Interesting Times: She Exposed Epstein and Shares MAGA’s Anger

My colleague Ross Douthat talks to the journalist who exposed Jeffrey Epstein. This episode of “Interesting Times,” with the Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, came out back in July. But since Epstein has very much stayed in the news, I wanted to share it now. The conversation is such a fascinating and helpful explainer of the whole case, and the questions that remain unanswered — with the woman whose reporting led to Epstein’s re-arrest. If you haven’t had a chance to check out “Interesting Times” this year, you really should. The team has produced so many great episodes, especially with leading thinkers and activists on the right. You can find them on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to share an episode from my colleague Ross Douthat's podcast, Interesting Times. Back in July, he spoke to Julie K. Brown, the investigative journalist whose reporting led to the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I remember thinking at the time it aired that it was such a great booking, one of those ones I wish I had made. And it remains a helpful explainer of all the intrigue surrounding Jeffrey Epstein while we wait for the release of The Epstein Files. And if you haven't had a chance to check out Interesting Times, you should. It has just become an essential listen during the second Trump term. You can learn more in the show notes.

• 0:36Ross Douthat?

  From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

• 0:58Ross Douthat?

  Forget about the political drama for a moment. What is the actual truth about Jeffrey Epstein? Are there real secrets that haven't yet been revealed? And what's it like to try to pull back the curtain on one of the 21st century's most mysterious villains? My guest today brought Epstein's story fully into the public eye with her dogged reporting for the Miami Herald in 2018. And she'll be our guide through the big unanswered questions that are still with us today. Before we dive in, I just want to note that we recorded this conversation just before, as in hours before, The Wall Street Journal reported

• 1:40Ross Douthat?

  on a birthday letter sent by Donald Trump to Epstein, and before the president then authorized the Justice Department to seek the release of grand jury testimony in Epstein's case. So you won't hear us discuss those developments, just everything else. Julie K. Brown, welcome to Interesting Times.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:06Ross Douthat?

  So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we've had a lot of these meta conversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, about MAGA infighting, about sort of theories about conspiracy theories. And I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me, as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I'm really hoping that together we can sort

• 2:46Ross Douthat?

  of walk through the story, the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein, the man, became Jeffrey Epstein, the mythic villain of the early 21st century. And I want to start in the middle for him, or maybe near the end for him, but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you, as a journalist, to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Well, I was, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on the Miami Herald's investigative team and I was covering prisons. And I needed a sort of a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island. But I, whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was sort of looking for something to do around that time, Donald

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. And I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this. Sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008. So I thought at the time that at his Senate, at Acosta's Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions and I don't really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was confirmed.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  So at that point, I thought, I wonder what these victims, who we knew were, there were at least a dozen or so, you know, they were children when this happened, but now with the passage of time, they were in their late twenties, early thirties. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator, really, such a lenient deal and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  I found out more and more and more. And it took a long time, quite frankly, to figure out who the victims were because it was so long ago and all their names were redacted from all the documents. So it just kept snowballing. I became really interested in the fact that these girls' lives were essentially ruined, even if they had only gone to his house one time. It affected the rest of their lives and it was just very powerful, their stories that they were telling me.

• 6:01Ross Douthat?

  And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal. Related to early teenage girls.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:12Ross Douthat?

  What was the actual nature of that deal?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Well, actually, it was only, you know, I came to find out, one of the many things I came to find out, which hadn't been reported before, was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pled guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older, so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed. And it was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public, but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort

• 6:57Speaker 02

  of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to, because it was all the records were sealed. And as a result of that, a lawyer for one of the victims filed a lawsuit. And that lawsuit had been ongoing when I took up the case in 2016. But the nature of the lawsuit was that he, the FBI and the Justice Department, by doing this all in secret, had violated what's known as the Crime Victims Rights Act. And under that law, you're supposed to be informed of all proceedings or any plea deals. And they didn't do that. And it was a year, another year, before that plea deal was unsealed

• 7:40Speaker 02

  and made public. And by that time, he had already served this cushy jail sentence, which was not a sentence at all, because he was allowed to leave the jail and go back to Palm Beach to his office, or his home, or the Home Depot, or, you know, he had a chauffeur picking him up at the Palm Beach jail every morning, and didn't return him to the jail until 10 o'clock at night. So he essentially only slept there.

