How Evil Epstein Used Elites to Stifle the Truth

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tina Brown tells all about her shocking experience being named in the newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein case files, revealing how Jeffrey Epstein and his allies frantically tried to “neutralize” her and shut down The Daily Beast after her explosive reporting with Conchita Sarnoff blew open his web of abuse. In a gripping conversation with Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty, Brown recounts the panic inside Epstein’s circle, the chilling legal threats from powerhouse firms, the duplicity of social fixer Peggy Siegal, and the moral rot of an elite “club” that protected its own even after the truth was in plain sight. She reflects on the pre-#MeToo culture that dismissed victims, the powerful names orbiting Epstein—from Bill Clinton to Ehud Barak—and the industrial scale of exploitation enabled by Ghislaine Maxwell and recruiter Jean-Luc Brunel. It’s a bracing defense of investigative journalism, a warning about the corrosive power of extreme wealth, and a behind-the-scenes look at how close this story came to being buried—so what else is still hidden in the millions of unreleased files? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I thought he was a creepy social climber, was my instant. But at the same time, the more she reported, the more kind of alarming it became because of the people on the flight logs. Bill Clinton is on the flight log. Ehud Barak, you know, from Israeli former Prime Minister, was on the... Then you start to think, oh my God, the guy is so hugely well connected. There were all these people who were just in this favourite bank of this elite world, and they were all there for different reasons.
0:22.2	But at the end of the day, they were all ignoring the elephant in the room that they had no business ignoring.
0:27.6	Because after we published those pieces, there was nothing you could say that was ambivalent about Jeffrey Epston's conduct.
0:36.9	Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docky. I'm executive editor of the Daily Beast
0:41.6	and I'm in for Joanna Coles. But this is a reunion episode today, not for me, but for
0:48.7	The Daily Beast. I am going to be talking to the legendary Tina Brown. She founded the Daily Beast
0:54.1	in 2008 and we're going to be talking about stories from The Daily Beast. We're going to be talking to the legendary Tina Brown. She founded the Daily Beast in 2008, and we are going
0:55.4	to be talking about stories from The Daily Beast, but more importantly, why she's in the Epstein
1:00.6	files and the amazing, extraordinary dramatic insights that we have learned from those files about
1:08.3	Daily Beast's groundbreaking reporting back in 2010 and 2011 and how Epstein
1:14.4	tried to keep her and Conchita Sarnoff, the Daily Beast reporter who broke the Epstein
1:19.9	stories silent. Let's get right into it. Welcome Tina Brown. Tina, it is so great to see you. It's so great to have you back in the
1:33.6	Daily Beast world, which you founded. And I feel like we are...
1:38.3	I love to, you know, any chance to be in the Daily Beast world. There's always a roaring pleasure.
1:44.8	Well, we are, strangely, journalism is usually about the new and pushing forward,
1:50.3	but I'm going to go on a very long trip down memory lane, I think.
1:55.7	The Epstein files, which have just exploded over the last few days have been we you know as people will know
2:07.1	we are in them yes and especially you are in them and you wrote about this on your substack and
2:14.1	I'll just say to anybody who has not read Tina's substack go to substack fresh hell on substack and I'll just say to anybody who has not read Tina's Substack, go to Substack,
2:19.8	fresh hell on Substack and it is just an extraordinary story of what happened with Epstein.
2:26.9	And we are, we are now 15 years, 16 years, I should say, later, finding out some of the other side of the story.
2:38.8	Yes, it's absolutely fascinating, you know, to find myself in there.
	...

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