Amy Robach
In 2019, ABC News anchor Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic complaining that the network “quashed” her interview with key Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell for two years. “I’ve had the story for three years,” said Robach in the video. “We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told, ‘Who was Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.’ Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”
“I tried for three years to get it out to no avail, and now these new revelations and — I freaking had all of it,” said Robach in the video. “I’m so pissed right now. Like, every day I get more and more pissed, ’cause I’m just like, Oh my God! It was — what we had, was unreal.”
Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s longtime friend and attorney during his first arrest, supporter of Hillary Clinton and a member of Trump’s legal team during his 2020 impeachment trial, was mentioned in Giuffre’s interview. Dershowitz told NPR that he had called ABC News in 2015 just before the interview was supposed to have been broadcast to dissuade the network from airing Giuffre’s allegations. He said he had mainly called to warn ABC against giving Giuffre a platform. “I did not want to see her credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz told NPR.
Julie K. Brown
In 2017, Julie K. Brown, a reporter for the Miami Herald, began investigating Epstein. She uncovered 80 potential victims, some of whom were 13 and 14 years old when they were trafficked. She documented eight individuals through a series of reports published in November of 2018.
Brown also extensively covered the secret deal Epstein made with federal attorney Alex Acosta, who would later become U.S. Secretary of Labor during President Trump’s first term. Through a 2008 plea deal with Acosta, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to only two state-level prostitution offenses. His federal charges disappeared and an FBI probe linking Epstein to dozens of victims was shut down. The deal also granted immunity to any possible co-conspirators.
Epstein’s plea deal came under fire after his 2019 arrest, and amid bipartisan criticism, Acosta resigned as Secretary of State.
Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee in 2019, urging them to shut out Brown and the Miami Herald for the “fake news” reporting on the Epstein case. Brown didn’t receive the award.
She later said she had been warned by former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter to expect pushback for her reporting, as other members of the media who had attempted to report on Epstein received. Reiter had said, “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
It wasn’t an idle warning. The Epstein Files reveal that in 2011, Epstein asked private detective William Riley of Riley Kiraly to get information about a Miami reporter and “her boyfriend.” Riley sent Epstein a full report on the target, all redacted in the U.S. Department of Justice’s published files.
Brown herself revealed late last year that the DOJ was monitoring her, as information about a 2019 flight booking is included in the Epstein files. Brown said she expected to see her name in the files because of her extensive reporting on Epstein. “What I didn’t expect to see was an American Airlines flight record from 2019 with my full name on them, including my maiden name, which I don’t use professionally. It’s an unusual name, so it’s clear it’s me.”
“Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?” she asked on X.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Shortly after journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley met with Epstein and Maxwell victim Carolyn Andriano in 2022, she was approached in a restaurant by a private detective who asked what she was writing about. She said the man offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. The restaurant manager asked him to leave and he then waited outside for her, forcing Osborne-Crowley to sneak out through a staff exit.
Andriano, who was trafficked between the ages of 14 and 17, was a key witness in Maxwell’s 2021 trial. Osborne-Crowley had been interviewing survivors for her book on the trial, “The Lasting Harm,” published in 2024. She wondered who was paying the private detective and other people following her and victims who had come forward.
“It could be any of the people who are not yet facing charges,” Osborne-Crowley told The Guardian. “Firstly, they can afford it. The weekend I was in Miami, there was a person following me, a person following a survivor in South Africa who was in my book, and a person following a survivor in the UK. Just so that we all were aware.”
Two women withdrew from “The Lasting Harm” after receiving threats. In November of 2025, 28 victims released a statement alleging many of them had received death threats and asking for police protection. “Ghislaine used to tell them, ‘If you ever tell anyone what’s going on here, no matter how far into the future, we will find you and we will stop you,'” said Osborne-Crowley. “And in a lot of ways, that promise was kept.”
Conchita Sarnoff
Investigative journalist Conchita Sarnoff was in a unique position when she began investigating sex trafficking. Her former husband is the grandson of Brigadier General David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC who also oversaw the construction of Radio Free Europe during World War II. Those connections brought her into the same social orbit as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whom she met in the 1990s.
When Epstein was arrested in 2008 in Palm Beach, Sarnoff phoned him and then interviewed him at home while he was under house arrest.
“Because I had a social relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, I knew who they were, who their friends were, and more or less how they thought,” said Sarnoff. “This allowed me to expand my investigation.” That reporting turned into a book, “TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case,” which Sarnoff completed in 2008.
Twenty-seven publishers turned her down after reading it. She said multiple media outlets scheduled her to discuss the book and her investigation but then rescinded the invitations without explanation.
The book became widely available in 2021, and discusses how Sarnoff risked her life to expose the reality of human trafficking despite bribes to stay silent. It includes witness accounts of Epstein, Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Sarnoff is now executive director of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking.
Savannah Guthrie
In 2019, Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie interviewed six Epstein/Maxwell victims, including Virginia Giuffre. It was the first television appearance for Giuffre and aired on the NBC’s Today Show and Dateline. The survivors shared their experiences of grooming and abuse, and the Dateline special focused on the failures of the U.S. justice system to protect victims.
The high-profile disappearance of Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie, has dominated headlines recently. Guthrie was last seen on January 31, one day after the U.S. DOJ released 3.5 million additional pages of the Epstein files. Nancy Guthrie remains missing and law enforcement has found no ties between her disappearance and her daughter’s reporting.