“Perversion of Justice”

JULIE K. BROWN, AUTHOR,”PERVERSION OF JUSTICE”: Well, I realized in — I guess it was late 2016. I was searching for new project. And I was thinking about doing something about sex trafficking in Florida, knowing that it is an issue here in this state. And every time I Googled sex trafficking in Florida, I saw another article about Jeffrey Epstein. And each article that I read just made me more curious than the last, because none of them really explained how someone who had committed such a serious crime had been able to get away with such a lenient sentence.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Which was when you really honed in on the prosecutor at the time, and then the appointed secretary of labor, Alexander Acosta, right? You expected — and this in the Trump — the early days of the Trump administration — you expected that the during his questioning, right, that this would have been brought up? And it wasn’t.

BROWN: Right. It was clear from the little bit of questioning that he got about the case that the senators that were reviewing it didn’t really understand the scope of what had happened. And at that moment, I just thought of the victims, who by this time were now grown women in their early — late 20s, early 30s. And I thought, I wonder what they think about this former prosecutor who let their — essentially let their predator off the hook now having oversight of this agency that basically handles child labor laws and sex trafficking and human trafficking.

GOLODRYGA: And when you tried to seek these women out, having them come forward after they saw their abuser serving only 13 months in jail, he was allowed to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, he had access to a computer, a television, what was it that you were able to do to convince these women to come forward with their stories?

BROWN: Well, for one thing, keep in mind that one of the victims I was able to interview was in prison at the time that I did my first interview with her. She was serving a three-year sentence on a drug charge. Now, think about that. Jeffrey Epstein, who molested, we know now, hundreds of girls, got a 13-month jail sentence, and here we have this woman, Courtney Wild, who was in prison for three years on a drug charge, serving more time than then her predator had served. So, it was a difficult — that was probably the hardest part, trying to convince the women to trust me. But I was approaching it from a different angle than other journalists had done this story in the past, in that I was trying to point out all the failures of the criminal justice system and how they had really dropped the ball.