← Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
She Broke the Epstein Case — Now She Says Something Doesn’t Add Up (ft. Julie K. Brown)
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- [00:01]
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- [01:05]
Julie K. Brown
I really do say I park my
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Scott Galloway
cat in havid yard.
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Julie K. Brown
Everyone around here says like a coffee and dwark.
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Jessica Tarlev
We're so attached to the way that
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Julie K. Brown
we sound because it tells a part of the story of who we are.
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Shopify Narrator
Your accent decoded.
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Julie K. Brown
That's this week on Explain it to Me.
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Shopify Narrator
Find new episode Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
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Scott Galloway
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.
- [01:35]
Jessica Tarlev
And I'm Jessica Tarlev.
- [01:37]
Scott Galloway
Joining us today is Julie K. Brown, the investigative reporter whose groundbreaking work at the Miami Herald helped expose the scope of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes and ultimately led to his arrest. And the big news today is that there's going to be a limited series based on Perversion of Justice, Julie's 2021 book, that's the definitive account of the Epstein case. And Laura Dern is going to be playing Julie K. Brown. And. And you're also the executive producer. That's very exciting. So, Julie, thanks so much for being here.
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Julie K. Brown
Thanks for having me.
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Scott Galloway
So I have all these very thoughtful, measured questions. I want to skip to what's going to feel like a little bit of conspiracy theory, but I'm just curious to get your viewpoint. I can't understand when I see this whole thing. We're missing something here. And when I read about the fact that he was given, I think it was six months house arrest on what is supposed to be a five year minimum. And I read about the power and potentially the involvement of different security apparatus from different nations. Is your sense that somewhere along the lines as the truth comes to bear here that the CIA, the Mossad and other intelligence services played a bigger role here than maybe that has come to light. And I realize I might have my tinfoil hat on here, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. I've been dying to ask you this question.
- [02:57]
Julie K. Brown
I think that what we're learning just, we're getting kind of crumbs of this, I think, in these files, which I've been buried in for about two months now, three months. And you do see indications that he definitely had his tentacles into some kind of intelligence operations in various ways. Now, was he actually. Did he. Was he employed by the CIA or by Mossad? I don't think so, but I think that he used any kind of link that he could, any kind of connection he could to get information. I mean, he was really a person who sold and bartered on information. And part of that information, of course, is intelligence information involving countries and different security and arms dealing and all those kinds of issues. And I think as time goes on, we're going to get a better picture of how much he was involved in those things. I don't think it's a tinfoil hat issue, by the way, to get away with the crimes that he got away with for so long. I think it is fair, journalistically even to ask these questions and to be open minded as to whether it's possible that he could have been more involved in intelligence than we know of right at this very moment.
- [04:15]
Scott Galloway
I'm convinced he was an agent of Mossad. And the CIA said, you're either going to jail for the rest of your life unless you turn and become a double agent. But anyways, that's my script for a movie. The next question is, you've been sort of the shepherd or the scout leader here around all of this and brought it to light. I'm curious how you personally feel, because the kind of. The most chilling moment in Attorney General Bondi's testimony was when Representative Jayapal asked some survivors to stand up and ask them if they had been contacted by the DOJ and interviewed. And not only had they not been contacted, but the victims had reached out to the DOJ and were stonewalled. And it definitely feels like, well, were you as upset, I think, as a lot of people, that it feels like our Department of Justice is really the Department of Delay and Obfuscation right now when it comes to the Epstein files?
- [05:13]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah, and I absolutely. And I think that most people that follow this story, even to a small degree, understand or believe that There has been a cover up in this case. We don't, I don't think anybody really understands why, except for the obvious, that there are some very powerful, moneyed people in these files or who were associated with Epstein who don't want their association known. But I absolutely think that Bondi has been given marching orders. Initially her marching orders were release, you know, the binders or release the client list or whatever you want to call it. And she was all gung ho toward that. Then all of a sudden it got a, a little too hot and I guess some people got worried on what that meant and then they changed gears and said, nothing to see here. We're not going to release anything. So she got new marching orders and that was to do everything, I think, in her power to not release the information. So I think that the American public is pretty sharp in understanding exactly what's happening here.
- [06:22]
Jessica Tarlev
Yeah. Thank you again for being here. I'm so psyched about this. And congratulations on the series. Laura Dern is a high compliment to come in and play you. Yeah, I want to also be a little tinfoil Hattie, but then also serious about it, though the intersections are aplenty between them. And you've been writing about this and commenting on the last days of Jeffrey Epstein within the Metropolitan Correctional Facility, and you've said that you don't think that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, at least without assistance. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about that and the role of the security guard who was doing some interesting googling just a few minutes before this was reported there.
