MIAMI — Julie K. Brown’s 2018 "Perversion of Justice" investigation revealed how the U.S. Justice Department gave the now-deceased sex trafficker the deal of a lifetime and cut his victims out of the process.

That reporting led the Southern District of New York to bring new sex crime charges against Epstein in 2019, but he died in federal custody one month later in what has been ruled a suicide.

Epstein’s vast network of high-powered friends, including President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton, along with Epstein’s shocking death, have given rise to numerous conspiracy theories.

When the U.S. Department of Justice declined to release more information about its investigations into Epstein, it led to public outcry and caused a rift in the Republican Party.

The Miami Herald asked Brown five questions to help readers separate fact from fiction in a scandal that continues to capture the public’s attention like no other. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

Q: Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told President Donald Trump earlier this year that he is in the Epstein files. Is that a surprise? What do you think might be in the files related to Trump’s relationship with Epstein?

A: Well, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were very good friends for many years. They moved in the same social circles in New York and in Palm Beach, where they both had homes, and they both had a lot in common. They both liked beautiful women, as Trump is often quoted as saying, noting that Epstein liked them on the younger side, as he said in an interview many years ago.

So we know that they were friends. We are uncertain how close they were and also uncertain as to when their friendship had broken off because we kept hearing that they had a falling out at some point over a real estate deal and then later over an incident that happened at Trump’s club Mar-a-Lago, involving a member who claimed that Epstein hit on his underage daughter. From that point, from what we understand, there was a falling out, and there wasn’t really as close of a friendship. But in the ‘90s and early 2000s, it was thought that they were pretty close.

Trump had to know that he was in the files in some aspect because there have been plenty of stories written about him being on the plane, and the plane logs are part of some of these files. It’s been well reported that he was part of the so-called little black book, which was essentially a phone directory that had almost every single imaginable phone number that Trump had, including his car phone, his secretary and his office. And then the third thing is he was on the message pads as having called Epstein back in the early 2000s. When the Palm Beach police searched Epstein’s home, they found hundreds and hundreds of message pads, and Trump’s name was on some of those, indicating that he had called Epstein. So, it’d be hard to believe that Trump didn’t realize his name was in the files in some aspect since the black book itself was part of those files.

Q: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Ghislaine Maxwell on Thursday, and the U.S. House Oversight Committee plans to talk with her in August. What kind of information do you think Maxwell could reveal?

A: Ghislaine Maxwell knows pretty much everything, I think. She was what the victims consider the mastermind of Epstein’s sex trafficking organization. She was recruiting women to both work for Epstein and help schedule his trysts with these girls, these massage sessions, as they were called at the time. But she started the ball rolling by going into spas and gyms throughout Palm Beach and giving her business card to to young girls and telling them, “You know, I work for a very wealthy man. He is looking for a masseuse. You can make a lot of money.” And that’s what got the ball rolling.

Some of the victims consider her in some aspects worse than Epstein because they felt safe with her. Here was this woman that was a very nurturing kind of personality, very bubbly, telling them that this man’s fine, he’s going to help you. And they trusted her to some degree. So then to learn that she was part of the crime was a real betrayal to them because they were sort of tricked into this world by Ghislaine Maxwell.

Q: In the wake of the Justice Department’s decision not to release files from its investigation into Epstein, they are now seeking to have grand jury records released from the two federal investigations into Epstein and its investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell. What do we think these records will show?

A: The Justice Department right now seems to be limiting its scope of what it’s going to release or try to get unsealed. There were apparently two grand juries in Florida that were seated back in 2005 and 2007. Then there was another one in 2019 concerning Epstein’s crimes and another in 2020 concerning Maxwell’s crimes. At least that’s what the motion that was filed by the Justice Department indicated. And so what they’re seeking is all the underlying documents, mainly the testimony that was presented before all these grand juries.

It’s hard to know what was in the earlier grand jury because it never resulted in an indictment. The records that we do have concerning the early federal probe into Epstein indicates that the prosecutors were having a hard time being able to present witnesses before those grand juries because Epstein’s lawyers kept trying to intervene and present all kinds of reasons for them not to go before a grand jury. So it was very messy at the time, and we really don’t know how successful they were in presenting any kind of evidence back then.

And then in 2019, the FBI ended up reinvestigating the case. We know that there was another grand jury, but we believe that the information that was presented to the grand jury back in 2019 was very narrowly focused on the minimum amount of evidence that they would need to get an indictment for Epstein. Traditionally in grand jury cases, you don’t present your whole case anyway. You don’t present all your witnesses. You just try to find a minimum amount of information in order to get an indictment. You can always do another indictment if it turns out the case is bigger than that or there’s more crimes that you encounter, but initially you just want to get a minimum indictment. And that’s what happened in 2019 and also with Maxwell in 2020.

Q: Is there an Epstein list? If so, who do you think is on it?

A: I don’t think there was a proverbial Epstein list, per se. It was Maxwell who kept his little black book. Epstein wasn’t really adept at using computers, and he used other people that worked for him to compile things on computers, for example, so I don’t think he had a singular list.

What I do think is that he was a businessman and that he probably kept files on these men because a couple of the victims said that Epstein had quizzed them after their massage slash sex sessions about what kind of things the men enjoyed in the bedroom. And they thought that he was doing that in order to get something on the men.

Q: No one understands the Epstein story better than you do. Why do you think it has held the public’s attention for so long?

A: I think that the reason why the Epstein story has held the public’s attention is because it’s a mystery that has all the elements that people gravitate toward. It has money, politics, sex, crime and mystery, because we really don’t know all the answers. I think the public is very suspect of our government and the way that it operates. There is a distrust of the way that our government withholds information, for example, or covers things up, in their minds. So I think that this is an example of a case that still is a mystery, even after 20 years. We don’t know all the answers, and it’s a horrific crime. One would think that our government would have wanted to get to the bottom of how this happened a long time ago.

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