--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've heard of MailChimp. You've heard of podcasts. Well, MailChimp has a podcast. It's called Going Through It. It's hosted by Anne Friedman and features stories from 14 different women, including Rebecca Traitster, Solanad O'Brien, and someone named Hillary Clinton.
--:-- Noel King: Subscribe and listen now. It's available on Apple Podcasts. It's on Stitcher. Where do you listen? It's probably there too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Toward the end of last year, we talked about an egregious example of a two-tiered justice system on the show, one that seemed to confirm that the rich and powerful can get away with anything. At the time we released the episode, it didn't seem like there would ever be any real justice in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, but now there's like a little sliver of a chance.
--:-- Noel King: First, what he did. And, as a warning, this is a story about sex crimes against minors.
--:-- Julie Brown: Julie Brown has been covering the Epstein case for the Miami Herald, and she's helped uncover evidence that about 80 women have been sexually abused by Epstein and his friends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Epstein was a multimillionaire hedge fund manager who began his career on Wall Street with Bear Stearns. He was able to ingratiate himself with some very important and wealthy people who he persuaded to invest in his company.
--:-- Noel King: And these people wanted to be around him because he also had a lot of money and he was willing to donate to their foundations.
--:-- Julie Brown: Who are we talking about with these famous, powerful people?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, we know that former President Bill Clinton had flown on one of his private jets quite a number of times. We know that Donald Trump had been on his plane and had been at some of his parties.
--:-- Noel King: There were plenty of celebrities that were around him, David Copperfield, Naomi Campbell, Kevin Spacey, just a lot of really high profile people that he surrounded himself with.
--:-- Julie Brown: And while he was rubbing elbows with these powerful people and throwing parties for them and making donations to their various causes and fundraisers and charities, what was he doing behind the scenes?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had an obsession with very young girls.
--:-- Noel King: We now know that in the early 2000s, he would lure these teenage girls in Palm Beach into his home.
--:-- Julie Brown: The girls would be offered $200 to $300 to give an old man a massage. And these girls who had no money, who came from broken homes, who had parents who were either in jail or were on drugs, they were thinking, all I have to do is give a man a massage and I'm going to get $200.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what actually happened was he would molest them.
--:-- Noel King: And if the girls were uncomfortable, then he asked those same girls, look, OK, you don't have to do this, but bring me more girls.
--:-- Julie Brown: So he had this revolving door of teenage girls coming in and out of the house for trysts two, three, four times a day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do any of these girls' stories stick out to you? I know you've spoken to some of them.
--:-- Julie Brown: I spoke with Courtney Wilde, and her story is pretty poignant because she was really almost homeless.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My mother was on drugs at the time, and she couldn't provide for me.
--:-- Julie Brown: As with most of the girls here, she was brought there by a couple of friends. And she sort of got lured into this practice where he said, I can help you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he offered her money to bring him girls.
--:-- Julie Brown: By the time I was 16, I brought him up to 75 girls, all the ages of, you know, 14, 15, 16, people going from 8th grade to 9th grade at just school parties is where I would recruit him from.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she became one of his primary recruiters, and he wanted fresh faces every day.
--:-- Julie Brown: Every day? Yeah, every day he was in Palm Beach.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was another girl, Virginia Roberts, who was one of the early girls that he lured into his operation
--:-- Julie Brown: I went from an abusive situation to being a runaway to living in foster homes To just already being hardened by life on the streets She had had a tough life She had been trafficked to pedophiles on the streets of Miami she thought okay well you know how do I become a massage therapist so they brought her to Epstein's mansion and basically just started to groom her into you know here's the massage here's what you do but you take off your clothes and you know it went from there it ended with sexual abuse and intercourse and then a pat on the back you've done a really good job like you know thank you very much and here's $200.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was exactly the same story every time.
--:-- Julie Brown: My friend brought me here. We went into the kitchen. There was a chef there. He would offer us food. Sometimes we would eat some cereal or a sandwich and then I would be led up this circular staircase.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was like kind of like a spiral almost.
--:-- Julie Brown: And she brings us up the stairs and it was like spiral stairs. There were pictures on the wall of naked girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were led into this vast master bath bedroom combination.
--:-- Julie Brown: And there was a mint green and pink sofa in there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He took sex toys out of the drawer of this bureau.
--:-- Julie Brown: All the girls had the same details of what he did. He came in in a towel. He dropped his towel. He made them, you know, straddle him at first on his back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we would take the massage table out and set it up in the middle of the room.
