The Daily Beast Podcast - Ghislaine's Life Is At Risk Behind Bars: Author

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julie K. Brown joins Joanna Coles to unpack the latest twist in the Epstein saga—why Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanch, now number two at the Justice Department, personally visited Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. What did she tell him, and who is on the rumored list of 100 names possibly connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crime activities? As Epstein’s victims speak out in anger and fear, Brown reveals why Maxwell could now be in danger too—and why the Epstein cover-up still haunts the White House. Coles and Brown also dig into Florida’s ex-AG Pam Bondi, the deleted Elon Musk tweet, and why Epstein may have believed he’d never done anything wrong. With new subpoenas looming and Congress demanding answers, the question remains: what’s in the Epstein files—and who doesn’t want them released? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

She was the mastermind, and she was really just as evil, if not more evil, that Epstein was. I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast, and I hope you are drinking your new Chinese import, luck in coffee, as you listen to The Daily Beast podcast, or hopefully watch us on YouTube where you can leave us a comment. Today we're talking to Julie Kay Brown about what else for the Epstein affair. We know from Michael Wolfe that the White House is still in full panic about this story. No matter what the president does, he's unable to create a distraction that will let his MAGA base walk away. They sense a cover up. You will remember, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, said she was going to release the Epstein files in February. She released some stuff to some influences, but in fact it was already out there anyway online.

And then earlier this month in July, she said she wasn't going to release anything because there was nothing there. Yet we know that the president appears in the Epstein files or the Epstein information several times, something that Elon Musk tweeted out in June and then deleted. So there's clearly something going on. Nobody knows this story better than Julie K. Brown. And no one has followed the Gillen Maxwell of it all than Julie. She sat throughout the trial. She has spent years working on this story, and she's astonished that the number two in the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, who of course was Donald Trump's personal lawyer, would himself go down to interview Gillen. So let's talk about the list of names that Gillen apparently provided Todd Blanche, what she could possibly have to say, why on earth anybody would believe her at this point? And also given the ambiguity around Jeffrey Epstein's death that Gillen Maxwell may be in danger now too and will probably be forced to move jails. Julie, let's get into it. Julie K. Brown. First of all, what does the K stand for? You're always described as Julie K. Brown. Oh, it's my made name instead of using Knipe Brown, which is what I used to use. And Nipe was so hard for people to

spell because it's not spelled like you would think. It's spelled with a P.E. as in Paul. There's always a story behind an initial. Yeah. Yeah. Just to differentiate me between all the other Julie Browns in the world. Well, there's no other, there's no other Julie Brown that's had as much impact on, certainly on this Epstein case as you have, an extraordinary reporting career. Your journalism obviously led to the re-arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2009. which was actually a story the Daily Beast managed to get a heads up on. That's right. You have spent years of your life reporting the Jeffrey Epstein story.

What did you think when you heard that Todd Blanche, the president's former personal lawyer and now number two at the Justice Department, was himself going down to a Tallahassee court to interview Gillen Maxwell, who I just want to remind people, was sentenced to. 20 years for sex trafficking for being Jeffrey Epstein's partner in crime in soliciting school girls to attend to his endless sexual needs. Well, I thought that it's a little too late, to be honest with you. I don't know why the Justice Department didn't find out what she had before. It also struck me as being somewhat odd that you would send the second in command at the Justice Department to interview someone like her on a case that has spanned two decades. You have to, this case is very, very complicated.

