Temple journalism graduate Julie K. Brown is honored with a Pulitzer Special Citation for investigative reporting involving the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Years before investigative reporter Julie K. Brown became internationally recognized for her work exposing failures in the criminal justice system involving Jeffrey Epstein, she was a Temple University journalism major who developed a passion for chasing news and a belief that storytelling could make a difference. 

The Bucks County native graduated in 1979 from Pennridge High School, located in Perkasie. She then quickly began her journey toward becoming a journalist.  

Brown said she was drawn to Temple because of its strong communications program. 
 
“It was a great opportunity to learn in an urban environment, because those issues have always been important to me. And that I could learn from professors who worked as reporters themselves,” she said.  

However, despite Brown’s interest in news, she initially majored in public relations, believing it was a more practical path.  
 
“I was always into journalism and knew I wanted to be a writer of some sort. But everyone knew that journalists didn’t make any money and that jobs were scarce and hard to get,” she said.  

While studying PR, Brown said she was required to take journalism classes, such as news writing. 
 
It was that first journalism course that helped change the trajectory of her career. 

“I was lucky that my professor was a journalist at The Mercury newspaper in Pottstown,” she said. “He was so encouraging to me.” 
 
Brown began an unpaid internship for The Mercury as a freshman, and was eventually offered a full-time position as a reporter.  However, she turned it down to continue her education. 

“All my professors were supportive,” she recalls. “My classes helped shape me into the person and the reporter I am today.” 

Outside the classroom, she made it her mission to find other internships that could allow her to explore more career opportunities. She then landed a second internship with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. 

“I called them on the phone. That’s how I got the internship, by just calling,” she recalled. 

The internship introduced her to the fast pace of broadcast journalism. Brown worked on Morning Edition, waking up in the early morning hours, starting her shift at 2 a.m. 
 
“I would roll out of bed, take a cab to work and spend the early hours scanning stories as they moved across the newsroom’s old-fashioned wire machines. Bells would ring and signal breaking news,” she said.  
 
It was the 1980s, when audio was edited by hand rather than on a computer. Brown worked with producers who physically spliced tape. She also had a front-row seat to renowned NPR journalists, like Susan Stamberg and Bob Edwards, and watched with both eagerness and excitement as they reported live. 

“It was an incredible internship, but I didn’t do enough writing,” she said. 
 
Brown found herself missing the on-the-ground reporting and writing she had done with The Mercury. She longed to do more original news and shape the stories herself. 

However, before switching her major to journalism, she took on a third internship. Instead of being in a newsroom, Brown began interning at a public relations firm right in the heart of Philadelphia, in Center City. She helped to gather information from clients and wrote press releases, all of which she found less interesting than chasing news stories.  
 
Then, on May 13, 1985, Brown remembers being at the firm when one of the biggest news stories of the decade unfolded: The MOVE bombing happened, which killed 11 people and destroyed more than 60 homes. Local TV news went wall-to-wall with live reporting, and she and many colleagues were locked into the news coverage. 

“I remember standing in the office watching TV, and I’m thinking to myself as I’m watching: I want to report on things like this, I don’t want to be doing press releases about paper products,” she said. 

Soon after, she changed her major to journalism and began building her reporting portfolio, often writing freelance stories for smaller newspapers after her classes at Temple. 

“My professors always gave us reminders that ‘You need your clips,’ and I had a pretty kickass portfolio by the time I graduated,” Brown said. 

She graduated from Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication in 1987 and continued gaining experience at community newspapers. 
 
“Temple gave me the training ground I needed to become a journalist,” she said, adding Philadelphia is one of the country’s largest media markets.  
 
She soon landed a job as an obituary writer for The Hunterdon County Democrat in Flemington NJ, a South Jersey newspaper. She said talking to people during the most difficult times in their lives helped her learn to tell their stories with compassion. 

“In that job, I had to talk to relatives at times when it’s hard to talk. So you have to be very sensitive,” she said.  

She continued her career, working for other community newspapers, including the Hunterdon County Democrat, Bethlehem Globe-Times and Bucks County Courier Times.  

She later joined the Philadelphia Daily News, where she covered crime and courts and the Philadelphia Fire Department. 

“It was a really competitive market and really fun working for The Philadelphia Daily News,” she said. “It was fun. It was really fun. I was getting paid to have fun.”  

She moved to the Miami Herald in 2005, where she won numerous awards. Her reporting in 2018 into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein led to his arrest in 2019, as well as the resignation of Alex Acosta as the U.S. Secretary of Labor, who gave Epstein a controversial plea deal when he was a Miami prosecutor.  Her coverage also earned her a 2026 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. She also reported extensively on the justice system, talking to survivors who said it allowed him to avoid federal prosecution for years.  

She earned many other journalism awards,  including two George Polk Awards, the Hillman Prize, the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights story of the year in 2014.

“To me, the awards are not the reward,” she said. “The bigger reward is getting justice for people who can't fight for themselves.” 

In addition, her book, “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story," is the basis for an upcoming Sony TV limited series produced by Oscar-winning director Adam McKay, who is also an Owl. 

Julie was honored with a Lew Klein Award in 2019. 

She credits her time at Temple for giving her the tools to become a great journalist. 

“Everything I did in the classroom, at my internships, every story I wrote throughout my career, all those things I did prepared me for the kind of journalism I did for the Epstein story,” Brown said. “I could never have done the Epstein story early in my career, even five years earlier.”