--:-- Julie Brown: And then he came in with his white towel on around him. And then he just laid down in his towel on his stomach, and he was just talking to people on the phone
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When he flipped over that when he said okay you can go ahead and take off your shirt and pants but you can stay in your underwear
--:-- Julie Brown: It was all the same story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how did the police find out all of this was going on?
--:-- Julie Brown: In 2005, one 14-year-old girl confessed to her parents that she had been there and what had happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And her parents went to Palm Beach Police and Palm Beach Police launched an investigation.
--:-- Julie Brown: And as soon as they found out that this 14-year-old girl was brought there by two other girls, they went to those two other girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those two other girls told them, well, these two other girls took me there.
--:-- Julie Brown: And it just kept going on and on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the police chief didn't know when it would ever end because it was just one after another that they were finding that were involved in this.
--:-- Julie Brown: So what happens once the police get involved?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the police did a pretty thorough investigation.
--:-- Julie Brown: First, they had to interview the girls, which wasn't easy because in the beginning, the girls really didn't want to tell them what they did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were, you know, afraid and shamed.
--:-- Julie Brown: And after that, they found in the trash all these notepads with copies of messages that said, for example, Courtney can't come at four or Sally has soccer practice at three.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She can't make it here till five.
--:-- Julie Brown: So they eventually went to the Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer and said, you know, here's what we got.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This millionaire is doing this.
--:-- Julie Brown: And initially, Barry Krischer said, well, this is terrible. well, we're going to put that guy away. We're going to go after him. Go full steam ahead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then as soon as Epstein found out, he hired Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.
--:-- Julie Brown: Dershowitz comes to Krischer with a whole dossier full of information on this 14-year-old girl saying, this girl comes from a horrible family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She looks, she's on here on MySpace drinking a beer.
--:-- Julie Brown: He was trying to discredit her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so Krischer went from, you know, wow, we're going to go after this guy to telling the police, well, I don't know if we want to even prosecute him.
--:-- Julie Brown: And as this is all happening, police are just getting more and more girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it was just snowballing.
--:-- Julie Brown: So they're dealing with the fact that they have you know all these girls that they're interviewing and this is a small police force and a state attorney who is sort of backing off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So then the palm beach police chief asked krischer to remove himself from the case because krischer kept giving them push back.
--:-- Julie Brown: And then the chief took it to the FBI and said, this has to be prosecuted. This is a sex trafficking situation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Palm Beach state attorney doesn't want to prosecute it.
--:-- Julie Brown: And that's what happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, Jeffrey Epstein gets a sentence you won't believe.
--:-- Julie Brown: I'm Sean Ramos from This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As I told you at the top there, Going Through It is a new MailChimp original podcast.
--:-- Julie Brown: It's hosted by Anne Friedman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you hear Anne sit down with writers and comedians and politicians and musicians, I think there's 14 in total, to hear about the pivotal moments in their lives and careers and relationships when they had to decide whether to quit or keep going.
--:-- Julie Brown: And the show isn't necessarily about just, you know, cheering for victories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's about what goes through people's minds when they find themselves at a crossroads, crossroads when their best laid plans just don't pan out or when those plans do pan out and everything's still a hot mess.
--:-- Julie Brown: You can subscribe and listen to Going Through It right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's available on Apple Podcasts.
--:-- Julie Brown: I bet it's on Stitcher.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I bet you can find it on whatever podcast app you're using.
--:-- Julie Brown: Going Through It from Mailkip.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Julie, all of these women get wrapped up in this investigation.
--:-- Julie Brown: It goes from the Palm Beach Police Department to the FBI.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is Jeffrey Epstein convicted? No, he's not even prosecuted.
--:-- Julie Brown: What happened is the FBI picked up where the Palm Beach Police left off, and they re-interviewed a lot of these girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also obtained a lot more evidence in the way of witnesses.
--:-- Julie Brown: Epstein had butlers, housekeepers who knew what he was doing and who gave them other evidence to corroborate these girls' stories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which, by the way, all these girls' stories were the same and they didn't all know each other.
--:-- Julie Brown: 25, 30, you know, and eventually there were more girls all telling the same story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Considering that all of these girls are telling the same story and that this case gets escalated to the FBI, how is it that he isn't prosecuted?
--:-- Julie Brown: He hired more attorneys.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jay Lefkowitz, who had political connections in Washington.
--:-- Julie Brown: He was at the time the special U.S. envoy to North Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He hired Kenneth Starr.
