Situation Definition
Julie K. Brown talked about her experience during the whole uncovering of the Jeffrey Epstein case. She opened up the night talking about this being her first time in state college in over 20 years, where she last was in State College covering the shooting at Penn State. She started how well her ongoing series “Cruel and Unusual” where she reported on deaths and questionable use of force in Florida’s prison system.
Brown was the first to question the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office in why they gave Epstein case was covered up. She quickly took action and began investigating. She got in contact with a handful of victims, some who agreed to talk and not talk on the record. There were at least 143 Jane Does, which is how they were listed as in the reports.
Analysis
With the narrative on the night being on Brown and her accomplishment of putting a powerful man in prison, she explained how the main purpose of the issue was often overlooked. She mentioned how people overlooked the victims and the importance of her looking into the case was about them.Brown knew there was a problem with how the victims were being treated, but the bigger issue remained with the broken system failing these women, and that was the main focus of her speech.
“Prosecutors kept the whole deal away from (the) victims,” Brown said. “Prosecutors never treated them as victims.”
It made it even more troubling when U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, President Trump’s current secretary of labor, halted the earlier federal case and kept most details of charges against Epstein sealed from the public for years, according to the Washington Post.
Deeper into Brown’s investigation, she realized that the narrative of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office didn’t follow with what she found.
Epstein was attracted to a specific kind of girl, according to Brown.
“He wanted girls that looked as young as possible,” Brown said.
This is an ongoing problem in the world where powerful wealthy men take advantage of these young girls, “Society has let it happen,” Brown added.
Looking into this case deeper and not giving up on it was compared to as a detective coming back to a cold case, according to Brown.
The organization and influence of a wealthy man on the media and the people working for him was all a surprise for Brown as she found out more information about the case.
“The media didn’t cover the story in the same way,” Brown said. “It was clear he was so powerful his power controlled some of the media.”
Brown made it clear that she was fighting for the women who had no voice against the man who committed these acts.
Brown did do a good job ethically naming the victims and keeping true to her word by not exploiting them for the purpose of her own advantage of career and so on.
She mentioned how cases were there for people to investigate in public court records, but no one had the intentions of actually going further with them. She did not doing anything wrong by obtaining these documents and using them against Epstein.
Conclusion
Brown did a good job at reporting this whole case by not crossing the line ethically. She kept everything in line by being persistent and verifying all her information by either looking at evidence, the facts and even interviewing the female victims. She knew when big names like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, whose names appeared in documents that proved they were onEpstein’s personal plane, where reportedly he flew the females around.
Ultimately, Brown’s investigative reporting proved true to her work and powerful. Epstein was arrested following this report and the federal agencies looking into the case again.
Ken Meyer. (August 13, 2019 Tuesday). Miami Herald’s Julie Brown Breaks Down Epstein’s Sexual Recruitment Network: ‘A Lot of People’ Made Money Off of This. Mediaite. Retrieved from https://advance.lexis.com/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5WT8-KM21-F03R-N3K1-00000-00&context=1516831.
McQuade, Barbara. “Are ‘bigger targets’ behind Jeffrey Epstein?” USA Today, 9 July 2019, p. 05A. Gale In Context: Global Issues, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592697710/GIC?u=psucic&sid=GIC&xid=4ddff1c9.