And you really have to know everything that she has said previously in order to gauge whether what she's saying now is consistent with what she has said in the past. And I sense from everything that's happened under the Trump administration that they have not fully looked at this case. case, you know, and the history the way they should, or they wouldn't have been stuck with binders full of dated material that they released as if it was some big new information dump here. It was all, you know, information that we had already had in the public eye for years. So they don't fully grasp how big this case is and how complicated it is. So it gives me my doubts

that they know, you know, that they know what to ask and how to, I guess, obtain the information that they need. But isn't that presupposing that they actually want to get to the bottom of it? Isn't what's going on here that actually what they want to do is see the extent to which Donald Trump and his friends are implicated in what Jeffrey Epstein and Gillen Maxwell were doing? Well, I think that they probably want to know both. You know, I think it's also possible they're looking for people who might not have the same political bent as they do. You know, like Clinton, for example, they might be doing the opposite as well, trying to get information on Democrats. Look, I always say when I talk about this story because people inevitably bring up the political issue, sexual assault doesn't discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on both sides of this story, Democrat, Republican.

This has to do with power and money and to some degree politics, but the politics was on both sides. What do you think she told, Todd Blanche, we're told that he came away with a list of 100 names? Well, I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, she claimed, remember, during trial, that this was all a farce, that she, there was no sex trafficking. operation. She didn't know who these women were. I mean, she denied, denied, denied, and also bring you back to the things she has said in the past in sworn depositions, she has claimed that this whole thing was just invented, you know, that this was invented by the media and by the lawyers representing the victims. So now she's saying, oh, by the way, here's all the men or

people that were involved. I mean, you can't have it both ways. She's on one hand saying there was no sex trafficking operation. And on the other hand, when it comes to offering her pardon or some kind of a deal, she's saying, oh, yeah, I've got names for you. So it's hard to understand why, you know, they wouldn't question her motives. Obviously, she's going to say what she has to say because she wants to get out of jail. I suppose for the trial, she just decided to do a full not guilty, just deny, deny, deny. Otherwise, she could have come up with these names at her own trial. Right. You know, it's hard to know. I think that I'm sure her lawyers were telling her this was the tack to take. You know, you follow the advice of your lawyers. To be honest with you, I thought I sat through the whole trial. I thought there was a good chance she was going to get off.

Her lawyers did a very good job of trying to discredit these victims. It's common for victims, especially if they were children when the trauma happened, to not remember things exactly correctly. And her lawyers were very adept at poking holes in, you said this then, now you're saying this now. They would bring out statements that these victims had given police years ago. And then they compare them with statements they gave more recently. And just watching these young women go through this, again, was very hard to watch.

And maybe that's what swayed the jury, the emotion of the whole thing. But I do think that the case that they presented was somewhat weak. So I think it's possible that Gieland and her attorneys thought that she was going to get a guilty verdict or be convicted of something very minor. Right, but she wasn't. She was convicted of sex trafficking. She was sentenced to 20 years. Her appeal was turned down in November. Mike Johnson, the leader of the house yesterday on face the press. We're recording this on Monday morning, said he thought she should have got life imprisonment. The crimes were so horrible. So what are you hearing from victims in terms of their response? to Todd Blanche rushing down to Tallahassee to talk to her further? They are angry, frustrated, retramatized, you know, disappointed.

It's just devastating to them to hear that they're doing this. Because in many ways, they believe she was the mastermind. And she was really just as evil, if not more evil, that Epstein was. and I'm saying this is what I've heard from not only the victims but their attorneys, that this was something that she, that he may not have ever done at she didn't come up with this pyramid scheme that she came up with. She was the recruiter that went out with his houseman, his butler, his drivers, to spas and gyms across South Florida to give them these young women,

And in some cases, teenagers, her business card saying, I have a very wealthy man. He's looking for a masseuse. You know, they didn't go out and get, he didn't do go out and get prostitutes. He made a concerted effort, and she was part of that to go out and manipulate young girls, many of them in vulnerable situation where they had very little money or they were homeless or they just were just getting by. they made a concerted effort to go after girls that they couldn't trap. And that's exactly what they did.

And they used fraud because once the girl got in, it was very hard for her to get out because he made it very clear he was a very powerful man and would make their lives and their family's lives very difficult if they did not go along with the sexual sex trafficking that he was doing. And of course, they weren't sophisticated enough to know that actually, actually he had limited impact. Yes, he could have people sit outside their houses as he did. So private detectives sort of tracking girls and things.

