A reporter famous for exposing notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein is warning that one of his allies is about to take power.
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Julie K. Brown, whose Miami Herald investigation into Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal helped reopen the case against him, wrote in a Saturday piece for her Substack newsletter, “The Epstein Files,” that Stacey Plaskett, who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands in Congress, is likely to become the territory’s next governor.
Her rise, Brown argued, shows “that not everyone who helped enable Jeffrey Epstein suffered career-ending consequences.”
Plaskett was “once a rising star in the Democratic party,” according to Brown, who wrote that the congresswoman helped Epstein secure millions of dollars in tax breaks and accepted campaign cash from him and his associates while running for and holding her seat.
Their relationship went beyond money, per Brown. “She was so close to him at one point that she was getting advice from him via text message in real time,” Brown wrote, describing a February 2019 congressional hearing at which Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified.
Once those messages surfaced, House Republicans pushed a resolution to censure Plaskett and remove her from the House Intelligence Committee. It failed by a narrow margin.
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“So now she is aiming to become the USVI’s first female governor,” Brown wrote.
Brown noted that the territory Plaskett hopes to lead is the same place where Epstein sexually abused countless victims.
Critics, she wrote, believe Plaskett’s “judgement and ties with a convicted child sex predator should raise questions about her fitness to serve as governor at a time when the USVI is facing a number of crises.”
Those include a shaky power grid that suffers frequent outages and rolling blackouts, debt, a rising cost of living and what Brown described as “a culture of government corruption that has plagued the territory for decades.”
“Some could argue that Plaskett has only demonstrated that she is part of that same culture that looked the other way when it came to powerful people like Epstein,” Brown wrote.
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