And by now, of course, these women are older, they're in their late twenties, they have children, they have their own families. And I did not want to let Jeffrey Epstein send more private investigators after them. So I kept it pretty close to the vest until I had pretty much buttoned up the story. And then, you know, I would say, three to six months before it published
15:58 Speaker 01 was when I started reaching out to all his lawyers and to Alan Dershowitz and sending certified letters to all his residences.
16:08 Speaker 01 All of Dershowitz's residences and all of Maxwell's residences and all their lawyers. I mean, we spent probably maybe $300 or more just on certified letters.
16:21 Pablo Torre? Pre-publication.
16:22 Speaker 01 Pre-publication, yeah.
16:23 Pablo Torre? Which is to say that they have an opportunity to take you super seriously.
16:28 Speaker 01 Right. Well, Dershowitz did because Dershowitz just became a attack dog. And he really did with our lawyers, with me, with my editors. The emails were so crazy that I just were for, I was forwarding them to our lawyer. Because it was just too crazy. It was like, I can't get the story published if I'm dealing with all the Dershowitz nonsense.
16:54 Pablo Torre? Right.
16:55 Speaker 01 I was willing to, you know, listen to his side of the story about it. And we did. We ended up, before publication, he never would meet with us. He said he had all this evidence, but he never showed it to us. So after publication, he said, okay, you can come to my Miami Beach condo and I'm going to show you piles of evidence. So my, the first time I had ever in my career told my editor, you got to come with me. So my editor and I went there and I swear we were there for 100 hours. It felt like it was forever. And he had piles of his schedules for the past like 20 years. Piles of paper. And he said, if you look through these schedules,
17:40 Speaker 01 you'll know that there's no way this could have happened. And here they are. You can sit here and you can look at them. And we're like, we're not going to look through your schedules. Show us the pieces of this. And he just didn't do that. He wanted to make it so that it was impossible for us to really figure it out because it was just such a massive undertaking to look at his schedules for, you know, a five-year timeframe or even a three-year timeframe. So, you know, we tried, I would say, to try to confirm what he was saying.
18:12 Pablo Torre? I mean, one of the things he was trying to do there was, of course, attack the credibility of the victims.
18:18 Speaker 01 Right.
18:19 Pablo Torre? And Virginia Drew Frey is somebody who has been in the spotlight as a credibility question.
18:24 Speaker 01 Right.
18:25 Pablo Torre? She also was just memorialized recently.
18:27 Speaker 01 Right.
18:28 Pablo Torre? And, and so one of the things that I want to understand is, In your outreach and your vetting and your analysis of Epstein's accusers, how do you explain to people who don't know this story, what the degree of difficulty is on trying to triangulate among more than 100 victims? What is true?
18:53 Speaker 01 Well, there's a couple of things. Their stories all followed sort of a similar pattern. Epstein had a way that he operated. And a lot of these victims never even knew each other. But yet they told the same consistent story about how one of his assistants would call them. They would go in the back door. Another assistant would come, walk them up. And they would describe, you know, this stairway that was circular, pictures on the wall, a pink boot wire, basically. He would be laying there. I mean, it was the same story over and over. So that's one thing. The other thing is the time the police were investigating it, they collected some evidence. They had a search warrant. And there were message pads, hundreds and hundreds of. These were the pads that you would write on.
19:37 Speaker 01 And there would be a copy of it behind you back in the old days when you took a phone message. It would be like, Melissa can come at 6:00. She has piano lessons before that. Or so-and-so can't come tonight, but she'll come at 2 o'clock tomorrow. Tons of these messages from all these girls. So there were, there was corroborating evidence. The police also could see that these girls were, he was calling these girls. Sometimes he called them himself to come over. So they did have corroborating evidence to some degree. And with Virginia, they were able to corroborate some of her stories about where she was and when she was there.
20:20 Speaker 01 And I have to say, I got to know Virginia very well for many years.