• 8:05Ross Douthat?

  And so from your perspective, as a reporter, at that point, as you're digging into the story, what was your theory of why he got this plea deal?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Well, the theory wa- always was, you know, here we are getting a little bit into the conspiracy thing, but the theory-

• 8:21Ross Douthat?

  No, we're gonna, we're gonna get further, don't worry.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, the theory always was, who was the person in our government that let Jeffrey Epstein off? And I really didn't know, but I wanted to try to get to that place if I could. That was sort of my goal. Let's track everything that happened. I sort of looked at it like a cold case, pulling out all these files. A lot of them were in paper because it was so long ago and I had just piles and piles of boxes and boxes and I just started from scratch and thought, you know, maybe I can find out. My goal was to find out how did this happen and why?

• 9:00Ross Douthat?

  And what did you find out?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Well, I found out that Jeffrey Epstein, of course, had a lot of resources, both financially and politically. He cultivated people on both sides of the political aisle and people across the world, really. Uh, he was very wealthy, but there was no real indicator of how he made his wealth. And I, I just learned that he was able to hire, you know, essentially a dream team, you know, Kenneth Starr, Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz. A lot of these had contacts with the, uh, law firm of Kirkland and Ellis, who-

• 9:40Ross Douthat?

  It was a very prominent, very prominent DC law firm.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Very prominent. And Epstein was very shrewd. Every lawyer that he hired had a tie to one of the prosecutors on the case. Alex Acosta had worked for Kirkland and Ellis. So, and he was very ambitious. At the time, he was really a rising star in the GOP. Ironically, one of the ways that he was rising was he was handling a lot of child pornography cases. He was part of a, a team of prosecutors that was prosecuting child porn. And so, you know, Epstein knew exactly who to hire. I mean, he even hired a lawyer that had dated one of the prosecutors. So every single lawyer had a tie to the prosecutors in some way and was sort of, you know, if

• 10:27Speaker 02

  you're a prosecutor, you wanna eventually end up, you know, somewhere in a good law firm and, you know, make more money. So for some of these prosecutors, this was like, you know, having Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, they were starstruck by some of these lawyers.

• 10:44Ross Douthat?

  So in that sense, it looks like sort of insiders and power create a kind of path of least resistance for the prosecution where you get some kind of conviction, but you don't have to end up at war with this legal all-star team, spending all kinds of resources.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  That's right. And they were relentless, relentless in their pleadings and their motions that the prosecutors, of course, had to had to address. So we were able to get the emails that went back and forth between Epstein's lawyers and the federal prosecutors assigned to the case. And they were very eye-opening because of how chummy they were. You know, how was your weekend?

• 11:25Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  They were working hand in hand, really. They weren't treating Epstein as if he was the criminal that he was.

• 11:34Ross Douthat?

  And so just to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of those with a minor.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 11:42Ross Douthat?

  And how long was his sentence?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  18 months.

• 11:46Ross Douthat?

  But he only served about 13 months, right?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:48Ross Douthat?

  So now you start reporting on the story, talking to victims that were part of the initial prosecution. And then it becomes clear, right, that there were many more victims.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Right. Because the nature of Epstein's crime was that he would bring one young girl in there. Sometimes, you know, we believe that Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, who was a British socialite, who was his girlfriend at one point, started by recruiting young people from spas in the Palm Beach area, mainly people who worked, young girls who were very pretty, who worked at the spas. And then once they, and she didn't tell them, you know, we want you to give this guy, have sex with this guy.

• 12:36Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  It was, we want to give this guy a massage. So once they got there and they realized, you know, they go into this mansion and they go up the stairs and they're in this dark room and he's laying, he comes in in a towel and they're in this place and they realize, well, nobody knows I'm here, who is this guy? You know, they get really upset. So after he molests them, he says, look, you don't have to do this again. I'm going to give you the same amount of money for every single other girl that you bring me. So he had girl upon girl upon girl bringing other girls and it was a revolving

• 13:16Speaker 02

  door all day, all night. He was insatiable, really, and it was crazy. They were coming in and out like that, these girls, taking taxis, you know, getting rides.

• 13:28Ross Douthat?

  And this is mostly happening, this is happening in Palm Beach.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 13:32Ross Douthat?

  At his mansion in Palm Beach.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 13:34Ross Douthat?

