Julie Howell did not know what she was getting into last year when she was asked about a new inmate who had arrived at her prison – or that she was about to become an unwitting supporting character in the ongoing drama around convicted sex offenderJeffrey Epstein.
It started when Howell received an unusual email from her husband in August: A reporter with The Telegraph wanted to know how she felt about the fact that Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, had just beentransferred to her minimum-security prison campin Bryan, Texas.
Howell had plenty of thoughts, as did some of the other inmates. After consulting the prison handbook and a fellow inmate to try to confirm there was no prohibition against speaking to the press, Howell — who had recently started serving a one-year prison sentence for stealing almost $1 million from Tarleton State University, where she had been an associate professor — shared her views in a message for her husband to forward to the reporter.
“Every inmate l’ve heard from is upset she’s here. This facility is supposed to house non-violent offenders. Human trafficking is a violent crime. She helped find, groom, and traffick [sic] children for Epstein,” Howell wrote to the reporter, according to a copy of the email shared with CNN.
“We have heard there are threats against her life and many of us are worried about our own safety because she’s here. We had to be locked down in our units with the blinds closed because she’s here so she’s causing us to lose the little freedom we have in here, all because she’s cooperating with authorities.”
Her husband forwarded her note to the reporter. Several days later, Howell was in trouble.
She had just wrapped up a puppy training program that is designed to help rehabilitate incarcerated individuals when a prison guard whisked her away to the lieutenant’s office. She said the lieutenant asked her if she was familiar with the name Cameron Henderson, the journalist with whom Howell had shared her thoughts several days prior.
Speaking to CNN in her first interview since completing her prison sentence, Howell – who is now on supervised release – recalled the officer telling her: “‘It’s all over the world wide web.’ He just kept saying, ‘This is above me.’”
After Howell had waited for about an hour in a cell, she said the warden of Bryan camp, Tanisha Hall, came to see her. “She came in and asked what I was thinking, said that her phone was blowing up all weekend; I ruined her weekend; I shouldn’t have talked to them,” Howell said.
She apologized and explained to Hall that because her own daughter had been the victim of sex trafficking, Maxwell’s arrival at Bryan had been particularly upsetting to her. Maxwell was found guilty of carrying out a years-long scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls – charges she has denied.
“[Hall] rolled her eyes and flipped her hair back and she was like, ‘It’s too late for apologies,’ and walked out,” Howell said. Later that day, she was shipped off to a federal detention center in Houston, which houses male and female inmates of varying security levels.
Given the close public scrutiny of every aspect of the Epstein case, Maxwell’s incarceration has been a particularly sensitive subject.
Convicted sex offenders are not typically eligible to serve time at a minimum-security prison camp, so Maxwell’s transfer from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to the Bryan prison camp last summer was highly unusual, according to prison consultants. It prompted speculation that the government was giving Epstein’s accomplice special treatment in exchange for Maxwell staying quiet about President Donald Trump’s past relationship with Epstein.
Maxwell only further fueled those questions when she spoke flatteringly of Trump during herinterviewwith then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and said she never heard of Trump doing anything inappropriate. Maxwell has alsosignaled publiclythat if the president were to grant her clemency, she would clear his name of any wrongdoing as it pertains to Epstein. (Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of criminal wrongdoing related to Epstein; he appears numerous times in the Department of Justice’s Epstein files.)
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told CNN that the bureau does not discuss details related to any specific inmate, and that it is “committed to maintaining the highest standards of integrity, impartiality, and professionalism in the operation of its facilities.” BOP staff are prohibited from “providing preferential treatment to any inmate,” they said, and violators would be subject to disciplinary actions. As for whether inmates can communicate with members of the media, the spokesperson cited aBOP memoand said it is allowed with prior approval.