- [07:15]
Julie K. Brown
You know, I've been on the record even since my book, I have a chapter on this in my book that I don't believe that he committed suicide. And by the way, I suspect that it's possible that he was killed, that he was murdered. And I don't think that there's anything conspiratorial about that. I think that any good detective would look at all these facts as we know them, and we're getting to know more and more of them. As I'm reviewing these files, I don't think that anybody in law enforcement would look at the circumstances, how he died and what people said and how this all played out and not suspect that it's possible that he was killed. I mean, any good police detective will tell you that you can find a cause of death, but to figure out the manner of death, sometimes it takes additional investigation. And that simply was never done. In Epstein's case, they decided right away that he committed Suicide. The medical examiner ruled pretty quickly that it was a suicide, even though, by the way, the medical examiner who actually conducted the autopsy left the of death pending. In other words, she too was a little concerned that it wasn't a suicide. And then you have the whole events surrounding it. You know, he was supposed to have a cellmate. They pulled a cellmate out that morning, left the cell empty all day long. And then, of course, into the night, even though everyone was given strict instructions that he was to have a cellmate. The guards fell asleep. They were playing on their computers. You know, there was just a litany. I should probably put together a whole list because it would fill a whole page of things that went wrong to the point that you have the cameras weren't working. You know, there is just so many things that went wrong that night that I think that it's fair to say that it should have been more thoroughly investigated. It was never treated like a crime scene. And he was one of the most high profile, if not the most high profile inmate at that prison. And by the way, who they found a few weeks before that laying on the floor of his cell. And the first thing when they found him, he said, was that his cellmate tried to kill him. So, you know, you have all this conglomeration of events, and then you have the Justice Department never thoroughly investigating, not really investigating it at all.
- [09:44]
Jessica Tarlev
Yeah. And I mean, this spans Democratic and Republican administrations. This lack of interest in at least publicizing what really happened. You brought up the surveillance footage. We have Del deleted video footage of the cell. We also now have a lot of shredded documents, which is a new ish development from the latest dump of Epstein files. Could you talk about those? And also the security guard who got payments from JP Morgan. I think 12 payments that have been flagged.
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Julie K. Brown
Right.
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Jessica Tarlev
So I know that was a lot to throw at you, but.
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Julie K. Brown
No, but actually the shredded documents was my story. I broke that story and everybody picked it up. Didn't mention the fact that the Miami Herald was actually the one that found that.
- [10:27]
Jessica Tarlev
I apologize. An amazing story. Julie K. Brown.
- [10:31]
Julie K. Brown
I just. You know, these files are very interesting because you go in there and I always say, you go in and you can't get out. I'll be busy for 15 hours, you know, because one thing will raise another thing will raise another thing. And I just stumbled upon the word shredding in these files. And I'm like, what? Shredding? What the heck happened here? You know, then you find all these FBI reports and they were interviewing a corrections officer who was a whistleblower and had tried to get their attention, wrote an email to the FBI and to the U.S. attorney's office as this was practically happening. He said the documents were being shredded. And what's interesting is that he claimed that it was this after action team that was called in by the Bureau of Prisons after usually an incident like this. And they said it was that very team that was doing the shredding. And as I mentioned, they were going to try to grab the stuff before it could be taken, but they just didn't do it fast enough. And the bags of material was put in a dumpster and sent to the dump. So we don't really know the outcome of that, but we do know that they did assign a case number to that shredding incident. So they to some degree, took it seriously as a possible obstruction of justice case. But there's, you know, the prison guard, by the way, there were two guards on duty that night. We know a little bit more about the female guard only because there are more documents in the, in the DOJ's library right now about her. They did get the financial files for three guards, not just her, but we could only find her financial records. And in that grouping of files, we could see her bank accounts and the fact that her bank had flagged one of her or many, I think about 12 of her deposits, one of them right around the time that Epstein died, which was the largest, and it was for $5,000. So there's been a bunch of things like that that we're seeing in the files that are very suspicious. And like I said, the problem is with the Justice Department only giving us a portion of these files, that doesn't mean that there weren't other suspicious things happening that we just don't have in the files that maybe were held back.