--:-- Julie Brown: He had so much money that he was able to hire lawyer after lawyer after lawyer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does this all-star team of lawyers get Jeffrey Epstein?
--:-- Julie Brown: He got 13 months in a county jail, but within a couple of months, he was moved to a private wing of the jail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Florida has really tough sex offender laws and most sex offenders in Florida don go to the county jail They go to prison
--:-- Julie Brown: And in Epstein case he not only went to the county jail and had a private wing but he was allowed this work release that the Palm Beach Sheriff Office policies say sex offenders even eligible for work release
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But somehow he got work release and he had his own private driver pick him up almost every day early in the morning and drive him to this office that he had set up, you know, purposefully for this work release.
--:-- Julie Brown: And he was in this office from literally, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning until 10 o'clock at night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who signed off on this deal?
--:-- Julie Brown: Well, Acosta signed off on the plea bargain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time.
--:-- Julie Brown: He was considered a rising star in the party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had served two White House posts in the past.
--:-- Julie Brown: Very ambitious.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at the time, he was sort of in the forefront of a Justice Department effort to go after people who had child pornography on their computers.
--:-- Julie Brown: It was ironic when you have someone like Jeffrey Epstein, who, you know, had molested dozens and maybe even hundreds of girls, that Acosta would start getting involved in this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, as we know, Acosta is President Trump's secretary of labor and he has oversight for an agency essentially that oversees child labor laws, human trafficking cases that involve women very much like the women that he bypassed in Epstein's case.
--:-- Julie Brown: Was this deal public? Was there any oversight?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of this was negotiated and done in secret.
--:-- Julie Brown: And we know that because in the court records, there are now emails and letters between Acosta and his team and members of Epstein's legal team, in which they specifically talked about keeping this secret from the victims and from the media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They knew if the media really knew what was going to happen, it would have been a field day.
--:-- Julie Brown: And so part of their strategy was to keep this quiet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now that he's secretary of labor and your reporting and the reporting of the Miami Herald has brought a lot of attention back to this story and what seems like a conspiracy, this sex ring.
--:-- Julie Brown: Has he had to answer for this cushy deal that he gave Jeffrey Epstein?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, many years ago, I think 2011, Virginia Roberts said she had been essentially Jeffrey Epstein's sex slave for many years and that she had been directed to have sex with a lot of powerful people.
--:-- Julie Brown: You know, before you know it, I'm being lent out to politicians and to academics and royalty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Acosta was forced to make a statement.
--:-- Julie Brown: And he essentially said that the reason why this was made was he didn't feel that the case was strong enough that these lawyers had prevailed upon the U.S. Attorney's Office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, he used the word assault, that they had, you know, launched an assault against his U.S. attorneys, and that he had some concerns that if he didn't arrange this a deal that Epstein wouldn't get any jail time at all.
--:-- Julie Brown: So he said essentially, look, it was good we got him this because the power of his attorneys and his financial means, he could have gotten off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will anyone be held accountable for this in a real way?
--:-- Julie Brown: Well, when the story broke in late November, Alex Acosta had been on a list of possible successors to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the story broke, we found out that he was pulled off the list.
--:-- Julie Brown: And we pretty quickly began getting calls from some lawmakers wanting to write a letter to the Justice Department's inspector general demanding a further investigation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We want a right to express great concerns of reports that during his tenure as United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the current Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta gave a non-prosecution deal to a wealthy and well-connected serial sex offender.
--:-- Julie Brown: Rather than pursue the indictment fully to ensure the individual could never prey again on minor girls, Secretary Acosta entered into an extremely preferential deal that resulted in the perpetrator of horrific crimes against children serving just 13 months in the county jail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And all of the women that you spoke to who were the victims of this miscarriage of justice and this man's pedophilia, where are they now? How are they now?
--:-- Julie Brown: Well, I was able to find out a lot about the women, even those that weren't willing to talk to me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It appears that a lot of them, you know, have gone on with their lives, married, had children, they're realtors.
--:-- Julie Brown: One I noticed is a teacher.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One is a Hollywood actress, a pretty well-known Hollywood actress.
--:-- Julie Brown: But the four that I spoke to on the record are still struggling a lot with what they did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, they all blame themselves, which is heartbreaking to see.
--:-- Julie Brown: To me, still to this day, it is my biggest shame that I carry around that I will never get rid of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm really, really sad that I brought other girls my age and even younger into a world that they should have never been introduced to.
