Julie K. Brown

Julie K. Brown had spent years reporting on Florida's prison system for the Miami Herald when she began pulling at an old court file in 2016. Her three-part series of November 2018, headlined Perversion of Justice, set out how a 2008 plea agreement in Palm Beach spared the financier Jeffrey Epstein a federal prosecution, and how the deal was kept from the girls it concerned. Brown identified about eighty possible victims and persuaded eight to talk. The case reopened within months: Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in July 2019 and died in custody a month later, and Alexander Acosta, the prosecutor who signed the agreement and by then the United States labour secretary, resigned. Brown was raised near Philadelphia, graduated in journalism from Temple University and started out at the Philadelphia Daily News. She holds George Polk Awards from 2014 and 2018 and the Hillman Prize. Her 2021 book of the same title turns on the reporting itself: the records requests, the closed doors, and the long search for women willing to be named.