you know, this whole business of sex trafficking, um, you know, pornography, the internet, I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and I don't know the answer to trying to reel this in. I I do know that the answer is not to take the officers that police this, you know, from the FBI and Homeland Security and put them someplace else. Uh, the answer is to put more people on this problem. Hi there everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of the Best People podcast. This week's guest is to the Epstein investigation. What Woodward and Bernstein are to the Watergate investigation. She has blown every door open. And they weren't doors that were left a jar. Um, they were doors that were sealed shut, covered over, papered over until her intrepid reporting blew them open for the victims and for the public and now for the entire country. Without any further ado, this is the best people. And this is Julie K. Brown. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm such a fan. And your incredible reporting in the Miami Herald, reporting on Epstein has changed the weather. I mean, it has changed everything that we think and feel about this story. And I wonder if you can just first speak personally about what that is like. Um, I try to stay grounded and focused to be honest with you. If I think too much up in the clouds, then I'm not really doing my job. I want to stay focused on trying to continue to make people understand the importance of this story. I still think there's a segment of the public that do not understand how important this story is in so many different ways. So I've been trying to cover different aspects of it so that people understand because it is a huge story and a very complicated one. one of we'll start with um I've thought forever about I I want to go back to the beginning and and sort of how you um blew open this sweetheart deal, but I want to start with your most recent reporting because I think some of our best visibility into how powerful people treated Jeffrey Epstein is from some of your most recent reporting about how people, even though he was a child sex trafficker, which is the piece that I can't get my brain around. I can't even believe I said even though ahead of it, there were still powerful people in his circle. How does that happen? He was really a master manipulator. Uh he was very wealthy, so he dangled a lot of money out there or connections, you know, sometimes connections are almost as important, if not more important than money. He was adept at finding someone's weak spot. You know, I I always tell this story about these uh victims lawyers. There were many of them back in the day that represented these victims. And he wanted to meet with these lawyers personally. He wanted to size them up. And there was one particular lawyer who had a favorite cookie from New York. When he appeared for this meeting with Epstein, he had a whole tray of these cookies that Epstein found out that he loved from New York. And I think that that kind of says a lot about what Epstein did in how he manipulated people. He would find every out everything he could about someone and then find their weak spot or their need or how he could use their various skills to help him. And he it was just like a chess game in a lot of ways to him. It seems to me that there's a class element that doesn't get enough attention that these were smart girls and women. Um, these were he he seemed to prey almost in exclusively on on women with massive potential, but but women not from the same socioeconomic class as he and his peers were in. And I wonder how much that played a part in his ability to sort of carry on in in full view. Like a lot of the victims will say, you know, anyone that walked in or out of the mansion would see all these young women around. Like what did they think we were there for? Right. Well, I can relate to this because to be honest with you, I came from that class of people. I came from a a working mother, a single working mother. Uh I was very smart in school, straight A's. Uh but when you're young and you're you're uh the product of a broken family, your mother is always struggling. My mother worked two or three jobs sometimes, so she wasn't home a lot. Uh and a lot of these young women and girls were in this category. And I think sometimes you feel lost and he was able to convince these girls that he was going to help them in a way that their parents would probably never be able to. In other words, for me, it was always a question of whether I was ever going to be able to go to college. You know, my mom didn't have any money. And so, here he comes in like this white knight saying, "I'm going to get you want to be a model, I have connections in Victoria's Secret. You want to be uh you want to go to travel to Thailand? I'll help you do that." I mean, it he was serving them their dreams on a silver platter. And when you're young and impressionable like that, it's very easy to believe. He was very believable. He was very charismatic, he especially in the very beginning when he was trying to sort of trap them, he told them everything they wanted to hear. What is your um sense of how much remains unknown about his crimes and his victims? I don't think we have a handle yet on exactly how big it is and how much it involved. I I I you know, initially I was a little skeptical about whether he was in intelligence, for example. Uh now I'm less skeptical the more that I dig into these files, which by the way, I'm I'm in them almost every day, hours and hours and hours. And as you're looking for things to do with that piece, you inevitably find another piece and then you're off to the races on the next piece. So, there's so many pieces in here. Um, and unfortunately, nobody has really put them together, including the Justice Department um, and our own government agencies. It's clear that they never explored any of these angles and that they just I don't know what they were doing just throwing these uh documents in a file drawer somewhere because it's just amazing to me that there's so many threads of inquiry that I don't see any evidence that they followed. Is it as simple as they didn't believe the women or was there something else going on? I think that was part of it. I think especially early on in the case uh they didn't uh find them credible and they thought they were really you know prostituting themselves which was ridiculous because they were 13 14 years old so it's absurd. Uh but even I think as the years went by I think you know there's a lot of men in our government and I do think there was absolutely a bias not only on the part of failing to recognize how serious this crime was but also the female prosecutors in this case were also treated poorly I think and their male counterparts weren't really I think uh listening to them quite frankly when you go through the files, are you seeing things that confirm leads you had in your original reporting or that answer? I mean, I picture you like Carrie Mat from Homeland, right, with all of these different threads of the story in your head or somewhere physically and as the as some of the files have been released that you're able to go through and pursue investigative threads that you may have started a decade ago. I mean, can you just tell me what it's like to go through what has been released? It's sort of an epiphany sometimes because and it'll come from different places. Sometimes it'll come because I stumbled upon it, but you know, I get these tips from these people that just send me notes on Signal, you know, um, Michael, if you're out there, hi. I mean, there are these people who they actually look for things for me. They're just really into it. And I said, I think I saw this document. I don't know where I saw the the hardest part is really staying organized because you see things and then you might move on and then you think where did I see that and so I do have some people that have been very helpful in helping me find some of these documents but it's a whole range of of ways but yes a lot of it does trace back not only to my initial 2018 investigation but I subsequently did a lot of work between then and now on the US Virgin Islands for example all the, you know, they let him get away with doing this there, too, and they knew what he was doing. I just recently found a document that actually um not disputed what I reported, but changed a couple of the documents have changed the way that I thought about it back then. Can you tell us what those are? Well, one of them is uh the original lead prosecutor, Maria Vilifana. All the documents that we initially had from that case were from a lawsuit. And in that lawsuit, which was filed by two victims against our government, they were trying to prove that they broke the law by making this deal with Epstein. And one of the ways that they broke the law was that they didn't inform the victims that they were negotiating and had done this deal. In fact, they did the deal without ever telling them. So all the uh correspondence and the emails that they had connected to that document painted these prosecutors in the light that they were trying to hide this, you know, from the victims. And while I still believe that's what their goal was, it portrayed the lead prosecutor, Marie Villa, in a way that was that was she was part of the whole conspiracy. and and now that I can see some documents in here, more documents, I can see she really did fight for those girls. So, there's certain things in there and when you see the whole picture, it might look a little different. Another aspect of the story is Sarah Kellen, who is a um one of his assistants who arranged his schedule and had a lot of these girls come in and and subsequently they were abused. Sarah Kellen, it is now considered by uh at least later the Justice Department came to realize that she herself was a victim. And if you look in there and see what she's gone through in her life, yes, she should have never continued to do what she did, but you look at these people in a different way when you can see the full picture. um when you hear from the the women who were girls at the time um as well as the women who who weren't but who were abused and trafficked um and you hear them describe Galain Maxwell in a lot of ways the monstrosity of her crimes feel like an equal or greater betrayal to the victims and survivors that she participated in in the rape and the sex acts but that she also so groomed them and and spotted them and scouted them and brought them in. How is it possible that she's getting this favorable treatment in prison that Donald Trump's deputy attorney general goes and visits her? There are things happening around her that are that are as shocking as as everything that's been alleged about him. Well, let me tell you something. She knows everything. She knows everything. and she has emails and she has texts and she, you know, she's a very, very shre woman, very smart woman. And I'm sure early on she started saving all that material because for one thing, Epstein was starting to hang her out to dry a little bit toward the end. And if I'm I'm sure she was smart enough to start getting some material together as protection for herself. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took them this long to put her into a cushy prison. Um, you know, I I think she really does know everything and that there's a little bit of a big question mark there about what Trump is going to do. And I think depending on what he what he does, it will show whether he is implicated to be honest because I think there's a very good chance that he's going to pardon her. What is your sense of what happened with the three missing documents uh that included the allegation against Donald Trump of sexual and physical abuse against a girl who was 13 to 15 years old at the time? Well, the I have to be careful because I have sources involved in this case and they've told me a lot about what it is. But what I will say is I think that there is still a lot of people that want to discredit women. And what people have to realize about this is when I first started this case, the victims that I looked up, now of course this was years later. They were in their late 20s, early 30s, but the whole trajectory of their lives had changed after they met Epstein. I mean, they had been subjected to physical abuse. A couple of them were in prison. Courtney Wild, very vocal victim, who is part of my original story, she was in prison on on a drug charge, and she spent longer in jail than Jeffrey Epstein did with his sweetheart deal. So if we have if we discount every victim who then subsequently gets involved in drugs or gets involved in some kind of illegal activity, it's it doesn't discount the fact two things can be right. They could still have been sexually abused and yes, they could have a criminal record. That doesn't mean that they weren't sexually abused when they were especially when they were younger because most uh victims of sexual abuse when they are children, they don't go public with their abuse until they're well into adulthood. So, I think it's really important for people to understand that this woman, I'm not saying what she said about Trump is true. But what I'm saying is we don't know for sure that it's not true just because she has some kind of a strange or iffy background or by the way, I couldn't find any evidence that she does have a criminal record even though the Justice Department said she quote unquote has a extensive criminal record. I wrote the White House and I said, "Can you show us her extensive criminal record because I haven't seen it and we've looked very hard and so have other journalists and I have not received a response." What is your sense of how much Trump has influenced what has been released and when it's been released? I don't know. All I know is what I keep, you know, he, you know, thinking about was what he told Marjorie Taylor Green, which, you know, he was, you know, very uh upset that she was going to vote uh for this bill that released the files and he told her, you know, words to the effect that this is going to hurt some of my friends. And so that to me means he's protecting someone. I mean, I don't know of any other way you can construe that. What is the experience you have when you see that Alex Aosta, who's the architect of the Epstein sweetheart deal, ends up in Donald Trump's cabinet? I mean, the Trump story requires you to either believe in extraordinary coincidences or start asking questions. I, you know, I don't know, you know, a lot of things happened around that time. I was already working on that story. uh before he nominated think about this. I decide that I'm going to look at this because essentially at the time I had already been quite aware of the Epstein story and I always found it pretty disturbing that no one that he got away with his crimes essentially. So I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, you know, this is I don't even know if it's a story. And then he nominates Alex Aosta. And I'm thinking, okay, now when he goes before the Senate for his confirmation, everybody's going to throw all these questions at him about this. And they really didn't. It was as if the story was buried and everybody had forgotten about it, which made me want to then talk to the victims about what they thought about this man who was going to head an agency, by the way, that has oversight of human trafficking. and he's the very person that let their predator, you know, somewhat off the hook. So, you know, yeah, I don't really believe in coincidences. I don't know if if this was anything more than that. I haven't found any evidence of that. But you have to admit this story is filled with an awful lot of coincidences. You you just you have to I mean, that's the fork in the road that that the Trump story puts you at. You either have to believe in extraordinary coincidences. um or you have to ask the sort of difficult questions that you've been asking. Let me ask you to sort of go back in time and take us back to 2018 when this turns into a you know even in the time of Trump a a four alarm fire scandal politically. Um just talk about what you reported and and and the reaction. Well, I didn't predict. Obviously, by the way, I should mention that I had a reporting partner, Emily Micho, who worked on this. She was my videographer and photographer for this project. We took some wonderful um we called them mini docks, mini documentaries. I was young. I was scared. I knew these people were powerful. I didn't know what would happen if I said no. I didn't know what would happen if they reported if I reported them. That 16-year-old girl just let it happen. She did a wonderful job with putting together these documentaries uh that in just a few minutes kind of encapsulates the the the injustice and the trauma and just the outrage uh of this story. But Emily and I sort of felt like sometimes we were on an island with this story because uh you know we had a lot of support with the Miami Herald. Uh but unless you're in the thick of a story like this, it's very hard to communicate with people exactly why it's important until you get it on paper and and print it. Because I think even I wasn't sure about the story until I interviewed the very first victim and after we went to we went to Tennessee to interview her and after we did her I mean I get emotional now just thinking about it because it was an incredible interview. Once she spoke it was like this is freaking unbelievable. It was the story that she told and how it had affected her life and how they felt betrayed not only by, you know, the criminal justice system, but to some degree by their own lawyers, by their own families. There was just so much betrayal to these young women. Uh so many people at every step of the way in many cases took advantage of them. And you know, so you know, it it's it's understandable why many of them are so afraid to speak out. How did you get them to trust you? I think well, first of all, I did some homework. I spoke with therapists and a one man who was very helpful to me is was a former FBI. Uh he he he his job really his most his whole career was to talk to child victims of sexual assault and he just explained things. He you know and the therapist that I talked to the psychologist really explained to me the nature of trauma and what the triggers could be. And in the end, what I just decided to do was not to ask too many questions, which is against our nature, as you know. But I always tell young reporters that one of the things that are is sometimes more important than asking the questions is just being quiet and letting the the white noise settle so that they can think through what they want to say because this happened when they were so young and it it is just amazing. I think it gave them the freedom to breathe and to just talk tell me what you want to tell me what you know I didn't you know I told them if they didn't want to talk about the actual abuse they didn't need to because this story was really about the corruption on the part of the government and and how that impacted them. So I I think you know I know after I interviewed Michelle who was the first victim in Tennessee my phone rang and we were in the car Emily and I on the way to the airport and I thought okay here it goes she's going to say she doesn't want us to use it cuz we sort of had said if even if after they had done the interview we weren't going to say if they said we don't I don't want it in I changed my mind we weren't going to publish it and she just said I can't tell you what a relief this is. And I just burst out crying because, you know, just the way she said it, it was like I've been wanting to share that for 15 years, you know. So, um I think they did want to talk, you know, they did want to say, they wanted somebody to really listen, you know, and you know, that's what I think Emily and I tried to do. How many um Michelle's do you think there are? Oh gosh. Um at the time I did the series, I tracked down almost a hundred names. And out of those hundred, which I wrote letters to all the women that I could track down. And out of all them, Michelle was the only one that answered my letter. And then I had reached out to the lawyers for Virginia's, uh, lawyer, uh, David Boy and Sigret McCaulay. Um, and then Courtney Wild, that was Brad Edwards. And at at that point, I was a little disappointed that I only had four. The other one was Jenna Lisa Jones who came to the interview I had with Virginia because uh she had contacted Brad. Uh so we had four and at the time I was sort of thinking h gosh I wish we had more because I knew there were a lot more. Yeah. And I kept trying to get more, but they didn't want to go public. And uh you know, I even was in touch with the farmer sisters and they weren't able to do the interview and weren't ready to do it, you know. So uh I was a little disappointed, but after the whole thing was said and done, to be honest with you, I'm really really happy I had only four because they were each in their own way so special. And I just think if you have so many it would have perhaps been a little diluted, you know. I think it was just perfect actually. Can you remind us of all their stories? Well, um, Michelle just she came from a big family like I don't remember how many brothers and sisters, but a lot of brothers and sisters and she was a good student, but she felt lost. her parents worked a couple jobs and um she wanted to buy them Christmas presents and some one of her friends or acquaintance came to her at high school and said, "Do you want to earn some extra money?" She said, "Sure." And turns out that um she said, "All you have to do is massage this old man and he's going to give you a couple of hundred dollar." She said, "Sure." So she gets there and of course you don't know what you're facing. She didn't tell anybody she was there. And you just they take you up to this creepy room and they leave you alone with this guy and you're thinking I'm going to die, you know. And so he he molests her and she left there feeling like she was never going to find anyone to love her ever again because of what had happened. She felt stupid. She felt um dirty. She felt all those things you do, you know, when you're sexually assaulted. And from that point, her life began spir spiraling out of control just from going there one time. Same with Jenna Lisa. Jenna Lisa was a similar story. She went there only one time and it affected the rest of her life. And then of course uh Courtney was the one who was suing uh to her credit from prison. She was suing the US government uh because they had done this deal in secret and she she was just a onewoman fighting machine in that she wasn't letting up. She had a very great lawyer uh Brad Edwards on her behalf um fighting this lawsuit for a decade. At the time I took up this case that lawsuit was almost a decade old so it wasn't going anywhere fast. Um, and then Virginia, and we all know Virginia's story, and she had been out in the public before, but I do think that the way that Emily in particular did her documentaries and gave her a voice on camera that way, I think really showed the power of Virginia's story in a way that hadn't been done before. Even though there had been stories written especially uh in Europe about her accusations against the prince um I think seeing her on camera like that was very powerful. What do you think she would have experienced to see Andrew arrested? She she just she's she's smiling down from heaven. I think um you know I Even to this day, there are people out there that are trying to discredit her. It's incredible to me. You know, I am seeing things in the file. I have a whole file set aside of documents I found that back up what she said. What it happened. It happened. She was abused by these men. I do not understand why it's so hard for people to not know that this happens in America. This is what happens all over the world actually where young women are, you know, impressionable or underage and they're being trafficked to very, you know, wealthy and powerful men. It is it it it's real people. It's real that this happened. One of your stories, I think, um well, two of your stories um changed how I saw this. I mean, the reporting about is it Kathy Rmler? Rumler, Obama's former chief White House counsel who ascends to the highest levels of New York City uh legal and financial circles um at a law firm and then at I think it's Goldman Sachs. Mhm. Her email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein, she's texting with him and and then her email exchange after there was someone who was going to go in and cooperate where she wasn't his lawyer. Like there was no legal reason for her to be weighing in or helping him. And we don't know what she does, but she tells Jeffrey Epstein, I'll make a call. What makes her like, why why can she be corrupted with a Birkin bag? It's hard to know without knowing what was going through her head and also what her personal demons are or were. I would imagine that there's some kind of a backstory there that we probably don't know about, but there certainly is no real good excuse for something like that, especially the enormous volume of emails and the content of the emails that went back back and forth. Maybe she thought nobody would ever find out. What is your sense of how successful he was? Um because you you have some reporting on this as well since some of the files were released in getting law enforcement to look the other way. Federal law enforcement in bringing young women um to the island for abuse. I just I you know I just don't I don't understand it. I really don't. I haven't been able to make sense of it. I do know after my piece ran I got a I got quite a bit of push back from other journalists for example sort of dismissing the work and I I sort of think that there is still a segment of people out there who just don't get it who still think well they got money you know they knew what they were getting into um it was consensual I just think that there is still a segment of America and the media quite frankly who still don't understand the gravity of this crime and what he did. And um the easiest way I explain it sometimes especially to men is do you have a daughter? I mean that's what I say and I nine times out of 10 the person that is saying this stuff to me doesn't have a daughter so they don't get it. But if you do have a daughter and your daughter at 18 or 19 years old is invited to some 50, 60 year olds mansion and she comes back broken. I don't know a father who wouldn't go there and avenge her pain. So I do not understand why this isn't universally um toxic for all these fancy people to have associated with them. I I want to ask you if if you can unpack part of how the sweetheart deal is pedled by Epstein. You know, how does Epstein make friends after being convicted in 2008? Does he cover it up? Does he wear his ankle bracelet like a badge of honor? Does he just say, "Oh, I guess someone I mean, like, how does he re-enter or or stay in his circle?" Well, the genius of the sweetheart deal, and when I say the genius, I mean the genius on the part of his lawyers, was that they manipulated that deal all the way to the finish line and beyond the finish line. And the way that they did it was they picked a charge solicitation of a minor for prostitution and they attached one victim to that and it was not the 14year-old who was the first to report it but the 16year-old and that was very designed for a reason because in some states 16 is the age where you don't have to be monitored at least at back then you don't have to be monitored the same way you do as a sex convicted sex offender as you do in in other states. So that technically on paper he was he was convicted and plead guilty of that crime and he was able to tell people at least initially look it was just one girl and she was 16. I didn't know she was 16. She looked like she was of age and this is what his stickick was. you know, to get back initially to the party scene, into the elites, into the wealthy. Uh, and then he did, you know, what all the very powerful people do. He hires, you know, Peggy Seagull and other people to start, uh, repairing his reputation. He's donating millions of dollars to every cause. There's press release after press release. He's giving just millions and millions of dollars away to every kind of organization imaginable. So, you know, he had a plan to you repair his reputation. And then when it these victims started coming forward to sue him, you know, a couple of as the years went on, uh the media had forgotten about the case. So nobody was really scrutinizing, you know, they were reporting these, oh, another lawsuit was filed today by another victim who claimed she was molested. The the the victims had no voice. They were their stories were told through lawyers and through lawsuits. And so the story kind of quieted down because it became just another lawsuit story. And nobody really very few people anyway but nobody in mainstream uh you know like the Washington Post or the New York Times or any anybody in mainstream was really covering it rigorously. So it it you know at some point though it was clear because Virginia went public and when Virginia went public around 2011 or so that's when you know it hit the fan and she was naming the prince and she started mentioning people and then at that point it became more public again but then again it died again you know even after my story ran it got quiet for a while again. So it it's just been kind of a roller coaster for these poor victims. What in your view blows it into the open in the last 14 months? Like I know when I started covering it every day, it's when Elon Musk tweeted in all caps, "Donald Trump is in the Epstein files and I was covering Doge every day and I was like, what?" Yeah. How does he know? And I was covering stories of all the access um unauthorized or legally questionable access Elon Musk had to all the government everything and Elon Musk tweets that. But is there something else that that thrust this into the center ring for you? Well, that was a big moment because uh you know when Donald Trump was running against Biden, I know that there was a lot of information on uh social media about, oh, now we're going to find out about Trump and and I was one of the reporters that kept saying, "Wait a minute." Because there was a lot of propaganda out there and a lot of manipulation, AI manipulation show, you know, that with Trump. And I said, "Look, honestly, there is no evidence that Trump was involved in anything that the trafficking and you know, so when Elon did that, then it was like, wow, what does he know that we don't know?" You know, what's been covered up? So, I think that was definitely a watershed moment. But I also think uh there were two other watershed moments. The second one was these victims. I don't think that anybody anticipated how much they would mobilize and become a force to be reckoned with, you know, politically. And that was a huge watershed moment because as long as these women and and this is the way Epstein actually treated them when he was with them, he kept them all apart. They weren't allowed to talk to each other. They were to keep their mouth shut. They never really were allowed to become friends with each other. And so when they finally had the opportunity to actually, you know, mobilize and and form alliances with each other and compare notes with each other, they became a force to be reckoned with. That gives me chills. I mean, I I have the sense that that's the case from interviewing the ones who are willing to not just be public, but be public and come on television shows. But I've I've interviewed Jess Michaels and Danny Bensky and um I mean I've been so honored and so moved by every one of them. But they all describe themselves the way you just did as sort of being being changed and fortified by this I think sisterhood is what they call it. Um can you talk a little bit more about how that is new? Well, some of these women even to this day have never spoken out to anybody, right? You know, they've never told anybody this happened. So, it's been a long journey for for some of these women. They weren't uh Virginia was the exception that she was. So, and look what happened to her. She was so persecuted and still is to some degree. So, they're they've understandably been afraid uh because they know they open themselves up. Their lives weren't perfect. So when you go public, you know how it is that you're going to have people that are going to scrutinize you and try to attack you and find any little thing that they can. And I think it's a real credit to them and their sisterhood that they have been supporting each other this way. And u and there's a lot of them that still are in that sisterhood but won't talk on TV as you know. They'll talk to me on the phone, but it'll be completely off the record. It's different levels of comfort that they have with talking about it. But I think when they're all in the room together, and remember to some degree, they also helped um fill in the blanks for each other because when you get abused that long ago and you go through that trauma, there's pieces of it that you bury in your psyche. And I think that they're talking about it among themselves. They're able to put more of the pieces together in their head and then own their own story. And that's why it was so important for Maria Farmer to get those reports that she found because she wanted to own her own story. And up until that time, she had so many people saying, "Well, we didn't really find this. Uh, your story must be wrong. You didn't really report this." Or there was a million things that they that they they told her to make her feel as though she wasn't telling them the full truth. And it's so important for these victims to own their own story and to be able to say, "Yes, this happened to me. Look at me. I am a victim." And you you should just believe these victims really. Right. Well, and for to have so many of them tell the same story or similar stories. I want to ask you about the parts of the story that animate the right because the one of the other um things that seems to change the energy around the story is that it was Trump's own coalition that felt betrayed when Pam Bondi made the binders and called all the right-wing influencers to the White House, gave them these binders, and then I think six weeks later said, "There's nothing else here." What parts of the story sort of lay over the right-wing conspiracies about a massive government cover up and the investigative threads that you've been pursuing for years and years? Well, I never thought that, you know, that something that I was fighting for, which was to keep this story in the public eye and to continue to try to shed light on how it happened and who was responsible. I never thought that I would sort of find that the right part of, you know, my cause. Yeah. Right. We would have that in common. They were using it for their own, you know, purposes. Um, and some of them may have really had uh really good intentions, but I also think some of them really were using it to get Trump elected and thinking because he had said he was going to do this that this was a reason to elect him. And well, we found out that that wasn't really the case. So, uh, I was skeptical about that whole thing from the beginning. I I knew that Jeffrey Epstein didn't have his own little client list, so to speak. He wasn't the kind of person that would have had that written down, like here are all the men that I was trafficking women to kind of list. Uh, but I thought it any attention that this story gets is good because in my mind I needed all the help I could get to try to keep this in the public eye and to get, you know, to get more transparency, to get these files out there, to get, you know, answers. And so, in some ways, I was glad, but it it did sort of spiral into a place that I thought, ugh, this is just uh not the point. This isn't the point. The point is really uh transparency and getting justice for the victims. I mean, the Saturday Night Live cold open was about the Iran war being started to distract from the Epstein files. I mean it's now so saturated pop culture even um a lot of the manosphere um hosts and podcasting world um so much of their content is now derisive about Trump and furthers for their millions of listeners that he is orchestrating or part of or benefiting from a cover up. How much of that rings true to you having all of the investigative years under the hood of the story? Well, because I've been on top of it, I'm sort of I think I'm I'm colored by the fact that I've been on it and working on this for so long. And now you have some of these uh you know, influencers, so to speak, who have just discovered there's nothing so annoying to me of these uh influencers out there on public platforms and saying, "Look what I just found." And I'm thinking, "Here's the article I wrote about it three years ago or 13." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, so I'm colored by the fact that I feel like, you know, a lot of these people, you know, it's not that they were late to the party necessarily. I just think that they didn't do their homework. And, you know, I I just think a lot of them never really understood the the story to begin with. Um, Conan O'Brien in the Oscars makes a joke about the UK and he says, "Well, I think it's about the lack of nominees." He says, "Well, at least they arrest their pedophiles." What is the variable between how the UK and other eur, you know, European countries are dealing with people, anyone with any tentacle into this story so much more harshly than they are here in America. I do think that our electorate here has, for whatever reason, has given Trump and people in his camp a big pass. And you know the the electorate in Britain, my guess is they're not giving these people a pass. And I think that that is a big factor. When people say, "Well, what can I do?" I say, "Well, you got to vote, you know, or volunteer for organizations that help battered women." Uh, but it we really have to have leaders that want to hold predators accountable. We have to have strong laws in place that and strong punishments and and people in the justice department willing to go after. We have to make it politically necessary for our elected officials to go after these kinds of uh predators. What is your sense of how much pressure has built? I mean, if you could just put it into relative terms, between a year ago and today, it feels like there's a whole lot more public awareness. What is your sense of how much more we know today than a year ago, and how much more we'll know a year from today? Well, this brings me back to my third watershed moment, and that is when these files finally were released. And what has happened now is the public doesn't have to rely on Julie K. Brown anymore to tell them what's in these files. They can go in there. But you know what I'm saying? It's like jer sometimes people have this distrust of journalists and or anybody even on these public platforms. You can actually go in and you can look at these files and that is huge because the public can see with their own eyes and they're looking at these files and they are saying, "Oh my god, they're seeing this stuff themselves." So I think that that is huge because it's no longer being filtered that anybody can go in there really and you know it is a lot of work uh to sort through them like looking for a needle in a hay stack sometimes but you could put Trump's name in there and you can just look and see what comes up and uh you could get lost in them. Uh but I do think that it is a good thing and you know there's some negatives to this and that some of these victims names were not redacted and they should have been and there are some people who have been caught up in this that maybe they shouldn't have. But I do think that it's important that the public is now able to see the truth themselves. What is your hope for how the public interacts with all this information? And what would your dream sort of tool be for helping people more easily search through them and and and sort to your point experience them with their own eyes? I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. I'm still I'm going back and forth between, you know, three different programs. is one of them that's good for one thing and the other thing and then just going in myself, you know, cold and trying to find things. I I that is really the real challenge right now to be honest with you is to really understand them. And uh I mean I just spent all weekend reading the two statements that were given by the two corrections officers that you know who work the night. Each of those statements are 400 pages. So what is what what happened that night? I mean, what what you're gonna have to stay tuned. I'm working on something. But, uh, it is not it's that's another whole that's another whole mess. It is incredible that story about what happened that night. And you're going to have to read Julie K. Brown to find out. We always read Julie K. Brown. Um, what did I not ask you about that sort of keeps you up at night on this story? Everything keeps me up all night. Uh I don't sleep very well because I'm working on this and my brain keeps going even after I get in bed and sometimes I wake up at 2 3:00 in the morning and start working because my head won't stop. Uh I'll think of remember something that I read somewhere. You know, I have so much stuff in my head that it's impossible for me not to think about it almost all the time. What can we do as journalists and hosts um that don't know the story as well as you do to support the victims and the truth? I think that uh uh especially you Nicole and that there are some people in the media that are really doing a great job in telling this story and really doing their homework. I think that's the most important thing before saying anything to kind of at least go Google it first just to make sure there isn't a piece of it that because it's such a sprawling story it is no one person even me can know everything. I get these people that are sending me um Clyde so and so did you see oh my god and then they'll give me a whole report on this guy I've never even heard of him before. I mean we all are all I think doing the best that we can with trying to be accurate and to try to put the pieces together. The way the government has released this hasn't made it easy. It's a big word salad document salad and you know it appears from some in some places that they never followed up on anything but we don't know because we don't really have all the file. So maybe they did follow up on some of this you know it's not it's not linear or or chronological. Um, I I guess my last question for you is about where we started and and the way women are treated um and the way their stories are viewed through such a filter that um I wonder if you think there are other Jeffrey Epstein out there right now. Oh, I know there are because I keep getting emails about these other Jeffrey Epstein a couple of times a week from victims. Um, no, it's a hu, you know, this whole business of sex trafficking, um, you know, pornography, the internet. I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and I don't know the answer to trying to reel this in. I I do know that the answer is not to take the officers that uh, police this, you know, from the FBI and Homeland Security and put them someplace else. Uh the answer is to put more people on this problem and we have to really globally we have to address this as if it's almost like terrorism because it is terrorism against our children and our most vulnerable in this society in this world and it's really a a plague at this point. Your work is so important and I'm such a fan and take it to taking an hour of your time is something that I'm really grateful to have gotten. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.