--:-- Julie Brown: You know they older now and they thinking how could I have done something like that
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was so stupid
--:-- Julie Brown: But you know I spoke with an FBI agent who worked full time on these kinds of sex trafficking cases
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he said we think of these as girls and we think they will know better
--:-- Julie Brown: But when you are that young your brain isn fully developed and your emotions aren fully developed
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you don't really understand the ramifications of things that you do when you're young
--:-- Julie Brown: And that's why you need people who are older, like prosecutors, like police, like the criminal justice system, to in some sense protect younger people from doing things like this
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it doesn't appear that, you know, the federal prosecutors did that because by charging him with prostitution, they had labeled these girls as prostitutes, not as victims.
--:-- Julie Brown: So it was as if they weren't victims at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this has had a big effect on them because they've come to think of themselves in a way as having prostituted themselves because they had never been treated as victims.
--:-- Julie Brown: Yeah, there's just so many contradictions about how we think of our criminal justice system baked into this story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I guess we all have a sense that the rich can get away with murder, but we also live in a country where sex crimes are punished harshly.
--:-- Julie Brown: And yet this guy abused dozens and dozens of girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then this network of powerful men stepped in to make sure that he didn't have to pay for that.
--:-- Julie Brown: I mean, what do you take away from that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that there's a lot of, quite frankly, we know from the news and we know from all the cases that have been publicized over the past year, Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar.
--:-- Julie Brown: And if you really think about it, these are people that felt that they were somehow entitled to do this, you know, for a very long period of time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think that to some degree, some of these prosecutors and people in law enforcement really didn't think what they were doing was a crime, that the girls and women who complained about this, their stories were always discounted.
--:-- Julie Brown: And, you know, I started this story before the launch of the Me Too movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, fortunately for me, I think it helped in some respects because I think some of the girls were a little bit less fearful of coming forward.
--:-- Julie Brown: But it seems to me that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to sexual abuse of women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think your reporting and the way that it's publicized this story and made people aware of this network of extremely powerful men who came to Jeffrey Epstein's defense, do you think it will encourage some of the victims who perhaps haven't spoken up against what he did to them to come forward?
--:-- Julie Brown: It's hard to say because remember this happened a very long time ago and many of them never told anybody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their parents don't know. Their husbands don't know.
--:-- Julie Brown: So, you know, why would they come forward, really?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're going to lose more than they probably feel they would gain.
--:-- Julie Brown: But because I think people are paying attention, I think and I hope that they find some solace in the fact that people are now realizing what a horrible miscarriage of justice this was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julie Brown is an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald.
--:-- Julie Brown: She interviewed all the women you heard in this episode.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just yesterday, she reported that a new accuser filed a sworn affidavit in federal court saying she was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein in New York when she was 26.
--:-- Julie Brown: The new accuser also claims her little sister was molested by Epstein at the age of 15 and that she often saw other underage girls at his place on the Upper East Side.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is all coming after a few major developments.
--:-- Julie Brown: First, in late February, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors led by now Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta violated the law by not notifying Epstein's victims about his plea deal before it was signed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Acosta officially dropped the ball here.
--:-- Julie Brown: The Justice Department has now opened an investigation into how Acosta handled the case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They want to look into his role in the plea deal, which again was negotiated when he was the U.S. District Attorney for Southern Florida.
--:-- Julie Brown: And then two weeks ago, Acosta got called out during a House Appropriations Subcommittee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm sure you know there's no such thing as child prostitution under federal law.
--:-- Julie Brown: Only child sex trafficking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And each offense under 18 U.S.C. 1591 carries a sentence ranging from 10 years to life in prison.
--:-- Julie Brown: So logically, Mr. Epstein with the investigation should have been looking at a potential sentence of 360 years at a minimum.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's not what happened because there was a power dynamic here, wasn't there?
--:-- Julie Brown: We had teenage girls with no power who were rape and sexual assault victims.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we have Mr. Epstein and his friends, extremely powerful, wealthy and connected people.
--:-- Julie Brown: Senate Democrats have demanded the Department of Justice make public the full results of its investigation into Alex Acosta.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One last reminder to check out Going Through It, the new podcast from MailChimp hosted by Anne Friedman.
--:-- Julie Brown: It's a great place to hear about the pivotal moments in women's lives, careers, and relationships where they had to decide whether to quit or to keep going.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Subscribe to Going Through It now.
--:-- Julie Brown: It's available on Apple Podcasts and all the other apps that you use to listen to podcasts.