  And so just, just for overall numbers, like, you know, I know there's sort of official legal numbers, your, your guess is that there are hundreds of girls?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were hundreds.

• 13:44Ross Douthat?

  Who were involved in this in some way?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:46Ross Douthat?

  Yeah. So you do this reporting and then what are the actual real world consequences of your reporting? What happens legally to Jeffrey Epstein in the late 2010s?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Well, the story got a lot of attention and at first I thought, oh, that's good, I'm getting recognized for my work. And then I started hearing rumors the Justice Department was looking at again. Now, these victims had, a lot of them had filed civil lawsuits against Epstein over the course of the following decade. Some of them, a couple of them were still open. But as they were getting discovery for these lawsuits, they were finding out more and more horrible things about what had happened and what Epstein was doing. And they kept going to the Justice Department with the stuff. The lawyers kept going to

• 14:37Speaker 02

  the Justice Department in New York in particular because the plea deal had been done in Florida and they didn't think that they could bring charges, more charges against him in Florida because of the way the plea deal was structured. So they kept going to the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York and trying to get them to look at it and reopen it. And they didn't, they just kept saying, no, no, no. After my story ran, a group of prosecutors saw my story, took it to the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Jeffrey Berman, and said, we gotta do something about this. And Berman said, go ahead, look into it and let's do it. So he was arrested in July. It was like the 4th of July weekend.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  He was coming home from Paris. He has a home in Paris and, and they boarded the plane and arrested him.

• 15:29Ross Douthat?

  And then what happened to him?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Uh, well, he was put in the federal jail in New York and arraigned and charged on new sex trafficking charges. And he did the same thing. It was funny, the pattern was the same from 2008. He hired high-profile lawyers. He would have meetings with them almost every day. They kept assuring him that he was going, this wasn't going to stick, because he had this, he had already been prosecuted and pled guilty to these other charges. And they felt that this was, in essence, the plea deal would make it so that they wouldn't be able to prosecute him. And I think that they were trying to convince

• 16:12Speaker 02

  him, look, this is just not going to stick. You're going to get out. But then he tried to get bail and he was refused bail. All these victims showed up at the bail hearing and testified, this is what he did to me. It was very emotional and gut-wrenching. And I think, you know, there wasn't a judge anywhere that probably would have let him out on bail. They said they were afraid for their lives, et cetera. So he didn't get bail.

• 16:38Ross Douthat?

  And then what happened?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And then, um, one day I was scheduled to do an interview on NPR. Actually, what happened was, let me back up. The Miami Herald had sued to unseal a very important civil case that had been filed between Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, and a victim by the name of Virginia Giuffre. And what happened was, on August 9th, they unsealed everything, that we, almost everything. And we wrote a story. And I was doing an interview about the files that were unsealed that morning on August 10th, when I got on the line with

• 17:24Speaker 02

  NPR for the interview. They told me Jeffrey Epstein hung himself. And that's how I found out he had died. I couldn't believe it. I had to call the justice, I had a source in the Justice Department in New York. And I said, you got to tell me that this happened. And that's how I found out the next day after we had written this story.

• 17:44Ross Douthat?

  Now, I know you're not a prosecutor or a defense attorney, but at the point when he killed himself, what was your perception of the likelihood that he was going to go to jail for a long time? Did it seem like, okay, you know, enough has come out and there's enough victims that he's probably facing a long prison sentence? Or was there still a sense in your mind that he has this high-powered legal team? He has this past guilty plea. He's going to wriggle out of it?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  No, I thought he was going to wriggle out of it.

• 18:14Ross Douthat?

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I really do.

• 18:15Ross Douthat?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  He was lining everything up and he had all the resources. And he knew people. Who knew people? If you know what I mean.

• 18:54Ross Douthat?

  So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback. And I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it's the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City, where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it's an example of how Epstein's story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists. So as I understand the story, a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job

• 19:38Ross Douthat?

  at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. And then from there, between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.

• 19:48Ross Douthat?

  How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier, it's, this was an open question when you started reporting.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:55Ross Douthat?

  But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Well, he was a very smart man. Uh, he was a very intelligent man and he was very good. I think that, that the key to Epstein's real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had, whatever they needed or wanted, and he would exploit that. And I don't know what he had on, uh, Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients. Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria's Secret and also the limited, uh, retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner and Wexner was really his primary client.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  And as a result of that, his wealth just, you know, boomed.