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Scott Galloway
So the protocols around how files are released, and I'm going to propose a thesis and have you respond to it. Julie. I feel as if we're the victims of what is one of the most coordinated and deftly executed PSYOPS programs in history. And that is the way these documents, these files have been released, the way they've been dribbled out. What's been redacted, what hasn't been redacted has resulted in what I think is just this incredible manipulation of the US public, where we spend hours, days, weeks, months talking about how creepy a spiritual leader or a wellness expert is to avoid the conversation around were elected officials engaging in child rape. I feel as if we have been so deftly manipulated to talk about whether Deepak Chopra is a creep or not. And I'm at the point now where I wonder if the FBI should be in the business of not releasing files, but communicating to the public what is in the files with criminal indictments, as opposed to dribbling them out, such that we TMZ the whole thing and ruin people's reputations, but have a lack of actual prosecutions that result in incentives such that children are less likely to be raped in the future. It feels to me like the document dispersal or the protocols here have been absolutely manipulated. Something that the GRU would be jealous of. Your thoughts?
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Julie K. Brown
Yeah, I agree. This was done in such a chaotic way, and I think that it didn't have to be. So certainly there was a purpose, I think, for doing it this way, to confuse people, to be able to pull things out and manipulate people, to, quite frankly, intimidate people, especially the victims, whose names were not all redacted from these files. To make inferences by redacting. I mean, there is no reason for them to make some of the redactions that they did make. Instead of protecting the victims names, it seems like they redacted a lot of names of some politicians. They redacted names of some of the prosecutors. You know, the main reason why I took up the story to start with was because of this very thing that you mentioned. I thought that the story, the Jeffrey Epstein story, was sort of like, as you said it, a TMZ kind of story. The plane, the Lolita Express, Clinton on the plane. You know, it was the sensationalness of this story. That was what everybody was hanging their stories on, maybe for clicks, I don't know. And what troubled me about this is I knew that there was a serious story to be told about the fact that these prosecutors let this man off the hook and that they allowed him and his lawyers to manipulate the criminal justice system. And I thought that's really the story here about how he was able to get off and then think about all the girls and young women that he sexually abused after Florida, after he was under investigation in Florida. So I have myself been really trying to focus on that and the mistakes that were made by the criminal justice system, the leaders that were in power, and why were they allowing him to get away with the. These crimes, you know, over so many years. I mean, now we know that there were subsequent investigations after Florida that went nowhere with the Justice Department.
- [16:49]
Jessica Tarlev
Yeah, I'm curious on that point. You know, the story that you're telling is one of what powerful people can get away with if they have the law makers at least on their side as well. And the Epstein class has become this rallying cry, at least in Democratic politics and a bit in Republican politics, with some of the more fringe characters who are, you know, sticking to their story that they care about what happened to these young women over the years and the crazy web. Right. That Jeffrey Epstein was involved in. How do you feel about the fact that so much of your work has become part of politics? It must be so strange.
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Julie K. Brown
It's awful, actually.
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Jessica Tarlev
It's awful. Okay.
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Julie K. Brown
Actually, it doesn't matter. I. I say the same thing to Democratic lawmakers. This isn't a political story. This was a crime. This was a real crime. And it did turn political for. For a bunch of reasons. Chiefly because there was a cover up. You know, as the saying goes, the COVID up is often political worse than the crime. And I'm sure that the victims are grateful that there were some people, at least in political circles, who fought to get to the truth here by releasing the files. I'm not sure we're where they would like us to be with finding and holding people accountable who helped Epstein. I've never understood, for example, why they wouldn't go through the finances and the lives of some of these prosecutors who let him off the hook. I mean, I know you have to get a subpoena to do this, but I mean, why didn't they look at. I have no inkling that they ever looked at Alex Acosta's. Yeah, you know, bank records, for example. They're looking at these correctional officers bank accounts, but they're not looking at the prosecutor's bank accounts. Who let them. Who let him off the hook. And I think that's really important because had they stopped him back then, we wouldn't be sitting here right now.
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Scott Galloway
If you're not already, please make sure you get subscribed to our YouTube channel so you stay up to date with the latest in politics and news. Okay, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
- [19:11]
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- [20:43]
Julie K. Brown
Hi, I'm Brene Brown.
- [20:45]
Scott Galloway
And I'm Adam Grant.
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Julie K. Brown
And we're here to invite you to
- [20:47]
Scott Galloway
the Curiosity Shop, a podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree, but we almost never disagree.
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Pharmaceutical Narrator
And we're always learning.
- [21:00]
Scott Galloway
That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. Welcome back.
- [21:10]
Jessica Tarlev
You raised the issue of accountability, and I'm curious as to where or if you think there will be any in the United States. It seems like the rest of the world is taking this more seriously than us. New Mexico has been shining spot in it, it seems with Zorro Ranch there and legislators in that state, Republicans and Democrats voting to, you know, be able to search it, for instance. But do you see there ever being any arrests or prosecutions? I mean, it's a lot of money that the financial institutions that Epstein banked with and went through, they've paid these huge settlements. Not one banker has been arrested. And besides Ghislaine Maxwell, you know, nobody else in the web.
