The Daily Beast’s founding editor Tina Brown has disclosed how an FBI agent presciently warned that Jeffrey Epstein would never face justice. “Epstein will never make it to trial. There are towels on the inside,” the agent told journalist Conchita Sarnoff just after the financier was arrested at Teterboro Airport, New Jersey, in July 2019, Brown revealed Thursday on her Fresh Hell Substack. Five weeks after the FBI agent’s warning, Epstein was found dead in his cell at Manhattan’s federal detention facility. Brown details the story behind years of Beast revelations about Epstein in her new Substack post. She discloses how he tried to kill off a groundbreaking six-part series Brown commissioned from Sarnoff in 2010. It revealed for the first time both his sweetheart 2008 deal with prosecutors and the appalling scale on which he had abused underage girls. Brown tells of her own chilling encounter with Epstein, after the Beast’s first revelations of how he was slapped on the wrist for prolific child sexual abuse. The predator got past security and into her Manhattan office while she was at lunch, she writes. “He was morose and menacing, his snake eyes narrowed,” she recounts. “‘Just stop,’ he said heavily as I stared at him from the doorway. ‘There will be consequences if you don’t.’” Brown and the Beast were unintimidated and continued to investigate him. But, Brown writes, the stories “landed with less impact” than would have been the case in the wake of #MeToo. The veteran journalist writes that the Trump administration’s attempts to shut down interest in Epstein has fueled her—and others’—questions over how he died. “I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate,” she writes.