• 20:46Ross Douthat?

  But he wasn't just an advisor. He wasn't like Les Wexner's financial advisor.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Well, he was.

• 20:53Ross Douthat?

  But he had power of attorney, right? He had like a remark. He was effectively like, you know, the hand of the king in Game of Thrones or something, where he, he's just making any kind of deal for, for Wexner.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 21:07Ross Douthat?

  And in some of the, some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein's wealth, I've seen people say, well, this, it's a kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got, right? Wexner is a billionaire and he, I guess, makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that, does that seem plausible to you? Like, do you, do you feel like the Wexner connection, even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery, suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let's say?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't make any sense and it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money.

• 21:58Ross Douthat?

  Right, and he is, again, these, all of these stories are, you know, when we had our fact checking team look at the script, you know, they were like, well, this is a supposition, this is secondhand, this is hearsay, right? So you have, you have this narrative before he meets Wexner, starting in the 1980s, he's really good at sort of moving money around in sort of complex international environments.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 22:23Ross Douthat?

  So one of the, again, secondhand stories is that he does work for Adnan Kashoggi, the fairly famous arms dealer in the 1980s, right? So there's this sort of mythos around him as a kind of fixer. And you said that he was really good at giving people what they wanted, right?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:41Ross Douthat?

  And you've seen these stories that are like, people, people would come to him with some impossible problem, allegedly, like, I'm making this one up, right? But, you know, I have a fleet of Mercedes, you know, somewhere in Tibet, and I need to legally get them to Peru, can you help me, Jeffrey Epstein, right? And so he would, he would sort of come through with these things. But, but as far as we, no, from the public record, we're just trying to get at what we know to be the truth, his primary mechanism of getting rich was his connection to Wexner.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  That's correct, initially.

• 23:11Ross Douthat?

  And by the late 1990s, he is sort of building out a Playboy intellectual lifestyle, right? Can you, can you sort of describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home, and also at other homes he owned, like the island off the coast of St. Thomas, he would fly Nobel Prize winners, for example, in to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations. And he really cultivated a number of really high-profile scientists. And he sort of fancied himself as a little bit more of a science and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember, all these scientists and

• 24:09Speaker 02

  academics, you know, MIT, Harvard, they usually need money for some of their projects. So he, he had money, lots of money. So they... Kind of entertained him or

• 24:23Ross Douthat?

  Humored him, right?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yes, in some cases, because some of them felt like he was really just full of it. But they were willing to take his money.

• 24:32Ross Douthat?

  Do you know what his specific scientific interests were? Or specific projects he was interested in?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  He was interested in all kinds of things involving babies and how they form intelligence and eugenics and gene

• 24:49Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Research, things like that.

• 24:52Ross Douthat?

  And the story, one of the stories that I've read is that he had, you know, sort of transhumanist ideas, but also there were people who would say, oh, he wanted to seed his genetic lineage, right?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:08Ross Douthat?

  Into the future, sort of, not in the same style as Elon Musk and his many children, but with a similar effect, right, that he, that he sort of imagined many children in the future.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was going to these gatherings that they had a very wealthy, famous people. And they would talk about all these scientific interests. And that was one that he had expressed to a lot of the people that attended these conferences.

• 25:33Ross Douthat?

  But we can say, I mean, as you said already, it's pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein initially. It's because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that, that itself is not a special mystery. What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures like that, who, you know, rode on his plane, or supposedly rode on his plane, ended up on his island, people at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton. We'll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But are these, these people are also just sort of?

• 26:17Ross Douthat?

  Pulled in by, you know, the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa? Like, what's your sense of how that worked?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Well, you know, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations. And Clinton was certainly one of them. And even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation. And so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well. So that was one of the eight. They went on a long trip overseas on Epstein's plane to travel to various areas to, you know, understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And, you know, Epstein sort of envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find

• 27:08Speaker 02

  things that would help cure cancer or, you know, cure AIDS. Or he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.

• 27:17Ross Douthat?

  And so let's make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you've already mentioned, his paramour for a while, and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When did they first start hanging out?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  When, after her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a publisher, British publisher, died under suspicious circumstances himself.

• 27:46Ross Douthat?

  Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Right. They think he just fell off. They found him floating, but there was a yacht. He had a yacht. He was off the Canary Islands and they just woke up one day and couldn't find him. And then eventually someone saw him floating in the ocean. And so there's a lot of questions because after they found him dead, they realized that he had. Essentially raided his whole company, including the employee's pension fund. And so he, and ultimately his sons, you know, had to go to, you know, stand trial for this. And anyway, his, her father had passed away and Epstein was at the funeral or at another event honoring her father after his death.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  So at the time, Maxwell's family was in ruin. They had no money and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. And her mother wrote, later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn't name who that is, but there's enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that kind of came in to sort of rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. And, you know, it is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family. And that's how they met.

• 29:12Ross Douthat?

  So it's 1991 that Robert Maxwell passes away in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. Here it's worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that's a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories. But so you said that Epstein and Maxwell date?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 29:44Ross Douthat?

  And then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  I think it started, we know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998, some of his first victims were, were back then. And Maxwell, there were people that came forward that, that told me and others that.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. And, and there was a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married. But she realized that as she got older, that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls. So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That's how it all started.

• 30:42Ross Douthat?

  So there's clear overlap. Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets on his private island. And he's bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them. And this presumably, both of these things continue happening at the same time, up to the point that we already talked about. The point at which he is actually charged and convicted in a very limited way in 2008. What happens to the social world, all his high-flying connections, after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these PR people to remake his image. And there are press releases, if you look, you know, in archives, there are, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release about, first it started with, he was giving money here, he was giving money there. As time went on, being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened. And he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal. Because the plea deal, because it was only solicitation of one underage girl, he was

• 32:10Speaker 02

  able to say to people, yeah, I did this, it was bad, but it was only that. And to them, that was sort of, okay, he served his time. And, you know, they, they accepted that explanation, that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. And of course, he said he didn't know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that he later, we later know he was.

• 32:40Ross Douthat?

  Right, but that was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls, right? And there's, you know, there's this famous, this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York Magazine, before, long before Epstein's first conviction, right? Anything like that, where he's talking about Epstein's social life and he says something like, "He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side."

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:15Ross Douthat?

  So that, it seems like that was, that was always part of his reputation.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Right, right. He would have, you know, I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just sort of be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just, you know, just kind of fawn over him, you know? He would put some of them on his lap, you know? So he, yes, people could see.

• 33:48Ross Douthat?

  People could see it.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:23Ross Douthat?

  Okay, so, and this is, as you're reporting it, one thing to say, right? Because this is now a story that's supposed to have been taken up into the vortex of...

• 34:34Ross Douthat?

  You know, Trump and MAGA and everything else. But this was a Me Too story.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:39Ross Douthat?

  Just Epstein's behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior and people sort of tolerate it over a long period of time. He gets away with some, some stuff legally because he has all these connections. And then finally, because of your reporting, because of the changing climate, it comes, it comes crashing down.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Right, because the Me Too movement happened like right before the story came out, the, you know, the Weinstein thing happens and all that. I started working on the project before then, before the Me Too movement. But in the middle of it, the Me Too movement exploded. So it certainly helped my, my, the fact that, that, that occurred all around the same time.

• 35:28Ross Douthat?

  I'm also interested in that because I'm interested in basically the space between what we can say for certain about Epstein and the unresolved mysteries.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:40Ross Douthat?

  So if you're trying to take a kind of minimalist view of the story, it's a story about a rich man with connections who gets away with terrible crimes because he has these connections for a long period of time. And it's a story, you know, that makes all the people who knew him look bad for the same reason that everyone who knew about Harvey Weinstein looks bad. But it's not a story at the level of sort of political mythology that Epstein, the story has reached, reached now. So I want, I want now to talk about basically the open questions whose openness explains

• 36:22Ross Douthat?

  why Epstein is a bigger story and a more enduring story than, than Harvey Weinstein. Right?

• 36:30Ross Douthat?

  Obviously, one of the core questions in all of this is, were these girls expected to have sex with people other than Jeffrey Epstein?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:40Ross Douthat?

  And I think a lot of people following the story just sort of take for granted that there must have been a bunch of other celebrities who were getting sexual favors. And the debunking response, as I understand it, is that out of the young women who made accusations, only one, who you mentioned earlier, Virginia Giuffre, made serial allegations that she was pressured into having sex with famous figures. And out of the allegations, there was only one settlement. There was no trial or anything, but there was, of course, the settlement with Prince Andrew, where there was a photograph of him together with Maxwell and Giuffre. In the other cases, the men mentioned successfully fought back.

