Julie K. Brown and her explosive 2018 Miami Herald series, Perversion of Justice, blew the doors off the sweetheart deal with prosecutors that concealed the full extent of Jeffrey Epstein‘s serial sex crimes. Brown doggedly tracked down 80 Epstein survivors not identified by name in court documents. Eight spoke with her. Four trusted her enough to go on the record, and on camera, shining a light for the first time on the heartbreaking human toll of the Palm Beach millionaire’s miserable world.

Brown’s work had an undeniable impact. Eight months after it was published, Epstein was arrested in New York. A few days after that, Alex Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney in Florida, resigned as labor secretary. Acosta had overseen the extraordinary agreement that allowed Epstein to plead guilty to two state-level charges of procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, even though police had identified dozens of alleged victims younger than 18. Sealed by a judge, the 2007 “deal of a lifetime,” as Brown dubbed it, gave Epstein, four accomplices, and “any potential co-conspirators” immunity from all federal criminal charges.

Brown’s work went on to win many prestigious accolades, but not a Pulitzer Prize, the most competitive award in journalism. That all changed on Monday, when the committee granted her a special citation, citing her “groundbreaking reporting in 2017 and 2018 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.” In a Friday morning interview with Rolling Stone, the journalist talked about why she was heartened by the recognition, why she isn’t letting up, and why no matter what, the focus should stay on the survivors.

Congratulations on this award. It’s long overdue. How did you find out about it, and what was your immediate reaction?
I was totally surprised. I really didn’t know. We were called into the [Miami Herald] newsroom because another one of our investigative team pieces about the killer train was a finalist. Our editors knew about that, so we all went and wanted to support the other reporters. I think everybody was pretty stunned when it ended with my work getting a citation.

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Do you see it as sort of a corrective, or more as looking at your work then, along with your work now? How do you view it?
To some degree, the cultural reckoning that began with the #MeToo movement has now evolved into a survivor movement, with these Epstein survivors now having so much power in Washington. We’ve never seen anything like that. So, I think it’s that, combined with the fact that these records were published so that the entire world can see this. To some degree, you can’t really blame the [Pulitzer] jurors for not really knowing the impact that this would have so many years later.

There are reports that your initial nomination for the 2018 series faced opposition from one Pulitzer judge in particular, Joseph Sexton, who told Semafor that he didn’t believe there was enough “fully novel reporting” in your series for it to qualify. Can you respond to that?
Well, you know, I do think there were a lot of groundbreaking aspects to our story. Perhaps at its core, the most groundbreaking part was the fact I was able to get so many victims. I was able to give voice to them and also get them on the record. The videos, getting them on camera, were key to the entire story. And the failure of the criminal justice system in this case had never really been examined before. So that was novel, in and of itself. But then when you added to it the victims and how they were treated and mistreated and re-traumatized, I think putting all those pieces together made for a groundbreaking story that really had not been told before.

The survivors you’re in contact with, what did they think of the Pulitzer citation?
I got a number of congratulations from them, which meant a whole lot to me. From survivors who weren’t even victims of Jeffrey Epstein. That’s one of the other aspects of this story. It impacted all kinds of survivors of sexual abuse, and they have reached out to me over the years and told me what this story meant to them.

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In other news this week, a judge unsealed the purported Epstein suicide note. What do you think of it?
I’m skeptical because why didn’t we know about this before? It sounds like people knew that this existed, so I’m skeptical of how material it is as far as his death is concerned. I’m sure in his mind that he considered suicide. It’s also possible that he didn’t do it by his own hand. I have been on the record and open about the fact that while I don’t think he committed suicide, I do think that it’s possible he could have had somebody help him commit suicide, which is not suicide at all, of course, it’s murder. I don’t know the true answer to this, but I think that this letter should be examined to make sure that it’s authentic, and I think someone needs to answer the question of why this has been sitting in a court file pertaining to a quadruple [homicide] since this happened. It’s been sitting there for a very long time, in somebody else’s hands.

