If Jeffrey Epstein’s victims ever get any measure of the justice they deserve, it will be, as so many others have said, thanks to their own guts and to the reporter-with-a-bone efforts of Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald. In 2018, she began exposing his “cult-like network of underage girls” and sweetheart deal from prosecutors, and she still hasn’t given up.
Until this September, I worked for The Kansas City Star, which, like the Miami Herald, is owned by McClatchy, so I take a certain sisterly pride in Brown’s work, though we have never met.
As local news outlets continue to wither, it’s this kind of accountability we are losing nearly everywhere. And since more Epstein emails came out last week, I’ve been thinking about how it was really no accident that a local news outlet broke this story. How’s that, when national outlets with many more resources regularly publish brave and difficult investigative series?
In New York, where Epstein somehow made major power players too weak even to say no to dinner invitations, his victims gave interviews that mysteriously never were published or broadcast anywhere. And I suspect that’s because of what The New York Times just this weekend wrapped in gauze and presented with clueless nostalgia as “a clubby world that is all but gone.”
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