20:27 Speaker 01 And there were things that maybe she misremembered, but she wasn't a liar. She just wasn't. You know, I believe her. I believed her then, and I believe her now. So you have to get to a point, I think, as journalists, and you know, when you interview somebody, you can tell when somebody is usually making something up, you know? And the other thing that I learned, I did a lot of research about sexual assault victims, and the other thing that's common is for them to misremember things about their abuse, because it just gets buried in their head. They've been traumatized. The thing that you have to really pay attention to is if they're almost rehearsed.
21:09 Speaker 01 And none of these women that I interviewed were rehearsed. It was clear that this, you know, the emotion, the crying, it hits you in the gut. You know they're telling the truth.
21:30 Pablo Torre? Hello, it's me, Pablo. We have been very interested in what you guys actually like about this show. And so in the show notes, there is a survey. You'll find it magically as a link somewhere down there. And you can tell us what you want more of, what you want less of, what annoys you about me, and potentially all of my friends. We will use this to improve the show. It takes like 30 seconds, so please fill it out, and we will make this better, allegedly. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases, like groceries, or merch, or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter
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22:34 Pablo Torre? Your background in terms of being the right person to persuade these women. This is a story full of high-powered people who come from the most ivory towers and this unimaginable wealth and these secret networks that are global. And then there's Julie K. Brown. Just as a matter of your background, how would you explain your upbringing in Philly?
23:01 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, I spent a lot of time in Philly because my mother was a single mother and I spent, we spent a lot of time with her grandparents that lived in Philadelphia. But we technically lived outside the city in the suburbs. And nevertheless, I mean, back then, for a woman to be divorced with three children, I know it's hard to even imagine now, but, but that, back then, we were bullied because of that, you know? And we didn't have money. And, you know, I just remember, for example, on Halloween, the neighbor kids throwing dirt bombs at our house on Halloween. One of them breaking the front window, you know? So we would be crouched with our mother.
23:44 Speaker 01 Instead of going out Halloween-ing like all the other kids, we would be home scared to death. So I just remember things like that and I felt, I think that in part that drove me into journalism because I wanted to tell the stories of other vulnerable people who really didn't have a voice. And my mother certainly had things happen that I felt shouldn't have happened. All the furniture being taken from our house because she couldn't pay the electric bill. But I could have been in the same kind of spot that they were in and that they felt like there was no way for them to get out from underneath the, either the poverty or
24:24 Speaker 01 in some cases, they were homeless and other cases, you know, they just were all alone. And I, for some reason, didn't end up in that same, but I, I sympathized with it.
24:37 Pablo Torre? Well, look, at 816, you become an emancipated minor.
24:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
24:42 Pablo Torre? And you go to work where?
24:44 Speaker 01 Well, at first I worked at this place called James Way, which was like a precursor to like a Walmart or those kinds of places. That was my first job, but then, you know, I did a whole bunch of things because I was living on my own and I had to buy food. So I worked delivering flowers. I worked in a lampshade factory. I worked a lot of different jobs thinking, you know, I never thought I would be able to afford college. So it was, you know, at some point I just thought, let me see if I can get a scholarship or a grant to go to school because I didn't want to work in James Way the rest of my life.
25:21 Pablo Torre? I read somewhere that you worked at a, an actual bell factory.
25:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did. I didn't make the bells, but I worked in the factory. I was a sort of like a clerk.
25:32 Pablo Torre? I'm just saying, a bell factory in Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia area feels very on the nose.
25:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:38 Pablo Torre? For what a Philly job might be for an emancipated minor.
25:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, the Liberty Bell. Right.
25:44 Pablo Torre? But the idea of you end up getting into journalism. I know you work at the Philadelphia Daily News, the, the tabloid in, in Philly.
25:55 Speaker 01 The best job I ever had.
25:57 Pablo Torre? Why?
25:58 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, it was the best sports tabloid in the country. I will always stand by that. It was winning tons of awards for sports coverage. But I just think that, again, it was, its nickname was the People Paper. And we got into the neighborhoods and we just did those stories about average Joes who, whatever their plight was, whether they, you know, had their wheelchair stolen. The crime at the time was a lot higher than it is now. So there were tons of crime stories and drug deal, you know, gone bad. You have to really do journalism fast when you work for a tabloid. So I could put together a story very fast.