The note was unsealed in a criminal case for Epstein’s former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, not the so-called Epstein Files. What does that say to you?
Well, I heard about this note actually, and I probably should have looked at it closer, because I was also tipped off that Tartaglione had claimed he had a suicide note, and that it was sealed. I was told it was sealed as part of his effort to get a pardon from Donald Trump. And so, when I was told all those little pieces, to me, it didn’t sound very credible. The tip I got was, he’s using this letter as leverage to get a pardon from Trump. It just doesn’t sound credible. So, I kind of discounted it. I sort of kicked myself when I saw The New York Times had done the right thing, and I’m glad they did, which was to ask the judge to unseal it.

You wrote a story in March about the inmate who told the FBI he overheard guards talking about covering up Epstein’s death on the morning he died. It seems many skeptics, who don’t believe Epstein died by suicide, believe that maybe there were these outside sinister forces who did it. Do you fall into that camp? 
No, because I don’t necessarily feel that there are some outside sinister forces. I haven’t seen any evidence of that. When there is a regular murder, let’s say a murder of a wife, we look at some of the things to do with the husband that don’t seem right. For example, we find out he was having an affair or he was talking to somebody about it. We don’t talk about a regular suspicious death as if there’s a conspiracy. In other words, we don’t say, “Oh, there’s a conspiracy theory that her husband did it.” Epstein was the most high-profile inmate at that prison at the time. This is just Investigation 101. It should have been categorized as a suspicious death and treated as such. It was never handled that way, and that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s true. The FBI should have been called out. They should have taken DNA evidence. That’s what you do. It’s not a conspiracy to investigate whether he died the way that the medical examiner ruled. It’s just an investigation that should be done.

What’s some of the evidence you found the most questionable, suggesting maybe it wasn’t a straight suicide by hanging? What deserves the most attention?
I’ve worked with [forensic pathologist] Dr. Michael Baden on a lot of prison deaths in the past because I covered prisons in Florida, and I have a lot of respect for him. He was at the autopsy, and he didn’t agree with the medical examiner’s finding. The biggest thing to me is the idea that we have a frail, elderly man, who they say put some kind of fabric around his neck. Now think about it. This bunk is only five and a half feet high. There’s nothing to tie it to on the ceiling. So how do you hang your body when he’s taller than the bunk? I mean, just think of the logistics. Add to that, breaking three bones in your neck. Not one, not two, but three bones in your neck. How is that even possible? It just defies logic to me that he would have been able to do that. Plus, the other thing is that all the bottles on that top bunk were undisturbed. So, if he’s yanking himself so that he breaks three bones, wouldn’t some of those things be disturbed? Or if he jumped off the top bunk. All those items you could see in the photos, all those bottles are not toppled over or anything.

The other thing is, if you read the interviews with the two guards who were on duty, they’re really enlightening. The only person that claimed to have seen him with a fabric around his neck is one person, and that was the guard that found him. There were no other people to verify that’s how he was found because by the time they came in and got him, the noose was off. They didn’t even recover which one it was. There was so much material in there, they didn’t know which one it was.

Do you have a theory of what happened?
I do, but I can’t say. Let’s just say I’m working on it. It’s one of probably five different investigations concerning the case that I’m working on. We have a whole list of stories, and his death is never low on the list. It’s always one of the ones that we keep coming back to.

Turning to the files, where do you stand on digesting the millions that have been released already, and what has surprised you the most?
I think the scope of his crimes, how global they were, and how many other people were, not necessarily involved in his crimes, but were still part of his orbit even after it was pretty well known [he was a convicted sex offender]. Even after my series ran, some of these people still continued to associate with him. I think the fact that they released them is a really good thing because the public doesn’t have to rely on me or any journalist to tell them aspects of this case. They can look it up themselves. I felt somewhat vindicated. A lot of the information that I initially published back in 2018 was verified. It’s a good thing that the public can see for themselves how horrible this crime was, and confirm for themselves how many people enabled him, and it shows there needs to be a lot more investigation.

Were there any names among the implicated who were new to you?
I don’t think that there were too many new names. It confirmed a lot of the names we had already heard before. There were people who communicated with him that we didn’t really realize, you know, all these, academics. I’ve spoken to a lot of student journalists who are working on stories about them, whether it’s professors or their presidents. There’s still a lot of information that can be mined from these files, and people will be writing stories probably long after I’m even gone.

