Julie K. Brown is an investigative reporter with the Miami Herald. During her 30-year career, she has worked for a number of newspapers, focusing on crime, justice and human rights issues. As a member of the Herald’s Investigative Team, she has won dozens of awards, including two George Polk Awards, a Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights Reporting, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Hillman Prize, and PEN America’s Voice of Courage Award. In 2020, she was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people. In 2018 she wrote “Perversion of Justice,” a series that examined how a rich and powerful New York financier, Jeffrey Epstein, managed to arrange a secret plea deal and escape life in prison -- even though he sexually abused more than 100 underage girls and young women. The series, and her subsequent dogged coverage of the case in 2019, led to the resignation of President Trump’s labor secretary, Alex Acosta, Epstein’s arrest, the conviction of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and millions of dollars in damages awarded to hundreds of victims. 

 

Brown previously won acclaim for stories about racial profiling, police corruption and a series of stories about abuses and corruption in Florida prisons. Her prisons series led to the resignations of top agency officials, firings and arrests of corrupt corrections officers and an overhaul in the treatment of inmates with mental and physical disabilities.

 

In 2023 she was part of the team at the Miami Herald that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Breaking News Reporting.

 

She is the author of the book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”