- [21:58]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah, I don't think we're going to see it right now with the Trump administration because people like Scott sent is blocking Senator Wyden's effort to look at Epstein's taxes and his financial records. So there, there has to Be, I think, on the part of the public, they have to continue pressuring their lawmakers, force the Trump administration to be more transparent. You know, they go in front of the microphones a lot. You know, the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt. Oh, we're the most transparent administration ever. But in reality, if they were so transparent, then why aren't they letting investigators with the House Oversight Committee look at the money piece of Epstein's crime? And they're not doing that. So I think that, you know, it's incumbent upon the public at least while Trump is still in office, to force lawmakers to pressure the White House to release those records. And that's just one of them. I mean, there's tons of other stuff in there. I don't think we have. We don't have a lot of information about Epstein's early years. He had an SEC investigation. He was a big time scammer, and he did get in trouble in his ear early in his career. And there might be some clues in there. I mean, one of his partners went to prison for 20 years for a scam that Epstein had a hand in. And Epstein wasn't even touched. So we still don't have any of those early files or records of those investigations.
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Jessica Tarlev
I would love to see that. I went to Dalton, where he was a math teacher. I went, you know, many decades later, but, you know, when Bill Barr's dad was the headmaster. And then suddenly Jeffrey Epstein, a college dropout, is teaching high school math at the most prestigious school on the Upper east side, and then ends up working with the richest Dalton families. Even, you know, like Leon Black. You know, it's, it's very weird.
- [24:09]
Scott Galloway
So along the lines of Leon Black, Leslie Wexner transferred, reportedly $200 million to abstain Leon Black, somewhere between 160 and 170 million. And these weren't a set of funds. They were, I believe, classified as payments for services.
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Jessica Tarlev
Right.
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Scott Galloway
And as someone who works a lot with lawyers and estates, you don't pay someone $200 million to manage your estate. And I realize we don't know definitively here, but is your thesis or that this was blackmail or they were being paid off or the way these payments are described doesn't make any sense. What's the missing piece here in your view? What is your thesis?
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Julie K. Brown
Well, the missing piece are settlements. There were obviously some legal settlements. We know that Black, for example, did make a settlement with the U.S. virgin Islands because they had some goods on him and he just paid them off. And I know from the lawyers who have been handling these cases involving victims that there have been a number of, you know, legal settlements that have been handled by these powerful men. And of course, the women that were the victims are, you know, given these, you know, agreements where it's non disclosure. So I think that that's why we don't have all the answers, because there were a lot of settlements that were made with some of the women that were ready to come forward. Some of these lawyers were really pretty shrewd. If these victims went to these lawyers, they didn't make a big fuss over it. They just contacted whoever the big guy was, whether it was Black or anyone, and said, you know, we had this. Are you willing to settle? And look how quickly Black settled with the US Virgin Islands. So I just think that there's a lot of settlements here and that it wasn't necessarily blackmail, but it was the idea that Epstein had given them things that they weren't proud of. And there's some hints in the files. I mean, there's a letter that it looks like an email or a letter that Epstein wrote to Wexner where he's saying, basically, there's a lot of things that I have kept secret for you. And, you know, reading between the lines with this letter, you could see that he had dirt on Wexner.
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Scott Galloway
Okay, so my last question. I recognize you're not a lawyer, but based on what you've seen in the documents, if the president weren't the president, just a wealthy real estate developer, and these documents were reviewed by any other doj, do you think that there's enough in these documents that you've seen to warrant a criminal indictment against citizen Donald J. Trump?
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Julie K. Brown
No, not from what I've seen yet. I mean, nothing's been proven. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be an investigation, but whether there would be an indictment, I haven't seen enough. These cases are very hard to indict, very hard to prove. We're talking about, you know, the sexual assaults that happened, if they happened 20 years ago. I mean, even with I sat through Maxwell's trial and even those victims that testified, they were very shaky for obvious reasons. It wasn't because they were, I think, misleading or being untruthful. It's just you're raising all this horrible trauma that they experienced again. And they don't trauma victims like that, especially child trauma victims, their brain is been traumatized and they don't remember exact dates, exact times. It's very hard to prove these cases. And I do think that the justice department kind of shoved these allegations aside, and it appears they just let them sit there and did not do the due diligence that I think they needed to do.
- [28:12]
Scott Galloway
Julie K. Brown is the investigative reporter whose groundbreaking work at the Miami Herald helped expose the scope of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes and ultimately led to his arrest, and is largely credited with arguably the biggest story that almost wasn't a story. So it's a real honor to have you, and thanks for your good work.
- [28:30]
Julie K. Brown
Thanks for having me.