Julie K. Brown

Julie K. Brown is an American investigative reporter for the Miami Herald whose series "Perversion of Justice," published on November 28, 2018, examined the 2007 non-prosecution agreement between Jeffrey Epstein and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida under Alexander Acosta. The series led a United States senator to ask the Office of Professional Responsibility of the Justice Department to investigate, and the office opened a review in February 2019. Brown and the Herald were also the intervenors who asked the courts to unseal the record of Giuffre v. Maxwell; the Second Circuit ruled in their favor in Brown v. Maxwell on July 3, 2019, three days before Epstein's arrest in New York.¹²

Perversion of Justice

The Office of Professional Responsibility summarized the series in its November 2020 report: "The Miami Herald reported that in 2007, Acosta entered into an 'extraordinary' deal with Epstein in the form of the NPA, which permitted Epstein to avoid federal prosecution and a potentially lengthy prison sentence by pleading guilty in state court to 'two prostitution charges.' According to the Miami Herald, the government also immunized from prosecution Epstein's co-conspirators and concealed from Epstein's victims the terms of the NPA. Through its reporting, which included interviews of eight victims and information from publicly available documents, the newspaper painted a portrait of federal and state prosecutors who had ignored serious criminal conduct by a wealthy man with powerful and politically connected friends by granting him a 'deal of a lifetime.'" The report also cited a follow-up by Brown and colleagues of December 6, 2018, "Lawmakers issue call for investigation of serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein's plea deal."¹

On December 3, 2018, five days after the series ran, Senator Ben Sasse, chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on oversight, wrote to the Office of Professional Responsibility citing the Herald's report and asking it to "open an investigation into the instances identified in this reporting of possible misconduct by Department of Justice attorneys." The department's Office of Legislative Affairs told Sasse on February 6, 2019 that the investigation had been opened. Its November 2020 report found no professional misconduct by Acosta or four subordinates but concluded that the agreement "was a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest" and that Acosta's decision "constitutes poor judgment."¹³

When the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced Epstein's indictment on July 8, 2019, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said the office had been "assisted by some excellent investigative journalism." Acosta, by then Secretary of Labor, resigned on July 12, 2019.¹⁴

The Unsealing Litigation

Giuffre v. Maxwell, the defamation suit brought in 2015 by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell before Judge Robert W. Sweet, settled on May 24, 2017 with much of its record under seal. On April 6, 2018 the Miami Herald and Brown moved to intervene and unseal the entire docket; Alan Dershowitz and the writer Mike Cernovich had earlier sought parts of the record. Sweet denied the requests.²

On March 11, 2019 a Second Circuit panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler and Christopher F. Droney issued an order to show cause, listing "Julie Brown, Miami Herald Company" among the intervenors, which stated: "Our precedent clearly establishes that 'documents submitted to a court for its consideration in a summary judgment motion are, as a matter of law, judicial documents to which a strong presumption of access attaches, under both the common law and the First Amendment.'" It ordered the parties to "show good cause why the Court should not unseal the summary judgment motion, including any materials filed in connection with this motion, and the District Court's summary judgment decision"; Pooler dissented in part. A printout of the order from Bloomberg Law, time-stamped "3/11/19, 5:28 PM," is among Epstein's files released by the Justice Department.⁵

The panel ruled on July 3, 2019, in Brown v. Maxwell, that the summary judgment materials must be unsealed and that the remaining sealed filings required individualized review by the district court.² About 2,000 pages were unsealed on August 9, 2019, including a 2016 deposition in which Epstein invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege; Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center the next morning.⁶ On July 23, 2025, on appeals brought by Giuffre's side and by the Herald, the Second Circuit vacated the district court's December 2019 and January 2020 unsealing orders and remanded for further individualized review.⁶

Wild v. Brown

On February 3, 2022 Courtney Wild and Haley Robson sued Brown for defamation in Miami-Dade County circuit court over her 2021 book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. The complaint alleged that the book falsely described Wild as having had intercourse with Epstein after he raped her, and that Brown had minimized Wild's role in exposing the agreement and in Epstein's arrest while crediting herself; Robson alleged that after she declined an interview Brown told her she was "making the biggest mistake of your life." Brown told the Florida Bulldog on the day of filing that she had not yet seen the suit and had called her lawyer.⁷