The series, from Sony Pictures Television, will feature Dern portraying Brown and is adapted from Brown's 2021 book 'Perversion of Injustice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story'. Sharon Hoffman will write the project and serve as co-showrunner with Eileen Myers, while McKay, Dern, and Brown will serve as executive producers. The series is still seeking a buyer and has not yet gone into production.
It will provide an account of an investigative reporter exposing the secret plea deal between Epstein and federal prosecutors, following Brown's investigation that identified 80 victims, persuaded key survivors to go on the record, and led to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's arrests. Brown's reporting was crucial to bringing public attention to Jeffrey Epstein, with the Miami Herald publishing her three-part series in November 2018 that detailed the relationship between prosecutors and Epstein's lawyers and powerful people who allegedly turned a blind eye to Epstein's abuses. The series was based on interviews with 60 women who claimed to be victims of abuse, bringing Epstein's crimes back into public consciousness and leading to sex-trafficking charges.
Brown's series led to the resignation of Trump's then-labor secretary Alex Acosta, who, as US attorney for Florida's southern district in the mid-2000s, signed off on a non-prosecution agreement that blocked federal charges from Epstein's first criminal case, where Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges instead. Fallout from Brown's work continues to play out in the US, where the justice department faces calls to release all its documents on Epstein, and in February, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in England for possible misconduct as trade envoy for the UK, following the disclosure of emails exchanged with Epstein. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors.