For Julie K. Brown, the investigative journalist credited with the reporting about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse that led to his arrest, Mr. Epstein is not so different from the mob.
“What Epstein was doing was similar to organized crime,” said Ms. Brown, who spoke at the Summer Institute’s Speaker Series on Thursday. “It was a sex trafficking network.”
The speaker series is held on Thursday evenings at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, and features weekly discussions on topics ranging from politics and the arts, to media and democracy.
Ms. Brown pursued the Epstein story in 2016, speaking to victims and eventually publishing her work in the Miami Herald, which included how Mr. Epstein had previously avoided federal sex trafficking charges. She received a Pulitzer citation this spring for her work and continues to write for the Miami Herald, alongside managing a Substack dedicated to the contours of the Epstein story.
In conversation with journalist John Harwood, Ms. Brown brought a packed audience through some of those contours: what Ms. Brown has reported, what she suspects, and what she thinks we will never know about the story. Ms. Brown is still putting the pieces together, tracking down new sources and discovering new things in the Epstein files.
“I think this story is going to outlive me,” she said. “There will be academics and journalists and people looking at these [files] for years and years to come.”
While Ms. Brown didn’t break the original Epstein story, she picked up the reporting after Mr. Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” that helped him avoid federal prosecution after charges of sexual abuse.
“To me, this story was always a big mystery,” Ms. Brown said. “In my mind, I thought, what went wrong here? What in the criminal justice system broke so badly that you have a man abuse probably at least dozens, if not more, underage girls, and he was out there living his good life. He had basically gotten away with this crime.”
In 2016, Ms. Brown thought it was time to take a new look at the case, starting from scratch.
“I looked at it like a cold case detective,” she recalled.
Ms. Brown reached out to dozens of victims, convincing eight of them to speak to her on the record. When her reporting was published, federal prosecutors reinvestigated the charges and eventually indicted Mr. Epstein.
But the story kept evolving, even after Mr. Epstein’s death in 2019. Things got clearer once the Epstein files were released: They showed his many manipulations and trajectory towards building a sex trafficking network.
“Jeffrey Epstein could not do this whole thing by himself,” Ms. Brown said. “He had people helping him, and…some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world were involved.”
Among them, Ms. Brown suspects, is President Donald Trump.
“Once…it was built, it became so successful…that he was lending these girls out,” she said. “There are people that I know of that [victims] were trafficked to that would probably blow your mind, and they’re all very, very, very scared.”
Many of the victims signed non-disclosure agreements. They wanted to move on with their lives, said Ms. Brown.
Still, Ms. Brown gets “tons of emails a day” from both Mr. Epstein’s victims and sex abuse victims. She can’t help all of them, but she does respond to every single one, she said.
“They just want someone to say, ‘I hear you. I see you. I understand what you’re going through. Here’s some places you can go for help,’” said Ms. Brown.
There’s still much to be discovered, she added, among them the circumstances around Mr. Epstein’s death, many of the international implications, and the specific people involved. It would be hard to prosecute and convict something that happened so long ago, but it’s not impossible, said Ms. Brown.
“I think it’s possible that they can [convict] them,” Ms. Brown said. “Look, they got Al Capone on…tax evasion. So I think that they need to follow the money, and who knows where that will lead.”
The Summer Institute welcomes New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman this week, on Thursday, July 23.
This article appears in July 24, 2026.