26:40 Speaker 01 And then I segued into doing more investigative pieces. And I did a piece about the Philadelphia firefighters who were all getting hepatitis C and dying and the city wasn't doing anything about it. And I did a big expose and here, you know, because they were getting it on the job, but the city didn't want to admit it. And eventually, they were able to get benefits from the city because of the stories that I wrote. And that was really rewarding for me. And that was sort of my first foray into investigative journalism.
27:12 Pablo Torre? Did you ever use your journalistic doggedness to cover sports?
27:18 Speaker 01 Yes, I did. I loved doing sports every now and then. I covered a couple of things at the Daily News, Allen Iverson. And, you know, every time our sports were in the playoffs, I was always, I'm on the team, I'm on the team, send me. But at the Herald, I actually covered A-Rod's steroid use.
27:39 Pablo Torre? Ooh.
27:40 Speaker 01 That story, which really came out of Miami because the doctor that was giving him the steroids was based in Miami.
27:46 Pablo Torre? Mm-hmm.
27:47 Speaker 01 And the way that I got that story was that the whistleblower actually called the Miami Herald. He got sent to the sports department. And the sports department, and this is what makes me think of you, the sports department didn't do anything with the story. I don't know if they didn't know what to do with it or what the deal was, but you know, it's an investigative story. So the whistleblower went to the Miami New Times instead, gave them this story. They brought, it's a huge story.
28:17 Pablo Torre? Oh, this is Biogenesis.
28:18 Speaker 01 Yes, Biogenesis.
28:20 Pablo Torre? Tony Bosch was the steroid dealer in question.
28:23 Speaker 01 So we got beat because the Herald got the tip first. So of course, my editor comes to me and say, we need you to do this Biogenesis story. And I said, what? I mean, we already got beat on. And he said, no, we need you to do it. And I said, well, what about the sports department? And he said, we need you to do it. That's why we need, I said, I don't really know that much about steroids. I mean, I know, I watch baseball. And he said, that's why we want you to do this story.
28:51 Pablo Torre? There's one thing I read, and you let me know if this is accurate or not. Did you sneak into a hospital to interview Joe Frazier at one point?
28:59 Speaker 01 Yes, I did.
29:00 Pablo Torre? What happened?
29:01 Speaker 01 We didn't know what happened. So I just said, well, let me just go see if I can talk to him. And you know, you're not really supposed to do that, but I, nobody stopped me. I didn't, I put my, you know, I put my notepad in the, in my pocketbook and I don't know how, but I got right up into his room.
29:21 Pablo Torre? What prompted this? What was the reason why?
29:24 Speaker 01 The rumor was it was a drunk driving thing. And what he claimed though, however, it was like medication gone awry or some other thing that he was taking for his ailments that caused him to, I can't remember if he had a car accident or not, to be honest with you.
29:41 Pablo Torre? This is in Philly though, obviously, for the Daily News?
29:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, for the Daily News.
29:44 Pablo Torre? Oh gosh.
29:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Journalism was so much fun then. I'm so blessed that I lived during that time.
29:54 Pablo Torre? Well, you know, what I love about, about journalists like you is that you can feel like this is a dream job.
30:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:03 Pablo Torre? And yet, if you're looking through your own financial records.
30:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:09 Pablo Torre? Even at the Herald, and again, you make your way to the Miami Herald and you're, you're, you're getting increasingly bigger and bigger stories. What does the sort of economic picture look like for you as you're doing even the Epstein reporting?
30:24 Speaker 01 It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul the whole time practically. I mean, I had my car. I was out on a story covering prisons all over Florida, driving in the hinterlands of central Florida, going to prisons and I get a phone call that my car is repossessed. You know, I bounced so many checks. It's so embarrassing, really. But I was, I myself was a single mother with two children and at the time, we were, you know, it was a down, it was the real downturn in the newspaper business. And people were getting laid off. I had my pay cut, you know, over $25,000 a year. My pay was cut.