But I think we often imbue powerful men with more power than they actually have. But they were obviously scared of him. Many of them didn't have parents who could help them. And certain of them had parents who reported the behavior to the police. And then they weren't believed. Well, let's just fast forward a little bit to what's happening right now. I just had a victim tell me, for example, about the power thing, she said, this is very scary to me because if the president

of the United States can cover this up, could you imagine who is involved with this? And this is the words of a victim to me. They believe that if this is now squashed, for example, that there's so many people that are in these files that, And they must have a lot of money and a lot of power. So it's the idea of it, I think, that terrifies them. It's not necessarily reality. And we don't know what the truth is. But releasing those files, at least a good portion of them would help, I think.

It would show some transparency on the part of our government. Right. But I'm not sure we can expect transparency. on behalf of our government. But I would love to talk to you about the Pambondi of all this because obviously she was the Attorney General 2011 to 2019 in Florida. So she would have inherited the files on Jeffrey Epstein, who as we know, both the local police and the FBI

had massive amounts of information about him. He went to jail on one charge of underage. solicitation of prostitution in 2008. It was a sweetheart deal, as we all know. She would have picked up the papers then. What was her role? Because he continued this behavior in Florida, in Palm Beach, as well as his houses elsewhere, right under her notes. Right. Well, you know, there wasn't a lot of information, to be frank, there wasn't a lot of information about his sexual predation until Bondi became agey. He was sent to prison in 2008 before she became Attorney General.

But by the time she became Attorney General in 2011, a lot of civil lawsuits had been filed. And in the course of all those lawsuits and depositions and discovery, they found that there were a lot more victims, you know, and that this was an ongoing network of predation involving other people. Virginia Joufrey, who was the most vocal victim, filed an affidavit, I believe, in 2015, saying that she was trafficked to some very prominent people, including Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew. And that was a court document. Julie, just sorry, but you're right.

This is a complicated story. Did she file that in Florida? Yes. So Pam Bondi would have been aware of that. Well, yes, she had to be aware of it because it was written about extensively, especially by the British media. But the American media covered it as well because Alan Dershowitz also came into the picture. And then he started suing her lawyers. So there was coverage of it back then.

And as I said, it was such a high-profile case, at least during that period of time. one would think she would have looked at it. Now, it's possible she did and she decided not to do anything. I'm not saying she didn't look at it. What I'm saying is that it did, part of it did become public under her tenure. Julie, hold on one second. We're just going to take an ad break. And we're back with Julie Kay Brown from the Miami Herald talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

So what do you think happens now? Well, what do I think happens or what do I think should happen? I mean, those are two different questions. Well, yeah, a very good point. I mean, what do you think may happen now and then what do you think should happen now? Well, I think they're going to move her out of the prison that she's in in Florida. I'm sure that there's some concern or at least on her part of her safety because she's, you know, she's really in the news right now.

and she believes that Epstein was murdered. His brother believes he was murdered. Whether you agree with that or not, I'm sure she has some safety concerns. So they might move her, especially maybe to a place that's a little bit more conducive to Washington, maybe closer to Washington, where they're going to be, I guess, having more talks with her. You know, it's hard to say whether they're going to offer her some kind of deal. well, my guess is they're going to try to find something, you know, because this story isn't going away for Trump.

So my guess is they're going to try to figure out some way to have her make public a statement of some sort that Trump wasn't involved. So do you think that Gillen Maxwell is at risk? Do you think her life is at risk in the current jail she's in in Tallahassee? And we know Florida jails are at difficult places and you've had a lifetime. of reporting on for jail. Right. Well, what I was going to say is, jails are just prisons and jails are just dangerous places, period. And it is so easy to cover up a crime in jail. You know, the cameras are broken. You know, guards fall asleep. I mean, they are, for the most part, very corrupt. And so, yes, it's possible. But she wouldn't necessarily be

