Tina Brown isn’t exactly MAGA. But the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor does agree with the president’s base on one thing: that when it comes to the death of Jeffrey Epstein, important questions remain unanswered. Conspiracies have swirled since his apparent suicide in 2019, but the attorney general insisted this week: “Case closed!” In this article, reprinted from her brilliant Substack, Fresh Hell, Tina explains her own part in breaking the news of Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal—and why she still thinks the pedophile sex-trafficker’s death is suspicious.
—The Editors
It’s rare that I agree with the MAGA conspiracy theory loonies, but in the case of the Epstein files, they deserve an answer about why the full folder has not been released. I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide, and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate.
Flashback to 2010. During my time as editor of The Daily Beast—thanks to the pioneering reporting of Conchita Sarnoff—we were the first news outlet to break the story of the 2008 sweetheart deal Epstein made with a U.S. attorney in Florida. Multiple charges of child sexual trafficking were reduced to state charges only, and he served just 13 months in a work-release program that allowed him to spend as much as 12 hours a day outside jail.
Sarnoff, a Cuban American anti–human trafficking activist, stumbled on the Epstein story when interviewing a Mexican child trafficker in the Palm Beach stockade who told her that underage girls were brought to Palm Beach to service rich older men.
Dimly remembering an item about the arrest of a New York high roller named Epstein, who once asked her for a date, Sarnoff dug through the Palm Beach police files and was stunned to learn that the department had identified as many as three dozen underage girls who had been trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein—the youngest imported from the Balkans at age 14. So, how did this serial predator (the DOJ report says Epstein harmed over one thousand victims) get off with a slap on the wrist—only two counts of solicitation of a minor for prostitution? Spurred by the suspicions of a Palm Beach society lady who lived close to Epstein, Sarnoff brought the story to me and we launched a six-part Daily Beast investigation about the rank perversion of justice enabled by Epstein’s money, connections, and political donations. She revealed how Epstein’s crack team of all-star lawyers discredited the young victims, many of whom had been abused previously or came from rough backgrounds. (“The younger, the better,” Epstein instructed a local teenager who was paid to bring girls to his home.)
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Author: Tina Brown
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