• 37:24Ross Douthat?

  Giuffre is dead now. She was very troubled, clearly. And there are reasons to think that she might have been sort of out to get money or get revenge and these kind of things, and reasons to be skeptical of some of her allegations. That is how I understand the case, that it was just Epstein. Do you think it was just Epstein?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't, because over the years, a lot of women have come forward. And I speak with the attorneys that represent these women quite often. And I was speaking with one yesterday, who said that he had a client. She was of age, she was on the younger side. And she was trafficked to a very powerful man by Epstein in Palm Beach. And I believe there were others like that, that were trafficked to very powerful men. These women are scared to death. They're not going to come forward at this point, because look what happened to Virginia. It's just, they're just not going to, they're afraid. And so I do believe-

• 38:33Ross Douthat?

  What did happen to Virginia?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Well, Virginia, you know, she went public and she named names. And as a result of that, Alan Dershowitz among, was really the most vocal and, and he attacked her just brutally at every juncture, said every time he was in front of a microphone, he said horrible things about her. It was very, very, very nasty.

• 39:01Ross Douthat?

  Well, in fairness, I mean, in fairness to Alan Dershowitz, she had accused him of sex crimes.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Right. Well, you didn't let me finish.

• 39:08Ross Douthat?

  No, sorry.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Because I certainly agree that that's enough to drive anybody crazy, especially if you're wrongly accused. And he certainly felt that she had misidentified him. At the same time, Virginia wasn't the only one that accused Dershowitz of this. There was one other victim that also accused him. So I agree that, you know, especially how the whole thing ended, there's certainly some question about whether her allegations were, you know, whether she was mistaken or not, let's put it that way. But I do think that, you know, the reason why she ended up suffering so much trauma is every time something like

• 39:52Speaker 02

  this happens to a victim who's been sexually abused, and she was as a child, you're re-traumatized. And so she had a lot of trauma in her life and, and I'm sure that that led to her problems, her mental health problems that ultimately, you know, led to her suicide.

• 40:12Ross Douthat?

  Right. But so from your perspective then, though, it, it is likely that there is some set of men.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:19Ross Douthat?

  In the world of men who move through Epstein's mansion, Epstein's island and so on, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and part, you know, having sex with minors and so on, whose names, whose names have not, who have not been successfully accused in a court of law.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 40:38Ross Douthat?

  Okay. So, the next question. What do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that, again, is sort of the next, the next phase of the, of the sort of theorizing is that Epstein wasn't just trying to sort of woo and, you know, befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  I, I think he did, but I don't think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it's not like you write it down or that you, you know, I don't believe he had a list. I just think that he, he used these women, girls and women as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with. It was a business transaction to him, that's what this was. I don't think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying, if you don't do this for me, I'm going to reveal that you had sex with so and so.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  I don't think it was like that in, in that traditional sense. But if you're a man and you know that you've been doing this.

• 42:01Ross Douthat?

  You know, and he knows that you know, right?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think it was more like that. I don't think it was a official or a outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like, he knows this about me, maybe I better, you know, do this.

• 42:17Ross Douthat?

  So then that, that leads into the next sort of open question, right? Which is Epstein's alleged ties to intelligence agencies, meaning, I think in practice, either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. And here... We were talking earlier about Epstein's lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving him the plea deal. There is a now famous secondhand quote from Acosta where he is reported by someone else in the first Trump administration to have said, oh, he was told to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.

• 43:00Ross Douthat?

  Acosta has never publicly corroborated that, that quote, and there have been other, other instances where he said he didn't know anything about Epstein's intelligence connections. But first, do you think that some form of the intelligence world and Epstein's connections to it entered in at all to why he got off light the first time or anything like that?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  I don't know. And I don't think anybody really knows, except the people that, in the government that have these files. And I think that's in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein. Because I, I just don't know. I know there's a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, you know, I try to stick to the facts. And so it's just something we don't know for sure.

• 43:43Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, I mean, but I think, I'm drawing on your, your view, your skepticism about the blackmail narrative.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:51Ross Douthat?

  There's sort of two, two intelligence stories you could tell. In one, Epstein is literally an agent of an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the US government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That's sort of the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where, you know, Les Wexner, his, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence. So that, you know, this is a world of- People who overlap with Israeli intelligence.

