A newly released F.B.I. report shows that Donald Trump contacted the police about Epstein’s crimes as early as 2006. The Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown discusses the revelations.

By David Remnick

If the Jeffrey Epstein case has a leading reporter on the national scene, her name is Julie K. Brown. An investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, Brown has interviewed dozens of Epstein’s victims and has meticulously anatomized how Epstein managed to win preposterously favorable treatment in the courts. Brown’s reporting on Epstein is credited with reopening the 2008 case against him. Her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” was published in 2021.

The millions of documents recently (and chaotically) released by the Department of Justice have left Americans reading myriad e-mails and text messages that seem to describe, in their aggregate, a range of élites eager to curry favor with a criminal beyond the imaginings of the police blotter or the Marquis de Sade. The dreadful cast includes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, as well as various Wall Street wizards and real-estate magnates. And yet Brown’s main focus is on the names that fewer people know: the many girls and women who were treated for years with such cruelty.

When I spoke with Brown last week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, she was just about to publish an article in the Herald about President Trump’s telephone call to the Palm Beach police chief around the time of Epstein’s arrest in 2006. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.