31:05 Speaker 01 And furloughs on top of that. So, I don't know, I, I really look back and wonder how the hell I did it, really, to be honest with you, because it was a real struggle.
31:17 Pablo Torre? I mean, putting two kids through college in general.
31:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:21 Pablo Torre? Is a lot.
31:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:22 Pablo Torre? And then to do it while the industry that you're working in, that you love is, is putting you in a bit of a. Iraq is squeezing is it's why a lot of people stop.
31:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:37 Pablo Torre? And you didn't.
31:38 Speaker 01 I didn't. For one thing, I don't know if there was anything else really that I I was made to do this work. I was born to do this work, so I don't know if I could have ever really done anything else. And I, oh, I tell students all the time, even though we talk a lot about all the things that are happening, bad things that are happening in journalism right now. I have to say, I, there's never really been a time that I hated my job, ever. I loved my job all the time, you know, even on bad days, I would never want to do anything else.
32:13 Pablo Torre? I am contrasting what you've just described, your financial status as you're breaking arguably the biggest story in America.
32:23 Pablo Torre? I'm contrasting that with the people you're reporting on.
32:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:26 Pablo Torre? And I'm contrasting that with the things I've learned in our reporting here about Harvard University.
32:31 Speaker 01 Right.
32:31 Pablo Torre? My alma mater, where they still are struggling, and most generously, we'll use that word, struggling, to disclose what they knew and when they knew it and how they were complicit in the construction of Jeffrey Epstein, the man and the myth that was able to get inside of the most exclusive and elite sectors of American life and all around the world.
33:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:01 Pablo Torre? You see university presidents of Harvard, Larry Summers, most famously, but also Henry Rosovski, according to our reporting, these are all things that were inside of the Harvard system that were documented.
33:12 Speaker 01 Well, not only that, but they gave Epstein cachet. And a lot of the victims, including Sarah Kellen last week when she testified, they were asking her, why didn't you leave? She said, he had the brightest minds in science, in academia, in technology. I mean, you name it, Bill Gates, he was meeting with Fidel Castro. And to her, it became like a normal thing.
33:40 Speaker 01 Here's this important man, you know? And Harvard has a piece of that because they gave him carte blanche at their university. I mean, he had his own office at one point.
33:50 Pablo Torre? He had a key.
33:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:51 Pablo Torre? He could access it.
33:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:52 Pablo Torre? I mean, again, a sweetheart deal.
33:55 Speaker 01 Right.
33:55 Pablo Torre? In which he had access to an office that he also could decorate.
33:59 Speaker 01 Right.
33:59 Pablo Torre? His assistants followed him around. They moved around the campus. They went and sat in Epstein, according to Harvard's own disclosure. He sat in classes sometimes.
34:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:11 Pablo Torre? I mean, I was on campus while this was happening.
34:13 Speaker 01 Yeah. You were there when this happened?
34:15 Pablo Torre? I was, I graduated in 07 and we're talking in that period, right then.
34:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was that period.
34:21 Pablo Torre? And as a, just a pure side note, in terms of like my angle of approach on this. When I graduated, our class day speaker was Bill Clinton. Our commencement speaker was Bill Gates.
34:36 Speaker 01 Wow.
34:36 Pablo Torre? The president of the university when I arrived was Larry Summers. And you go through Harvard's own records and their self-report in 2020, which left out so much that we have now reported on. The way in which they continued to send Epstein.
34:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:52 Pablo Torre? These personalized updates.
34:54 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
34:55 Pablo Torre? On what his money was up to as a major donor to Harvard University, inviting him to things on campus. Hiding secret Jeffrey E. Epstein Women's Sports.
35:06 Speaker 01 Right.
35:07 Pablo Torre? Fund documents.
35:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:09 Pablo Torre? It's tragicomically disturbing.
35:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:12 Pablo Torre? Like, wow, this was all happening and I was there.
35:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a culture of silence, too. You know, let's not talk about him after the conviction. I, they continued to do, you know, business, so to speak, with him. But it was really a culture, a hush-hush thing that they tried to do. MIT was also in that same category.
35:31 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
35:31 Speaker 01 These academic institutions, and by the way, there are students, journalists all over the country, looking up all the names of all their presidents and they're all scouring and doing stories. Stanford, the Student Law Center. And there were a bunch of students there that were poring through the files and were asking my advice on how to cover, you know, the names that they're seeing. You know, it seems like he got around to other universities, too.
36:00 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I mean, the way in which he was using the credibility of. The most respected institutions available to him.
36:08 Speaker 01 Right.
36:08 Pablo Torre? And the way in which those institutions, for whom there was never enough money.
36:14 Speaker 01 Right.
36:14 Pablo Torre? Were using him to both fund these projects, academic and personal, as well as perhaps, in the case of Larry Summers, who honeymooned on Epstein Island.
36:26 Speaker 01 Right.
36:26 Pablo Torre? One of the crazier sentences you will find, I think, in this whole story. Establishing personal rapport, friendships.
36:32 Speaker 01 Right, right.
36:33 Pablo Torre? That were deliberately kept secret even into 2020, when Harvard was supposed to finally open the kimono and show everybody, okay, this is what we did and this is why we're sorry.
36:45 Speaker 01 Right.
36:47 Pablo Torre? And this is, you know, the former Secretary of the Treasury. One of those important economic minds in America. It speaks to how, what you reported, insofar as it got to the files being released. It started, Julie, this massive group project.
37:08 Speaker 01 Right.
37:09 Pablo Torre? For journalists, for
37:11 Speaker 01 Right.
37:12 Pablo Torre? curious people.
37:13 Speaker 01 Right.
37:13 Pablo Torre? To get involved in, and I am one of them.
37:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I talk to those people a lot. I have a couple of regulars on my Signal group who are looking into aspects of it. And they, they've tipped me off on things that I didn't know about, you know. I don't think this has really ever happened, that I know of anyway, in the history of our country, where the Justice Department has completely opened their files to the general public to look at. And the picture isn't pretty because they seem to have an awful lot of information about him. And it seems to me that they just didn't take it far enough and really thoroughly investigate him, not just in 2008.
37:56 Speaker 01 But, you know, they had tips about him involved in narcotics trafficking. They had tips about him involved in money laundering.
38:04 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
38:04 Speaker 01 They had lots of other things that they had over the years, and they just never really pursued them.
38:10 Pablo Torre? Well, one of the things that's also clear, though, as the drip continues of the Epstein files, is that, at the very least, this is a bipartisan scandal.
38:19 Speaker 01 I always say, people just want to keep pointing fingers. And I always say sexual assault doesn't discriminate based on political party. And there were people, you know, I try to avoid even saying who, what party so and so was from unless it seems relevant to the piece that I'm writing. Because to me, it doesn't matter if you're committing sexual assault or you're committing any kind of a crime. It doesn't matter. This was a crime. It was a crime and it should have been investigated like that. And it wasn't. It really wasn't investigated like that.
39:10 Pablo Torre? That takes me back to this non-prosecution agreement, which itself was legally problematic.
39:16 Speaker 01 Right.
39:16 Pablo Torre? So for those, again, who don't remember this, Jeffrey Epstein pleads guilty to state charges he'd been indicted on. Two state charges of soliciting prostitution, solicitation of minors for prostitution, had to register as a sex offender, served consecutive prison terms. That's what we.
39:32 Speaker 01 But even that was watered down when we were able to find out. I mean, his lawyers were brilliant. They were brilliant. One of the things that they did, it was such a small thing, but it made a big difference, was that the original victim in the case was 14. They changed the agreement so that the actual count that he pleaded to, they slid in a victim who was 16. So therefore, in some states, it's not a crime to have sex with someone who is 16. But 14, most states, you can't. So in that respect, he didn't have to, for example, he didn't have to register as a sex offender in New Mexico. Where he also had his estate.