• 44:34Ross Douthat?

  And maybe Epstein is useful as sort of a conduit of information, these kind of things. But it's not that he's being run as a kind of entrapment ring. That's sort of where I am. If we don't think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is sort of doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Well, let me put it to you this way. You're talking about what's plausible and what's not plausible. It's the job of our government to find out what's plausible or what's real and what's not real. And the question here, if we're talking about things that we don't know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is here. There certainly was enough there that the federal government, the DOJ, at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true on that end or not. We've known long enough of this Costa statement that he made. We've, you know, they've heard everything that we've heard, that we've just talked about. So we don't know the answer to those questions, but it's the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don't know whether they did or not.

• 45:50Ross Douthat?

  Good. So that brings me to either my last or next to last unanswered question, right? Which is, what do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else, that could shed further light on this case?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example, the FAA records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the US Marshal Service, which was supposed to monitor him. He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane. On a regular basis. So this is to me more of a story, not necessarily about Epstein, but about our government and what our government did or didn't do.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen? And why did it happen to me is the question. Epstein is sort of the the character in this. But really, these questions, I think the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do.

• 47:13Ross Douthat?

  When people talk about the Epstein files, right? This kind of term of art that gets that gets thrown around. Some of what you're suggesting sounds more like you think the government needs to, you know, look at material that it already has, but effectively create a new set of Epstein.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Well, we don't know.

• 47:30Ross Douthat?

  We're gonna, we're gonna go digging and find new information.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  But do we know? Maybe they did do that. We don't know what they did and didn't do. It's possible they did do a counterintelligence operation. It's possible they did look into some of these leads that they received about what he was doing. These are just some of the questions. It's not when they say, release the Epstein files. You are correct. They might not be able to release these, all these files, and it might not be appropriate for them to do so. But to completely shut down the case the way that they are saying, that's it, nothing to see here. I think it does the public a disservice because they, people want answers about how this man was able to operate like this for so long.

• 48:17Ross Douthat?

  And when you say things could be released that wouldn't be appropriate, that means that there's a set of information and material that involves both victims and maybe alleged perpetrators.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 48:30Ross Douthat?

  But also just people who are connected to Epstein, right?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 48:33Ross Douthat?

  And there's some of that that presumably can't be released without betraying the victims themselves, right? And some of that you wouldn't want to release because you'd be effectively releasing hearsay and rumor about public figures who haven't actually been charged with a crime. Right? Those seem like both impediments to some kinds of release that people want.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  That's correct, but there's still a whole set of information that they could. Release, for example, the FBI has a lot of files that are there online in their vault, what they call the vault. And for the most part, when you click on those files, they're either filled with wall-to-wall gobbledygook codes, or they are reports from the FBI from their investigation way back in 2005, where they're kind of giving status reports on the investigation. Those reports are heavily redacted, even Epstein's own name is redacted in some of these reports. That investigation from back then, what they did and what they knew and when they

• 49:35Speaker 02

  knew it, certainly those, some of those files could be looked at again and unredacted so that people can see exactly what happened back then and what the FBI did and didn't do. I just think that there's, this is in a

• 49:48Ross Douthat?

  Are there similar files from the 2018-ish investigation that could be, that could be released?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Certainly, they would have had to have some files, but, you know, remember, Ghislaine Maxwell is appealing her conviction right now. So the reason that, of course, they give for not releasing those case files concerning Maxwell is because that case is theoretically still open.

• 50:12Ross Douthat?

  If, if there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn't Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?

• 50:26Speaker 02

  I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn't want to release the files. I think that it's just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men, and possibly even, quite frankly, GOP or Democratic donors.

• 50:43Ross Douthat?

  But why does Maxwell, we're going to end with Trump, but why does Max, why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  You'll have to ask her. She certainly, she has said

• 50:59Ross Douthat?

  We're working, we're working on getting her on the podcast.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Good luck. She, she

• 51:06Speaker 02

  To be honest with you, I think once they got her conviction, that was it. They were, from what I understand from the lawyers representing the victims, they were more concerned about getting Epstein and Maxwell. They never really went there, there to go after the other people. And so if you don't want to go there, you don't want to do that, there would be no reason.

• 51:25Ross Douthat?

  You don't want it?