Are you still in the files, finding new things?
I’m exhausted right now. I was working around the clock when they first got released. Completely around the clock, just sleeping for two hours at a time, and it’s really taken a toll on my health. I can feel it. So I’m trying to take a little bit of a break right now.

Where do you think we stand in terms of accountability right now. Has it been enough?
We have no accountability. We’re nowhere. Nobody has been held accountable other than two people [Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell]. And Epstein really wasn’t held accountable because he died before he could be held accountable. What accountability looks like for me isn’t just the people who abused these girls, or who enabled Epstein. The other aspect of accountability should be with the criminal justice system and the prosecutors who were successful in keeping that plea deal secret, and as a result of keeping aspects of that case secret, essentially covered up the scope of how horrendous his crime was. I think that there should be more accountability on the part of the people in the criminal justice system who also didn’t do their jobs.

We still have millions of pages to be released. What do you think is in there? And will we ever see them?
I don’t know the answer about whether we will really see them, but there is a lot more information that we know we haven’t seen. I know of victims who filed reports or were interviewed by authorities whose interviews don’t show up in the files. I think there are aspects of the early case that are missing, the prosecutors’ memos that went back and forth. Alex Acosta’s emails supposedly disappeared during a key time, when this deal was being negotiated. Did the Justice Department do anything to try to get them back? Because I think the public deserves to know whether what they did was legal, to eradicate any inkling that this could have been a corrupt deal. We need to see those emails.

On the topic of Ghislaine Maxwell, she was moved to a nicer prison facility last summer. People are wondering if she might be pardoned. Are you worried about that?
I wrote a whole Substack saying I think she’s going to be pardoned. I do, because she has everything. She knows everything, and it looks like just from the little leak of some of her emails from prison that she’s kept some of that material. Why would they be treating her this way, sending her to this cozy prison? It doesn’t make sense that they would give her this. I also think she was responsible for leaking some of the things that hurt Prince Andrew and ultimately led to him having to relinquish everything. There are some questions about whether Maxwell is the person that did that to send a message to other men, important men, that, you know, she might have similar material on them.

If Trump were to pardon her, what do you think that would say about him?
Well, he’s already said to Marjorie Taylor Greene that a lot of his friends would “get hurt” by the release of the Epstein files. In fact, recently, she added to that and claimed he said “people at Mar-a-Lago” would get hurt. Those are pretty highly placed people that tend to go to Mar-a-Lago. So it’s clear to me that he, to some degree, has been trying to protect his friends.

You’ve mentioned before how immersing yourself in this story has taken a toll on you. It’s not just the document dump, this has been years. Do you have any advice for other people covering these very disturbing types of stories, day in and day out?
It’s hard to say because I don’t really follow my own advice, so to give advice that you don’t follow yourself, I think it’s kind of dumb. What I would say is that this story is like the phrase, “It takes a village.” I welcome other journalists’ work on this story. The more they keep working on it, the less work it is for any one journalist like myself. So I’m ecstatic that there are other people working on it. I’ve always been competitive, but I think my days worrying about being beat with this story are over. It’s a huge story. It still is, and the more important thing is that we keep working to expose the scope and eventually hold some other people accountable besides just Epstein and Maxwell.

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I think every story, with or without your byline, owes a credit to you. Speaking of credit, there’s also a TV series in the works from Laura Dern and Adam McKay based on your book, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. How do you feel about that and about Dern playing you?
I just went out to dinner with Emily Michot, who was the videographer and photographer for our incredible Miami Herald series. She’s an unsung hero in this. Emily and I sort of feel like we’ve been through a war together. We still sort of pinch ourselves and look at each other and say, I can’t believe this, you know? With the TV series, I think anything that continues to keep this in the public eye — especially one that gives survivors visibility and a voice — can help enlighten another segment of the public about this crime, and help them understand it better. There are some people who still don’t really understand this story, because they think of these young women as prostitutes. These were teenagers, and they were manipulated. So, I hope the series can help enlighten people who don’t really know the full story.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.