Julie K. Brown

Julie K. Brown is an award-winning investigative journalist for the Miami Herald who was described in a 2026 profile as “the woman who brought down Jeffrey Epstein.” But before she became one of the most celebrated reporters in America, she was a daughter who became emancipated from her single mother when she was 16. She worked a minimum wage job and had few prospects before she became determined to go to college. When, decades later, she was reporting on the girls and young women who became targets of Epstein, she realized: “This could have been me.”

Early life

Brown was born in the suburbs of Philadelphia in 1961 to Theresa Corona Torma and John Paul Torma. The eldest of three children, she grew up in Bucks county. Her father left the family when she was young, and she was raised by her mother, who struggled to provide for her family, holding a job as a secretary by day and as a waitress at night. That made for a difficult childhood, Julie K. Brown recounted during a 2026 interview with Encyclopædia Britannica. “She wasn’t really home a lot. We had a lot of babysitters.…despite the fact that she was working so hard and doing her best, we were ostracized because we were a different type of family. It was not common to be a single parent. It was a different world in the 1960s.”

Those differences led to taunting and teasing as well as financial difficulties for the family, but even as a young girl, Brown saw her future in writing. She wrote stories that she tucked away in a shoebox. The woman who would win some of journalism’s most coveted prizes for her work recalled with delight winning an essay contest about what it meant to be an American when she was in elementary school. “It was a big deal for me. I finally won something.”

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When Brown was a teenager, her mother married Douglas Knipe, who adopted the children, but she didn’t get along with her stepfather. At 16, admittedly depressed, she moved out of her mother’s house and became an emancipated minor. She lived with older friends and worked at a discount store and as a secretary for four years to earn money. “At some point, I realized if I didn’t want to work at Walmart for the rest of my life I had to go to college.”

Discovering journalism

Brown entered the public relations (PR) program at Temple University, figuring it would offer a financially stable outlet for her desire to write. But after interning at a small daily newspaper and National Public Radio, Brown did a PR internship and hated it. She graduated from Temple and went to work at small daily papers in the Philadelphia suburbs before landing a job at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1996. Brown had long aspired to work at the other Philadelphia newspaper, the Inquirer, recalling:

“I read it all my life. Some of the best stories I read were stories about ‘nobodies.’ They’d take a story about a janitor and make it the best thing you’d read. That’s real journalism, real writing.”

In 2005 Brown was the mother of two grade-school children and was going through a divorce. With her former husband moving to Florida, she thought about leaving Philadelphia for the first time in her life to ensure that her children would be near their father. She wound up taking a job as an editor at the Miami Herald.

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Prison series

Brown admits she was not ideally suited for the role of an editor and was eager to return to reporting, even if it meant a pay cut, which it did in a journalism industry marked by furloughs, layoffs, and, as Brown notes, “paycut after paycut.” Fueled by the experiences of her youth, she had always seen her reporting as a way to give voice to those who don’t have one. She embarked on a series investigating abuses in the Florida prison system. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious George Polk Award for Justice Reporting for a series that, in the words of the awards committee, uncovered “appalling evidence of guards brutalizing inmates at correction and detention facilities.”

The next year, she explored abuses at the Lowell Correctional Institution, a women’s prison, in a series called “Beyond Punishment.” Brown and video journalist Emily Michot shed light on a world many people never think about. “Many women aren’t in prison for violent crime; they’re in prison for financial crimes, because they were trying to support their families. I could relate to that because of my mom.” She adds, perhaps surprisingly, given what was to come: “I’m more proud of my prison stories than anything else: I made a huge difference. Lot of reforms were done because of my work.”

Epstein investigation

Brown’s next big project grew out of her investigation into the women’s prison, where sex trafficking had figured prominently in the stories of incarcerated women. So Brown set out to research the subject and discovered that searches on “sex trafficking” and “Florida” yielded a lot of hits that contained one name: Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein’s conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor had been settled in 2008, when the financier pleaded guilty in a sweetheart deal and served 13 months in prison. That deal had been crafted by Alexander Acosta, who at the time was the U.S. attorney in Miami. But in 2017, Acosta had been chosen by Pres. Donald Trump to head the Department of Labor, which oversees the prosecution of human trafficking cases in the United States. That fact piqued Brown’s interest: She wondered how Epstein’s victims would feel about that and proposed to her editors a “reaction” story.

The problem was that the names of the victims weren’t readily available; Brown had to launch an investigation to find out who to contact. Initially her editors were skeptical about the story, but Brown’s ferocious determination swayed them. In the end Brown compiled a list of some 80 victims. In looking through their stories, a pattern emerged: “The trajectories of their lives were changed forever because of their interactions with Epstein: Some had died of drug overdoses; some were in prison.…There was life before Epstein and life after Epstein.”

That was the story Brown wanted to tell, but before approaching any of the women, she talked to experts who had worked with trauma victims. Then she wrote snail-mail letters to each woman she had identified. In the letters she told them they didn’t need to talk about the abuse. (Brown says: “There was never any question that it happened. There is just so much evidence.”) Rather, she wanted to hear from the women about their experiences with the criminal justice system. She never heard from many of the women, but some were eager to talk. They appreciated the research Brown had done and felt empowered to tell their stories. Her first interview was with Michelle Licata, who was 16 at the time Epstein raped her. After the interview, “I got an email from her and I thought she was going to say she had had second thoughts. Instead she wrote: ‘I feel like this big giant rock has been lifted off my shoulders.’ After that I knew I had a huge story.”

Ultimately four women would talk to Brown and agree to have their interviews videotaped by Michot. In addition to Licata, Virginia Roberts (later Virginia Giuffre), Jena-Lisa Jones, and Courtney Wild told their stories. In November 2018 the Miami Herald published a three-part series, entitled “Perversion of Justice.”

The work won Brown another Polk Award but also stirred the ire of Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who represented Epstein in his plea deal. Dershowitz wrote a public letter to the board of the Pulitzer Prize, urging them not to honor Brown’s work and calling it “fake news.” The work did not win a Pulitzer, but when Epstein was arrested in July 2019, there was no doubt of the impact of Brown’s work. At a news conference announcing the arrest, federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman noted that the case had been “assisted by some excellent investigative journalism.” In 2026, the Pulitzer Board gave Brown a special citation for her “groundbreaking work” on the Epstein scandal.

In 2021 Brown published Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, in which she recounts how she pored over spreadsheets, filled a spare bedroom in her house with documents, and, most importantly, spoke to the women. She also focuses on the role Epstein coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell had in the abuse. “Victims in some ways think she was worse than Epstein. They really, really hate her. I think she was driven by greed,” Brown told Britannica.

Importance of journalism

Julie Brown’s journalism has made a difference, but she worries that the public doesn’t always understand why reporters do the work that they do. “Most journalists don’t do this for fame or for money. The public doesn’t realize this. We don’t do a good job of explaining…how important journalism is for the country. How important it is for their own communities, so they know what the town council is doing.”

As for being the reporter who brought down Epstein, Brown wants to correct the record on her role:

I am the vehicle for those first four women: it was the most courageous thing that I’ve seen. Those four women came forward. That’s why we know about Jeffrey Epstein. I was just the vehicle.… I feel proud that they finally have a voice.

Learn more

The rise and fall of Jeffrey Epstein

Ghislaine Maxwell, partner in crime

Who was Virginia Giuffre?

Where did Epstein get his money?

The Epstein Files: A scandal in photographs

Inside Epstein’s islands