The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
Brown’s second story, published Saturday, reports that an inmate at the New York jail where Epstein was behind held has told the FBI that “he overheard guards talking about covering up Jeffrey Epstein’s death on the morning he died” in 2019, contradicting the official story that he died by suicide. Brown again:
“Breathe! Breathe!” he recalled officers shouting about 6:30 a.m.
Then he said he heard an officer say “Dudes, you killed that dude.”
A female guard replied “If he is dead, we’re going to cover it up and he’s going to have an alibi — my officers,” the FBI notes said. The inmate claimed the whole wing overheard the exchange.
The notion that Epstein killed himself has always been questioned by some on the theory that powerful people — possibly including Trump — wanted him dead so that he wouldn’t tell authorities what he knew about them. It always struck me as far-fetched; to me, it was more likely that guards neglected to check up on him. The inmate’s story, though, may call that into question, especially since Brown also reports that the autopsy on Epstein revealed details that were inconsistent with suicide.
Brown herself writes in her newsletter that she doesn’t think Epstein killed himself, although she says he may have been done in by an inmate disgusted by the crimes with which he’d been charged. “Having covered prisons for a good deal of my career, I can tell you that men accused of harming children don’t last long in prison,” she says. “Epstein knew that and was paying for protection, which is not uncommon when you are a wealthy inmate, and a frail one at that.”
As for the 13-year-old, that story seemed to have been thoroughly debunked way back in 2016, when Vox’s Emily Crockett found not just that her accusations couldn’t be verified, but that there was some reason to believe that she didn’t even exist. As Crockett wrote after the girl, known by the pseudonym Katie Johnson, failed to appear at a news conference:
It was the end of an incredibly strange case that featured an anonymous plaintiff who had refused almost all requests for interviews, two anonymous corroborating witnesses whom no one in the press had spoken to, and a couple of seriously shady characters — with an anti-Trump agenda and a penchant for drama — who had aggressively shopped the story around to media outlets for over a year.
Yet here we are, 10 years later, and charges that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl keep on bubbling up. That doesn’t make it true, but it does mean that this horrifying story not only hasn’t been put to rest but that serious journalists like Julie Brown are continuing to look into it.
Meanwhile, Trump has launched us into an instantly unpopular war with Iran, raising questions about whether this is the ultimate distraction from the Epstein files. Probably not. But Trump may very well see everything collapsing in on him, which has caused him to lash out wildly in multiple directions. As Josh Marshall wrote a few days ago, “All of this is rooted in Trump’s psyche, which is as transparent as he is malevolent. His need to compensate for ebbing power is inevitable and unstoppable.”
Brown was interviewed last month on the public radio program “On the Media.” It’s definitely worth a listen.
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Check out video of Sen. Whitehouse’s statement on cover up last week that involves Russia.
In a recent newsletter she writes, “This story is massive, and it will take a village of journalists to put the threads together,” and “I believe that LOCAL journalism will save America.” Hmmm…
Simply cannot take either the sordidness of it all, nor that “elite” is appended to “political” in describing it. Reminds me of the 1974 movie “Stavisky” with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charlyes Boyer (from Alain Resnais, of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”) not widely remembered, but pertinent in that it dealt with a swindler whose activities indirectly led to political crisis in France prior to WWII. From Roger Ebert’s review:
“Resnais sets his film in the France of the early 1930s, when a shaky economy is being held together by the lies and bluffs of the ruling class. One of the greatest of the manipulating financiers, and certainly the most fascinating, is Alexandre Stavisky, the emigre son of a Russian Jewish dentist, who’s parlayed his personal charm and confidence schemes into a vast stock swindle.”
What is it that Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme”?