Journalist and author Julie K Brown photographed in New York. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer
Journalist and author Julie K Brown photographed in New York. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer
It was by focusing on his silenced victims, says the dogged Miami Herald reporter, that she was able to help bring the billionaire sex offender to justice after police and prosecutors had failed
Sun 25 Jul 2021 03.00 EDT
The town of Palm Beach in Florida, the crime writer Carl Hiaasen has observed, “is one of the few places left in America where you can still drive around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and not get laughed at.” It’s an unironic island, filled with the super-rich and famous, plastic surgeons and, of course, the former US president, Donald Trump, who holds court at his ostentatious Mar-a-Lago resort.
This is FRESH AIR. I m Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross.
When wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2006 following an investigation into his sexual activities with teenage girls, the case ended in a shockingly lenient plea bargain. He pled guilty to soliciting prostitution and served 13 months in a county jail before resuming his jet-setting lifestyle. His rearrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges was largely the result of a hard-hitting investigative series in the Miami Herald, which relied on a wealth of documentary evidence and the firsthand accounts of women who said they were repeatedly abused as adolescents by Epstein in his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion. They also said they were paid to recruit other teenage girls for him to exploit.
She was 13 going on 14, but if you look at her picture, she looked like she was ten or 11, he tells
New Times. What he did to her and how scared she was and how vulnerable she was, that was a really bad story.
This could be my daughter, he thought. Fisten was working the case for Fort Lauderdale attorney Brad Edwards, who filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2009 and worked on it for nearly a decade. Edwards faced down countersuits by both the billionaire financier and his most high-profile attorney, Alan Dershowitz, before finally winning a settlement for the Epstein survivors he represented. Fisten was a key member of his team.