Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown fired back at comments by an editor who blocked her from getting the Pulitzer Prize years ago, posting a series of tweets rebutting his claims that her reporting had not been “fully novel.”

Brown’s reporting is widely credited with leading to the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for their sordid child sex trafficking scheme, as well as exposing details about the controversially lenient plea deal Epstein secured in an earlier criminal case. In the course of reporting her “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” series in 2018, she worked closely with Virginia Giuffre and numerous other victims to help them share their stories, and her work was influential in pushing for the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes included a special citation for Brown for her “groundbreaking reporting” on the series that “exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic abuse of young women, the justice system that protected him, and, over time, his powerful network of associates and enablers,” and gave “voice to the scores of victims who had been groomed and abused by him and others in his circle.”

The announcement of Brown’s Pulitzer recognition reignited discussions about why her work had been overlooked before. David Boardman, who served on the Pulitzer jury in 2019, posted a tweet blaming a “well-known editor” who mounted a “bizarre campaign” against Brown.

Semafor’s Max Tani reported that two sources told him that the editor in question was Joseph Sexton, who had been at ProPublica then and also was a previous Metro and Sports editor for The New York Times, describing Sexton’s objections as “voic[ing] strong concerns that Brown’s reporting didn’t include enough substantially new information to deserve the award.”

Tani reached out to Sexton for comment, and got a reply by email:

In an email to Semafor, Sexton called Brown’s work “commendable and consequential.” But he said the “most explosive elements of her reporting had been previously published, both in news articles and books.”

“I and others on the jury felt the work was not the best entry for a category that greatly values fully novel reporting,” he said. “The work’s impact on the public’s appreciation of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the troubling performances by local and federal authorities was considerable, and I raised the possibility that the entry be moved to another category — public service or explanatory, perhaps. Nothing came of it. The Pulitzer board encourages its juries to engage in both robust debate and its own inquiries into the distinctiveness of all entries. It was a seven-person jury, and the majority vote required to advance Brown’s work as a finalist did not happen.”

The Daily Mail’s Daniel Bates shared Sexton’s quote with a comment, “An argument that looks worse and worse over time.”

Brown wrote multiple tweets as a reply to Bates defending her work against the criticism by Sexton and other skeptics who questioned whether she was worthy of the Pulitzer.

Wrote Brown:

I guess it wasn’t “novel” to track down 80 victims (all their names redacted from court documents, meaning I had to find them), convince 8 of them to speak to me, four on the record– and on camera! Does anyone understand how difficult that was? It was so difficult that I contacted sexual assault psychiatrists to guide me so that I wouldn’t re-traumatize them. 1/

I also got the lead detective and police chief to speak on the record about their own betrayal by the state and federal prosecutors, they too were cagey BECAUSE they said other journalists had not taken their concerns seriously. 2/

3/ There were also hundreds of emails between prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers — most of which had also never been reported before — showing a pattern of the prosecutors repeatedly bowing to Epstein’s powerful lawyers.

4. Lastly, I did a search of how many stories the NYT wrote about Jeffrey Epstein between 2005, when his case became public, and 2018 when my story ran. Do this search and read the stories. They simply did not cover this story adequately — and it is fair to ask why one of their own journalists cozied up to Epstein, even after he pleaded guilty to sexual assault.

5. What is really galling and sad is that I even have to explain this, especially to journalists. But then again, this is why the victims have had to fight so hard to be heard. /end

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