Perversion of Justice Julie Brown Harper Collins, 14.99
Financier Jeffrey Epstein died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges but he should have been caught many years earlier.
In 2006 detectives in Florida amassed a mountain of evidence to show he had groomed and abused high school girls at his Miami mansion. It was, writes Julie Brown in her new book on the case, a sexual pyramid scheme.
The victims would come, give him a massage, sexual acts would occur, and he would send them away with cash and gifts. They in turn were paid to find other girls to come and do the same.
Epsteins preferred prey were waif-like pre-pubescent girls from troubled backgrounds, who needed money and had little or no sexual experience. Some came from broken homes, were often homeless, and had witnessed terrible violence in their lives, with alcoholics and drug addicts for parents. These were girls he thought no one would believe.
As it happened, police did believe them and pressed charges against Epstein, telling his victims: It doesnt matter how much money you have, or how many connections you have, if you commit a crime you will be punished. Thats the way our justice system works.
It wasnt to be. Following a plea deal, negotiated by Epsteins team of prestigious and expensive lawyers, he was allowed to escape jail and was granted immunity from further prosecution which, Brown writes, defied some of the nations most basic legal principles. It was another decade before he was stopped.
Why was the case dropped? Epstein was a big donor to the Democrats but as Brown says: The divide is not Republican versus Democrat; its the rich and powerful versus everyone else. Epsteins friends included Nobel Prize winners and high-profile figures in media and politics.
The author of this book was not of that elite. A struggling single mother, she was just a lowly reporter with the Miami Herald then but without her efforts Epstein would surely continue to have gone unpunished. Court documents were heavily redacted but she found and interviewed dozens of his victims.
As she continued to dig, more women came forward in the US and worldwide. Many spoke of the pressure they had faced to accept financial settlements on a take-it-or-leave-it basis from Epsteins lawyers and were threat of exposure if they did not.
Brown also built up a relationship with the police officers involved in the original case to the point where they confided in her.
She tracked the movements of Epsteins plane, logging frequent visits to Paris, London, Dubai and Bratislava. He always returned to a small airport where he could evade security before taking a helicopter to his private retreat, bringing a stream of new girls with him.
Eventually, the evidence Brown gathered was enough for the FBI to charge Epstein with sex trafficking across State lines a federal offence thereby overriding the plea bargain that only granted him immunity in Florida.
Browns motto throughout came from an editor in Philadelphia where she began her reporting career: When you see a pack of journalists go the other way.
At the time journalists were not interested in writing about Epstein and it was a struggle to persuade editors to let her pursue the story. I didnt really, at the time, believe that any media network would have succumbed to pressure to ignore or drop such an important story, she writes. I was, however, naïve and wrong there are news organisations that protect powerful people especially when it comes to sexual harassment and abuse.
Hers was an awe-inspiring piece of forensic investigation. Arguably theres a little too much detail to plough through to make an entirely satisfactory narrative be it about Epsteins finances or the Grand Jury hearing that granted Epstein his so-called sweetheart deal.
Its easy to get tangled in the evidence as the story jumps forward and back in time but at heart its very simple. As one victim says: The higher-ups get to do whatever they want. They can ruin lives if they want. Who are we? We are nobody. Brown has given them a voice.
Whether her book meets the bigger challenge it sets itself at the outset is another matter.
Much has been written about the case by countless journalists, she asserts early on, but little of it offered real insight into how someone so evil was able to manipulate so many people.
Brown chronicles the events but doesnt really explain why they happened. She says Epstein likely had video surveillance of the people he came into contact with and probably had tapes and photographs of powerful men in compromising positions, and theres a possibility it was used to blackmail them, which seems a logical conclusion but theres no direct, damning proof as such. There are no smoking guns.
The same goes for her conclusions as to his death by apparent suicide in 2019. That chapter is entitled Jeffrey Epstein Didnt Kill Himself, but the furthest she will go is to say there are questions to be answered, and the FBI and the Justice Department have not persuaded me or a majority of the public that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Perversion of Justice is neither a perfect or definitive account of Jeffrey Epsteins crimes but it is an essential one from someone who did more than any other one person to expose his depravity.
Epstein got away with his crimes because nearly every element of society allowed him to get away with them, Brown notes. Professional, legal and moral ethics were set aside for a broken system of values that places corporate profits, personal wealth, political connections, and celebrity above some of the most sacred tenets of our faiths, our teachings and our democracy.
That system is still broken.
Perversion of Justice Julie Brown Harper Collins, €14.99
