Then, once I have the file name, I try to remove the apostrophe.

The preferred practice when cleaning up things like filenames is to specify what you will accept rather than what you will reject. For instance, if you used a substitution like $newName =~ s/[^\w.-]//g; you may not have run into this problem at all. (Assuming that the problem really was a character in your filename that only appeared to be an apostrophe.)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";