safe anywhere. Look at Epstein. You know, he was probably one of the most high profile prisoners that we've ever had, and he still was managed to be found dead. So anything's possible. And I know you're not a conspiracy theorist, but you haven't, you can't quite figure out how he died. Do you want to talk us through that? Well, you know, there's just too many problems with the story that they're using to justify the suicide. I'm not saying he didn't commit suicide. I'm just saying that there are too many holes in the whole story. And, you know, I can go through the litany of problems, but for the most part, they haven't

answered why the cameras weren't working. Why is it that he was able to have two mattresses and all that, all the blankets and the material that he had in there? why wasn't the scene secured after his death that should have been treated as a suspicious death from the get-go? He was pretty much dead when they got there, you know, but they removed his body and they, you know, God knows what they did with the crime scene. You know, his brother firmly believes that this was a situation where Epstein had a lot of information on a lot of powerful people and that it's possible that the death. death didn't happen. They took out his cellmate, for example, right before this happened and he was on suicide watch. Allegedly, you're supposed to have someone in there. I mean, there are all these

protocols that were broken. So I think that, you know, the autopsy itself hasn't been released. So all these things lead to people coming up with conspiracy theories. I mean, I spoke with one victim last week who thinks he's still alive. Okay, well, that does seem to be pushing it. There was a picture of him dead, actually, on the New York, on the front page of the New York poet. But you make the point that the video they released actually wasn't the video of his cell door. No.

And for them to kind of try to imply that it is, and this is evidence, is absurd. Because the wing where his cell was, that camera was not recording in real time. So they have no video from that. And these were various wings. And none of the cameras in that whole unit were working except for the one that they showed us, which doesn't really show anything. So, you know, it's like I said, there are so many things like this that don't make any sense. Although you can imagine that if you're Jeffrey Epstein, you're in there for a second child. I mean, the photos of him from jail makes.

him look really rough. I don't find it difficult to imagine that you would want to commit suicide in that situation. He was doing exactly what he did in Florida, though. He wasn't spending a lot of time in that cell during the day. He was doing the same pattern. He would hire all these lawyers. He would go out in the morning and he would go into an office with his lawyers and he would stay there for almost all day. And then he would just go back to his cell to sleep. He was using his lawyers so that he could get out of jail, so to speak, and just be able to be in a comfortable environment where he was allegedly speaking to his lawyers. He was setting up things that he had done in Florida in order to make his jail time a little bit more comfortable.

But he also knew he was guilty. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think he always thought he was above the law. And in his mind, he was trying to help these girls by, in some cases, he did. He helped one of the victims become, you know, an actress. And he did pay for some schooling for others. He fancied him himself as this intellectual father figure giving them advice.

He always thought of himself as above the law. I don't think he ever really thought he did anything raw. But he must have known that his behavior was completely abnormal. Did he not have an understanding of that? Was he so sociopathic that he literally thought he was above the law and anything he did be? Right. Yes. That's what I think.

He really was. And it's, you know, it is possible that he could still, two things can be correct at the same time. that's possible that he didn't believe he did anything wrong, but still could see that he was in a jail and that the publicity at the time surrounding a story would make it very hard for him to get out. So two things could be correct there. So if he were killed in jail, who is like, I mean, I understand that jails are difficult and dangerous places and they're often very badly run and they're corrupt, as you say, how would you murder someone in jail? Well, you just, you know, you have a lot of people in jail who have no hope of getting out. And just because in general, when I have covered deaths that happen in prison,

it often involves other inmates that you make promises to, whether it's a financial incentive or even, you know, I know of deaths that have happened just because they got, some cartons of cigarettes. I mean, they're in there, and they're not getting out, number one, so they have nothing to lose. And the other thing you remember is that pedophiles are on the lowest of the low in any jail. They do not last long in jail because they have a target on their backs. So, you know, I'm not saying that he was killed, but I'm saying that, um,

There are a lot of questions. There's no evidence that authorities even questioned all the inmates that were on that wing. Is it common in your experience that if people do get killed in jail, that it's staged to look like a suicide? Yes. Oh, really? It's always staged, always staged, whether it's a drug thing or the person tried to, you know, commit suicide. I mean, there's been plenty of, you know, cases of inmates who are found hanging, but there's some question about whether they did it themselves.

