The sordid Jeffrey Epstein saga is a Florida story, first and foremost.
That’s where Julie K. Brown, a longtime investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, did most of the reporting that led to the Palm Beach billionaire’s arrest in 2019. She has a gorgeous apartment in Hollywood, Fla., overlooking the Atlantic, and temperatures were climbing into the mid-60s on this Tuesday afternoon.
But Brown is sitting at a dining room table inOld City— not in Florida — surrounded by redacted documents and lots of Eagles and Phillies memorabilia. Outside, cars are encased in snow on the cobblestone streets like ice-age fossils after another snowstorm. It’s late February, and temperatures hover around freezing.
“I decided this is a good place for me to come and get sane from Florida because Florida is insane,” she says. “Philly is in my bones. I would not be where I am right now if not for Philadelphia.”
Brown, 64, isn’t used to talking to reporters about herself more than Epstein, the man who will be mentioned in the first sentence of her obituary someday, but she’s doing her best, while keeping an eye on her cell phone.
She could miss a message from an anonymous source or one of her two kids, Amelia and Jake. Television producers from CNN or PBS could be trying to get her on to discuss Epstein, of course. That’s a constant, she says.
CNN’sJake Tapper, who grew up in Queen Village andLower Merion, has had Brown on his show multiple times.
“There is something in the water, or I should say ‘wooder,’ that makes us all particularly scrappy, and whether it’s being in between New York City and Washington D.C., or whatever, the chip on the shoulder that is part of Philadelphia DNA is very, very strong with Julie K. Brown,” he said.
“And I mean that in the best possible way, because the Philly chip is not hostile. It’s about loyalty, underdogs, and the work ethic.”
On one occasion, Brown’s cell phone offers up something seemingly less serious, via the Major League Baseball app: updates from an apropos spring training game in Jupiter, which is about 70 miles north of Hollywood.
The Florida Marlins beat the Phillies 6-1 that day, but the Sunshine State never beats Philly in Brown’s mind.
Brown’s friends, family, former editors, and media colleagues say her backstory — lean times with her single mother inBucks County, a circuitous route to journalism viaTemple University, and formative years at the Daily News on North Broad Street — made her tough enough to expose Epstein, and the prosecutors who gave him a sweetheart deal in Florida.
But there is a tenderness about Philly that’s often underreported, and Brown, who became an emancipated minor at 16 and went to work in factories — not straight to college — after high school, was uniquely qualified to connect with women abused by Epstein.
“I’m a product of a single mom. A lot of these girls came from the same place that I came from,” she says. “I always say, by the grace of God, I didn’t end up in a situation as they did.”
A single mother of two herself, Brown spent two years reading through court documents in Florida and reaching out to Epstein’s victims with Herald photographer and videographer Emily Michot. Their work culminated in the Herald’s2018 award-winning series “Perversion of Justice.”Brown published a book by the same name in 2021.
