Chapter Thirty A Reckoning Begins #2
It was during this period that Julie K. Brown, an investigative journalist at the Miami Herald, began digging into the Epstein case.
She has said that she was prompted, in part, by Alex Acosta’s elevation to Trump’s cabinet—and by the fact that during Acosta’s confirmation hearings, Epstein’s name had barely come up.
The Miami Herald’s investigations editor gave Brown the go-ahead and assigned a videographer, Emily Michot, to work with her to capture interviews with Epstein’s victims on tape.
In early December 2017, they recorded their first emotional on-camera interview, with Michelle Licata, who’d been sexually assaulted by Epstein when she was just fourteen.
They would later conduct similar videotaped interviews with Courtney Wild and Jena-Lisa Jones, who was fourteen when Epstein fondled her during a “massage” and paid her $200 afterward.
And Brown and Michot wanted to record a conversation with me.
In early 2018, David Boies and Siggy met with Brown, who told them she was determined to get the sealed court records of my defamation case against Maxwell unsealed.
In her experience, victims of sexual assault often wanted to keep the details of what happened to them private, so she was expecting pushback.
But my lawyers told her she’d get no opposition from us.
The more light she could shine on the darkest corners of Epstein’s evil world, the better, we said.
In March 2018, I sat down for a video interview with Brown.
We’d meet more than once, but at the end of that first interview, I told her I was fighting not just for myself, but for every Epstein victim.
“I’m not going to stop,” I said, “until all these girls get justice.”
When I said “all” the girls, I was quite consciously including those I was sure Epstein was continuing to abuse in the present day.
Remember: he was a free man who, despite being a convicted sex offender, was still unrepentant about his taste for minor girls.
We know this without a doubt because in mid-August 2018, Epstein invited a New York Times reporter named James Stewart to his Manhattan townhouse for a chat.
The meeting was “on background,” which meant Stewart could only use whatever information he gleaned if he didn’t attribute it directly to Epstein.
[*] During their conversation (ostensibly about Elon Musk, whose business dealings Stewart was investigating), Epstein offered an off-topic aside, calling the criminalization of sex with teenage girls a cultural aberration.
He supported his belief by noting that at certain times in history, it had been seen as acceptable.
Epstein compared the vilification of men who had sex with minor girls to the way gay and lesbian people had been treated for decades—homosexuality, he noted, had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.
Clearly, Epstein still felt righteous about having sex with whomever he pleased, regardless of age.
In November 2018, Brown’s series of articles, accompanied by Michot’s videos, went live.
The series was called “Perversion of Justice,” and in it, Brown revealed the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that had led to Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement, zeroing in on Acosta’s role in it.
She uncovered eighty victims of Epstein, some as young as thirteen when the abuse occurred, and revealed the campaign of terror that Epstein and his cronies had used to try to silence those victims. (Remember when that car shined its headlights on our front door in Colorado?
Well, Brown found a victim in Florida who’d endured the same kind of hazing.) Finally, the series documented the experience of eight survivors in detail, with on-the-record interviews. I was among them.
The series was fantastic, in no small part because of Michot.
Her videos forced readers of Brown’s hard-hitting reporting to see all of us who’d survived Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse as human beings.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted, the videos acted as “something of a force multiplier, creating a three-dimensional platform for Epstein’s teenage victims to tell their harrowing stories.
” Brown’s series drove over 9.5 million unique visits to the Miami Herald website, while Michot’s videos were watched 850,000 times on the paper’s website alone and millions more times on YouTube.
“You’re just thrown into a world that you don’t understand,” I said in one video, describing what I and so many others had gone through with Epstein and Maxwell.
“And you’re screaming on the inside. And you don’t know how to let it come out.
And you just become this numb figure who refuses to feel and refuses to speak… All you do is obey. That’s it.”
Brown has rightly been credited with refocusing the attention of the public and of law enforcement on Epstein and Maxwell’s heinous acts.
We now know that not long after the Herald ran Brown’s first story, the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York opened an investigation into Epstein.
I will always be grateful for what Brown and Michot did for the countless women who’d been victimized—first by Epstein and Maxwell, but then again by their own government.
I also have to thank Brown with helping me understand that despite the problems I’d had with members of the tabloid media, working with good journalists could do a lot of good.
More and more, I began to make myself available to reporters who reached out.
Maybe if I spoke more about what all of us had been through, I thought, I could help increase awareness and prevent other young girls and women being abused.
It’s been said that no good deed goes unpunished, however, and apparently someone thought it was high time I be punished.
At some point in this period, the FBI called me in Australia to say there had been a credible threat on my life.
The agent told me that Robbie and I should contact the Australian Federal Police immediately.
I called right away but kept getting transferred from one person to another.
I was so scared that I was shaking. Robbie stood next to me as I waited on hold, determined to stay on the phone until someone helped us.
But after explaining myself over and over, only to be transferred again, I was out of patience.
That’s when Robbie stepped in. “Start packing,” he told me. “I’ve got a plan.”
From the earliest days of our relationship, Robbie had been my protector—my savior, even.
Now, he was going to deliver us from danger once again.
He rented a large mobile home and loaded the kids, the dogs, and me into it.
Within a few hours, we had hit the road, heading north.
I didn’t think I could maneuver that big of a vehicle, so Robbie drove for eight hours straight.
We ended up in a one-horse town at the top end of Queensland, not far from Cape Melville National Park.
The town had no grocery—just a convenience store where we could buy milk and bread.
But it was completely off the grid, which was what we needed most. There we would stay, cooking and sleeping in our RV, swatting mosquitoes, and occasionally fishing—for three weeks.
How do you decide when a credible threat to your life is no longer dangerous?
The answer is: you don’t. There simply comes a time when you resume normal routines.
When we returned to Cairns, we let the local police know what the FBI had told me.
Robbie and I tried to make the kids feel safe, even though we weren’t certain that they were.
Day and night, I worried that my family would be harmed by the very people who had hurt me when I was a teenager.
And in addition to fear, I felt rage. How entitled and selfish do you have to be to continue hounding and threatening the very victims you’ve hurt before?
It drove me crazy to think these people could potentially get away with silencing me for good.
When someone on Twitter speculated that the FBI might kill me “to protect the ultrarich and well connected,” I felt the need to respond.
If I died suddenly, I tweeted, no one should believe that it was an accident.
“I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed hastily but resolutely (making several spelling and grammatical errors that I’ve corrected here).
“I have made this known to my therapist and GP—If something happens to me—for the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.”
Skip Notes
* Readers of The New York Times wouldn’t know this, however, until three days after Epstein’s death in 2019.
In an article titled, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People,” Stewart explained that his promise to keep their conversations on background had expired because Epstein was deceased.