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:25Ross Douthat?

  So if her lawyers had offered, they would have just said, no, thanks. We're not interested in.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know for sure.

• 51:32Ross Douthat?

  You giving evidence against someone else.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Right. I don't know for sure.

• 51:34Ross Douthat?

  Okay. And now Trump himself. What, what do you think? Now, we're going to enter the realm of speculation, but Trump, it's not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or shut, you know, said, well, we've disclosed everything we can disclose. It's that Trump has come out swinging, saying, you know, this is a hoax. This is, you know, he's, he's essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just sort of ignore, but like publicly discredit. First, what is your understanding of Trump's connection to Epstein?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'd like to stick with what I know.

• 52:15Ross Douthat?

  What we know. Yeah. Stick with what you know there.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  He, he was friends with Epstein in the 1990s and they were in the same social circles together. And, you know, we, we see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is the falling out was two things that led to the falling out. One, that he, Epstein hit on a, a member's daughter at Mar-a-Lago and he was banned from, Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago. And the other.

• 52:47Ross Douthat?

  Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America. Yes. It's good.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  And the, the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property, very big property. And Epstein lost and, and Trump won the deal. And so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things that, but up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein's plane. He entertained some of Epstein's family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly.

• 53:22Ross Douthat?

  But there's no reason in the public record, in what we know, to think, oh, you know, out of all of Epstein's friends and acquaintances, Trump would be someone who you would expect to have actually been deeply enmeshed with Epstein in some way.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  There was no evidence right now that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein's businesses, or his sex trafficking, or his crimes.

• 53:48Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:49Ross Douthat?

  So then, and again, I don't want to make you speculate too much, but then, to you, watching Trump essentially say, it's time to bury this story, it's time to get my own supporters to move on from it, and so on, that looks like to you just a desire similar to the desire of prosecutors, not to have to deal with potential fallout from other names coming, coming out. What's, is that your reading?

• 54:14Speaker 02

  I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me, to be honest with you. I, I really honestly don't know. It doesn't make any sense that you would promote doing this and saying you're going to do it over and over again, and have the people that you appoint go forward with going public on, you know, on TV in a very public way, promising to do something, and then to switch gears like that. I, I really honestly don't know why he would do something like that.

• 54:45Ross Douthat?

  He gave an interview during the campaign, I think during the campaign, right, where he said something like, he was asked about the files, and in part of the answer, he said, well, we're going to release, you know, we should release something. But then he said, ah, you know, but you don't want to release things that aren't true.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:00Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:01Ross Douthat?

  And, and my perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story, that it was never, this was never one of Trump's obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn't surprise me that in the end, they didn't want to do some version of even what you're describing and say, ah, you know, we're going to go back and find a bunch of other records to, to release. That doesn't surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the, the vehemence of Trump's reaction to the negative reaction. That, that is something of a mystery.

• 55:39Ross Douthat?

  Okay. I've been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  I wish I understood why our government isn't treating this like the crime that it is. It's a serious crime that happened here. I don't think there's any dispute. I mean, let's, you know, this is, this is something that actually happened. This isn't a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young. And I just, it is surprising to some degree that they're treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is as a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory, don't contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Maybe the answer is, we still have questions and we're going to look into this more. But that's not the answer they gave. The answer they gave was, there's nothing here, there's nothing more to investigate, we're done with this story. And I think the answer should be, obviously, the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we're going to look at this a little further.

• 56:55Ross Douthat?

  But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead. So the assumption, your assumption in making this argument, and I, I think it's a very compelling argument, but the core of the argument is, there are other people out there who are guilty-

• 57:11Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 57:11Ross Douthat?

  -of Epstein's crimes, who should face justice and haven't.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me be clear. Epstein did not do this all by himself. He barely tied his shoes by himself. He had butlers and assistants doing everything for him, including his compiling of his contact lists, his musical playlists, he had people doing that for him, his computers, he had lots of people helping him. So he did not do this alone. There were other people helping him and there were other men who he sent some of these women to.

• 57:46Ross Douthat?

  Julie K. Brown, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 58:15Ross Douthat?

  That's our show for the week. If you enjoyed it, please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:24Ross Douthat?

  Interesting Times is produced by Catherine Sullivan, Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos, and Reyna Raskin. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Amen Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sofia Lanman and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulski. And our director of opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.