I mean, it's an easy place to get away with that kind of crime. So, Julie, where does your reporting take you next? Well, you know, Senator Ron Wyden is looking into the financial aspect of Epstein's crime. and there's some evidence that he was doing business overseas. And I think that's the next front that we have to look at is to follow the money of how he made his money, who he was paying, who he was getting money from. The senators getting some resistance from the Justice Department as well as from the Treasury Department in order for him to get the information that he needs about Epstein.

bank accounts, for example. Well, good luck with that. And of course, the oversight committee has required Gillen, Maxwell, come and give evidence in front of them. And that's in, I think, around August the 10th. So that will also probably throw up more questions than it answers. But who doesn't want to see who's on that list? And of course, the people on the list aren't necessarily accused of being involved in his

sex trafficking. but the proximity to Jeffrey Epstein has felt many a powerful man's career. That's right. I actually don't believe there is one list unless the FBI compiled its own. But I do think that Epstein kept files on people. I just don't think he kept one running list of people. But I'm sure he kept files. Now, whether the DOJ ever got their hands on it is another matter

because they weren't very adept at getting his computer. the first time around, they never got their hands on them. And so one has to wonder what they actually have. That was because he'd been tipped off that they were coming, right? So he'd actually cleared out the hard drives. That's correct. Well, and also one can assume that Gillen Maxwell is sitting there every day in prison trying to figure out what she's got that would get her some lenience on such a long sentence. Yes. I'm sure she's trying to figure out ways to to perhaps back up this, you know, whatever information she's providing, I would think that the Justice Department would need some, you know,

evidence in the way of phone records or computer records or just regular paper records that she may have. Well, you're right, though. She spent her entire trial denying any of this happened that she was completely not guilty. So the idea that she's got a list of people now that the Justice Department should take seriously seems completely at odds with what she said before. Right. And, you know, she's going to have to provide a justification for that given, I mean, in essence, she's going to have to sort of walk that line between implicating other people but not implicating herself.

Because she was convicted based on the testimony of three young women. there were probably a lot more victims. So once you open that door, you're also opening the door to the potential of implicating yourself in more crimes. Right. And who do you think the names are most at risk in the supposed list or the list of 100 names? Who do you think is in there? We've heard of Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, the list goes on. But are there any people in there that you think we're going to?

hear about. Not anybody that we haven't already known about like with Clinton and Trump. They're all in there. The question is that, you know, what does this mean? I mean, and in what context? Because just because you're in there on its phone list doesn't mean that you were involved in his crime. So that's the second part of this. She can provide a list of all of Epstein's so-called friends, but that doesn't mean that they're guilty of anything. Right, except bad judgment in being his friend. That's correct. All right, Julie Brown, thank you very much. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. Well, this story is clearly not going away. The president's usual attempts at distraction haven't actually worked on this particular one. It's an easy story to understand. There appears to be a cover-up.

So let's see the Epstein files, let's see the names, and let Maga come to its own conclusions. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends. Write us a comment on YouTube and I'm going to respond to some of your comments because many people, we got thousands of comments on Michael Wolfe's podcast over the weekend about Melania's involvement in all this. Many of you accused me of interrupting Michael, which I do do. it's true from time to time. To be fair, I only try to interrupt him when I think he's referring to something that the audience in general might not know. I worry sometimes that he takes our knowledge of the Epstein affair, which we're not following quite as myopically as Michael for granted. So I like to just make sure that people know who we're talking about. Anyway, I take your point. And when he's on the podcast next at the end of the week, we'll ask him if he thinks I interrupt him too much. Anyway, don't forget, share the podcast. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh,

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