40:16 Pablo Torre? Well, the thing that the Alex Acosta sweetheart secret non prosecution agreement also did was not tell the victims.
40:28 Speaker 01 Right, it was sealed.
40:29 Pablo Torre? This was another consequence of your reporting, which was that, oh, it turns out there's this thing called the Crime Victims Rights Act.
40:35 Speaker 01 Right, right. Well, I can't take credit for that aspect of it because there were two lawyers, very shrewd lawyers, Brad Edwards and Paul Castle, who brought a lawsuit. It was 10 years old by the time I did this. They had brought it right when the deal happened back in 2008 and they were still litigating it. And they were the ones that were fighting, trying to undo the deal because it had essentially broken, they broke the law. Because under the Crime Victims Rights Act, you have to let the victims know when you're doing something like this. They deserve the credit for that aspect of the case, which was very critical because, it was critical to my reporting, because that lawsuit has so much litigation
41:20 Speaker 01 attached to it. I literally would spend hours and hours reading all the evidence that they had collected against Epstein. There were depositions, there was so much material in that lawsuit that really helped me build upon, including the emails that went back and forth between Epstein's lawyers and the federal prosecutors, their buddy buddy. You could see how they were working together to make this deal happen. And, you know, it was a good deal of me getting that information was a result of those two lawyers working that case.
41:56 Pablo Torre? Well, one of the other consequences, and this is taking us to July 2019 and the unfolding domino effect of your work on this case and surfacing the long battle that people in Florida have been fighting on the side of, hey, people need to know more about this. Those attorneys among them. It takes us to when
42:19 Pablo Torre? Donald Trump nominated Alex Acosta and defends initially Alex Acosta as a really, really great Secretary of Labor.
42:29 Speaker 04 I can only say this from what I know and what I do know is that he's been a great, really great Secretary of Labor. The rest of it, we'll have to look at, we'll have to look at it very carefully. But you're talking about a long time ago, and again, it was a decision made, I think, not by him, but by a lot of people.
42:48 Pablo Torre? And of course, Donald Trump had been previously quoted in New York Magazine in 2002, calling Epstein a terrific guy, saying Epstein, quote, "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side," end quote. But I don't even say this to make an exhibit of Trump. I say this to say that Alex Acosta, his handpicked Labor Secretary, resigns, finally, after Jeffrey Epstein gets arrested.
43:13 Speaker 01 Right. He had given up, like, a press conference before he was arrested where he completely defended everything that he did. And I remember I was on a panel on CNN when he did it, when they wanted me to analyze it. And one of the arguments he said was, "Well, you have to remember, way back then, this kind of crime wasn't thought about in the same way it is now."
43:40 Speaker 05 Times have changed, and coverage of this case has certainly changed since that article. Facts are important, and facts are being overlooked.
43:51 Speaker 01 On what planet was it ever okay for a man to have sex with, you know, 13-year-old girl? That was bad all the time. That was never accepted norm in our country. The excuses that he was giving for this deal, it was very easy for me to dispel every single thing that he said in that, in that speech.
44:13 Pablo Torre? I imagine that one of the more satisfying things that a journalist can feel is, after they've broken a big story and they've published a multi-part series, they hear...
44:25 Pablo Torre? From, in this case, the Southern District of New York, that you're reporting is one of the reasons why they reopened this case in the first place.
44:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:38 Pablo Torre? Them saying this on the dais.
44:40 Speaker 06 And is there new information that you have or is evidence?
44:42 Speaker 07 I'm not going into any dealings with main justice, nor am I going to go into any aspects of how our investigation originated. I will say that we were assisted from some excellent investigative journalism.
44:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was pretty surprising to me. Journalists don't get that very often.
45:02 Pablo Torre? No.
45:02 Speaker 01 It was very, you know, and the prosecutor later subsequently, he wrote a book, you know, and he later called me and he said, "In case anybody tries to tell you anything different, I'm telling you, your story was the reason why we opened that case." And I appreciated that because, you know, part of the story also was there were a lot of journalists that were dismissing my work.
