#vicky ward

February 11, 2026

Journalist Vicky Ward first profiled sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. She discusses the fallout from the millions of publicly released documents, and why this story took so long to come out.

WARD: "Well, Julie Brown and I got to know each other as we sat through Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal trial, and she and I did a...

MOSLEY: A Miami Herald report, yes.

WARD: Yes, did an interview on our mutual Substacks last week, and Julie said - modestly, perhaps - but she said the reason she thought her story broke through was because the culture had changed from the time when I was reporting on Epstein, and that #MeToo was definitely very helpful, she felt, in waking up Congress and waking up the Justice Department at the time she published her extraordinary series about Epstein's sexual crimes.

But I think the reason that this has exploded into such a huge story now is, you know, ironically, also to do with the political climate that we live in. I mean, it's a great irony in a way that, you know, the populist wave that put Trump in the White House twice is tied up with great suspicion of what is called the deep state. And the Epstein story confirms that suspicion. It legitimizes this idea that terrible things get hidden up at the highest levels of government and power. It exposes the idea that there's one sort of justice for most people and a completely different sort of justice - as in no justice at all - for the very powerful and the very rich. And the fact that this is a global phenomenon just puts the whole thing on steroids. And I think that the Epstein story is sort of at the heart of all of it. It gives people a reason to totally mistrust the establishment, whatever that establishment looks like in whichever country it is."

Anand Giridharadas Has Read Through ALL The Epstein Emails

Yesterday, I reached out to the journalist Anand Giridharadas because he wrote a superb guest essay in the New York Times about what the latest batch of Epstein emails tells us about the true nature of the elites who comprise “The Epstein Class”. I recommend everyone read it. (It’s so good, I’ve read it multiple times). In it, he lays out vividly how Jeffrey Epstein was able to conduct a global orchestra of plutocrats, who cared not a jot that the man who was summoning them to dinner, or to lunch, or to the Middle East, was a convicted sex offender. He shows how these guys (and they were mostly guys) sought Epstein out for contacts, for insider information of any sort, for, in a word, “edge’. And that the person with the greatest “edge” of all was Epstein, the man-in-the-middle, whose poor spelling and grammar, was probably a deliberately manipulative mind-fuck, designed to keep them all beneath him in the shallow hierarchy on this lofty plane. You can watch our conversation above. And, yes, I’ll take Anand’s compliment: “You’re one of the only people whose name turns up in the Epstein emails in a way that makes you look better rather than worse because they’re worried about you.” “They’re worried about you….” That’s a phrase I think all investigative journalists want to hear regarding people in power who are hiding nefarious things. It’s cold comfort, given the hideousness of the crimes Epstein committed over so many years, but if, as it appears, I caused him even a few seconds of angst, then…good.

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this? A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain. At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against. The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare? But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

Item 100. “I wanna get to President Trump, what his connection is to this and who are the people, who you feel, have not been properly investigated?Amy Goodman interviews Investigative Reporter Vicky Ward on Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell & Their Victims. Democracy Now! 3.01M subscribers #DemocracyNow! Donate Now! 28 July 2025  Extract J — Maxwell trial extended coverage