45:27 Pablo Torre? Yes.
45:28 Speaker 01 Because the story had been reported before. So people who reported on it before were very offended that I was getting so much credit.
45:39 Pablo Torre? When people talk about all of this as worthy of a movie, a TV series in its own right, it is fun to get to say that that is also actually happening now.
45:51 Speaker 01 I hope. I mean, in this political climate right now, there's a lot of people that don't want to take on controversial stories.
45:59 Pablo Torre? In this case, Adam McKay, who's a friend of Meadowlark Media, he says, "This is a thing that I want in on."
46:07 Speaker 01 Well, actually, Adam McKay, way back when my series published, he was one of the first people who reached out to me and said he wanted to do this. He didn't know what form, but he wanted to buy all the rights to everything because he was so keen on doing this from the very get-go.
46:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
46:29 Speaker 01 So I've been working with him a long time to try to make this happen. So let's hope it happens this time.
46:34 Pablo Torre? And Adam's done The Big Short, one of my favorite things, Step Brothers as well. I mean, his work speaks for itself.
46:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:41 Pablo Torre? And the thing that I love is that when I reached out to Adam, I emailed him asking, you know, "What about the character of Julie K. Brown is most sort of compelling to you?" He said, quote, "The big thing I noticed was how Julie's tenaciousness was viewed as a negative by legacy news." She can tell you how much he was struggling financially, but it's telling how compliant to power US News has become that an old school grinder of a journalist like Julie wasn't welcome in the club.
47:14 Speaker 01 That's such an Adam and Kay statement, too. I don't pay any attention to that stuff. I just like a brilliant China shop. I just keep moving forward and I just want it and still want justice for the victims. And so I still really focus on that aspect of it. I can't do this whole story from every angle, but to me, the angle that I am focused on is accountability. Why wasn't he charged back then? What people helped him to not, you know, not get charged, not be arrested? Because had they done that back then, we wouldn't be sitting here. You wouldn't probably even know me, you know?
47:58 Pablo Torre? And yet now, you saying exactly what you just said is why they're getting Laura Dern to play you.
48:07 Pablo Torre? But it's true, though. I mean, it's like you are not somebody who is fundamentally interested. Your work throughout your life has spoken to this. Look, the Pulitzer is so great, obviously, and the movie, TV series, whatever it ends up being is wonderful, but you're, you are like a dog with a bone on the fundamental thing that drew you to the story in the first place, which is, how is it that justice was not served to, in this case, dozens upon dozens of women and girls?
48:41 Speaker 01 Thousands now. It's in the thousands, we believe now. It's, you know.
48:48 Speaker 01 It's just, it gets bigger. I feel like it gets bigger every day. That there's more information coming out all the time. And it's horrific that something like this was allowed to happen. That so many people who could have used their power to help, you know, for the good of humanity, were using it to make more money, invest with Jeffrey Epstein to just enrich themselves. And they didn't care what his background was. They knew who he was, but they kept doing business with him because of the almighty dollar, the money he was bringing in for them.
49:26 Pablo Torre? And for me, the thing that I think about is, it's not that everybody who was complicit or aware in terms of, "We want to do business with this guy nonetheless." It's not that all those people are guilty of a literal crime.
49:42 Speaker 01 Right.
49:43 Pablo Torre? But it does feel appropriate for them to face questions, like hard questions about, "What did you know and when did you know it?"
49:52 Speaker 01 Right, right.
49:54 Pablo Torre? And at some level, that's perhaps the best and only justice that they might ever face, is the accountability of having to admit, "We did want to be in business with this guy."
50:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't feel bad for those people that lost their jobs or those kinds of things. Those people give him the credibility that those girls looked at. And especially the people that kept up the relationship for years and years.
50:22 Pablo Torre? After the arrest indictments.
50:24 Speaker 01 There are a few categories of people who, for a very short period of time, they were in his orbit. And so, you know, I don't feel the same way about that. But there are plenty of people that were in his orbit for years, decades. I don't know how they sleep at night, actually. You know, someone, for example, like Bill Gates, you have to vet every single person that you meet with, if you're Bill Gates, right? You had to, he had to know, you know?
50:52 Pablo Torre? One assumes, um...
50:54 Speaker 01 I mean, I vet everybody that I, you know, I get invited to events all the time and I make sure, I find out who's running the event, who's paying for the event, you know? Because I just do that, so, you know, Bill Gates probably had to.
51:10 Pablo Torre? Well, it's interesting, right? Like, when do these masters of the universe, who are otherwise projecting as...
51:17 Pablo Torre? Extraordinarily competent and deserving of your trust as a member of the public in that they're selling you products or they are having deals with the government itself. It's interesting when those people want to project authority and when they want to be infantilized.
51:37 Speaker 01 Right, right.
51:38 Pablo Torre? The whole thing of convenient ignorance.
51:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:41 Pablo Torre? It's a bit inconsistent with the larger brand that they have constructed and profited off of, only to then retreat from it as soon as it feels like, oh no.
51:50 Speaker 01 Right.
51:51 Pablo Torre? Now I'm being held to a standard of an adult.
51:54 Speaker 01 Right. And, you know, I don't think enough attention is paid, quite frankly, to the people that didn't do that. There were people that said, oh no, I'm not going, you know?
52:04 Pablo Torre? It's so true.
52:04 Speaker 01 They don't get as much publicity. Tina Brown, infamously, you know? She got invited to a party and I think the prince was supposed to be there and all these, of course, journalists went, all these people, and she went, hell no, I'm not going to a party with Jeffrey Epstein.
52:20 Pablo Torre? Tina Brown recalled being invited to an intimate Jeffrey Epstein party with his pals Prince Andrew, the aforementioned royal who stepped down for the first time in the history of royals in 400 years after your reporting, and Woody Allen. And Tina Brown declared, quote, "What the hell is this? The Predator's ball?"
52:40 Pablo Torre? It's like, yeah, yeah. On some level, there is great investigative journalism that enabled the discussion we're having today. And at the same time, there's also just, I think, the basic capacity for lots of people to have smelled something wrong about this that did not require a multi-part series to be aware of.
52:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, right.
53:01 Pablo Torre? And, look, I, when you said, you know, I don't know how these people sleep at night, I am worried about your sleeping habits, though, because...
53:09 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny that you mention that because I realized I was not sleeping at all and it was really affecting my health. I was working around the clock. And then the Philadelphia Inquirer did a profile of me and I looked at the photo that ran with the profile and I thought, Oh my God, I better get some sleep. I mean, I look like, you know, I hadn't slept. So, yeah.
53:34 Pablo Torre? I dare say you looked like someone who's been watching a lot of Philadelphia sports recently.
53:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
53:39 Pablo Torre? There is no level of fatigue quite like that.
53:43 Speaker 01 I didn't stay up for the whole game last night, but I did see a couple of the home runs. But, uh, I don't know, I'm so exhausted by the end of the day that I can't talk to people. Like, I always tell people, do not call me at the end of the day, and especially don't call me when the Phillies are, when the Phillies are on.
54:03 Pablo Torre? And so what I want to do near the end here is something that may seem paradoxical, because it is assigning you more work. But I want to officially offer Julie K. Brown the job of Pablo Torre Finds Out Philadelphia Sports Correspondent.
54:20 Speaker 01 I think there's probably a lot better people that know more about Philadelphia sports than me. So, um, I'm happy to accept, but...
54:28 Pablo Torre? Your humility will not dissuade me. Julie K. Brown, our new Philadelphia Sports Correspondent. I cannot help but think that you once worked in a literal bell factory, and one of the great compliments I must pay your work is that it is this bell that just keeps ringing. Testament to somebody that really did make an impact. Thank you so much for doing this.
54:51 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
55:00 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
55:06 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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