Vicki Ward (4:32)

You know, honestly, Al, mixed. On the one hand, I obviously feel vindicated that I wasn't. I hadn't gone mad. I wasn't hallucinating back in the fall of 2002 when I was first assigned to profile Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair magazine. And I came across these two sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer, who went on the record with me detailing abuse not just by him, but by Ghislaine Maxwell, who I knew socially but not well. And, you know, it's been so long since then that there were times along the way where I wondered, you know, as sort of a lot of people know, the Farmer's sisters allegations wound up being cut from that piece horrendously after we had put their allegations to Jeffrey Epstein and to Ghislaine Maxwell. So they were now exposed. But the stress of the report, that whole piece, he, you know, threatened me, as I think a lot of people know, I was pregnant with my twin sons. I went into labor at 30 weeks, much too early. And my then husband and I were terrified that Epstein was actually going to somehow harm our babies who were in the nicu, because that's what he threatened he would do. So I tried to sort of move on with my life and forget that the whole thing had ever happened. And I think if you had asked me in 2003 and 2004 about Jeffrey Epstein, I would have told you that I never wanted to hear his name ever again. And I would have been shocked if you had told me then that here we would be in 2026 kind of talking about nothing Else you were pregnant,

Al Letson (6:36)

and he threatened your children, your babies. Like, I mean, I can't imagine the anxiety that. That must have set off anxiety and all sorts of emotions. Hearing this powerful man say that he was gonna harm you and your children.

Vicki Ward (6:53)

I'm not gonna lie, Al. You know, I'm a pretty tough reporter. But, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, I now know, had a talent for honing in on people's vulnerabilities, whether they were young, underage girls or actually powerful billionaires. And what was my vulnerability in the fall of 2002? My pregnancy. It was a high risk pregnancy. And ironically, the reason I was assigned to write about Jeffrey Epstein was because my editor at Vanity Fair thought that it would be easy, because he knew that I had a complicated pregnancy. And he said to me, you know, Vicki, you live in New York. Jeffrey Epstein lives in New York. I've been wondering for a long time how this mysterious guy made all his money so quickly. This should be really easy for you. Go and find out. And none of us anticipated kind of the storm that we were walking into. I've never encountered a reporting assignment like it. There was nothing about him anywhere. There was one tiny paragraph in the New York Post that said he had flown Bill Clinton and a bunch of celebrities on a sort of philanthropic mission to Africa on his plane. That was it. But so I'm starting with a complete blank slate and the lengths he went to to stop the piece. First of all, I mean, what he first of all did was that he went to a competitor. He went to New York magazine, which was then a weekly. We were a monthly. He thought that if New York magazine put this piece out, it would stop me at Vanity Fair, we would no longer want to do our piece of. But all it did actually was tick me off. But I think that, you know, he also sent me various business bigwigs he thought I should speak to who would say nice things about him. And as I encountered Maria and Annie Farmer, as I began to learn the stories and the things that Jeffrey Epstein didn't want me to know, he became more and more aggressive. And he started to phone me every day. I mean, that's not normal. When a journalist is profiling somebody, that person doesn't normally phone the journalist up every day and say, what are you hearing? What are you hearing? And it was when he was in a panic, wondering what I had, that he would start with these threats. And it was. He told me he knew every doctor in New York and he would find out where I was giving birth. He told me he would have a witch doctor place a curse on my unborn children. And then he paused and said, that's off the record. And he told me that he was going to have my.

Al Letson (10:01)

He threatened you and then said, that's off the record? Yes, like, sir, that's not how it works. That's not how it works.

Vicki Ward (10:09)

It was so weird, Al, because there were all. There were lots of threats. You know, my husband fired, and that's off the record. One of them was slightly stupid. You know, your children will never get into school in New York. And that's off the record. We were in uncharted territory. And I phoned the lawyer, the sort of legal editor at Vanity Fair, and said, what do I do? And the lawyer said, you know, Vicky, I think you better record him, because we really didn't know what we were up against.

Al Letson (10:43)

Yeah. Let me ask you, like, as you're working on this piece or even, like, after the piece came out, did you have any idea how big his network was?

Vicki Ward (10:54)

That's a great question. And unfortunately, I didn't. I wish that I had.

Al Letson (11:00)

Well, I mean, if you had, you might have been even more fearful because,

Vicki Ward (11:04)

I mean, yes, if I had. And here's the sort of tragic irony of the whole thing, of the timing, Al. So I was reporting this piece in the fall of 2002. All these years later, I would go on to meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre before she died. I would interview her when I was at CNN. 2002 was the exact moment when she finally escaped from Jeffrey Epstein, escaped sort of being his chief sex slave, as she described her role. It was the exact same moment in time that a high school, New York high school student called Jennifer Arouse was raped by him, was, you know, picked up by a woman, an older woman, who was one of his groomers, brought to his townhouse. And he told her that, you know, she. He could get her a modeling contract, that, you know, he could help her career. And it was the time that he raped her. It was the time period I've come, I've since come to meet many of the victims who were being abused by him at the exact moment of time that I was doing this piece. And I wish that I had got a sense of the scale. I did feel from the Farmer sisters that there was something very dark. But I didn't have the story of this extraordinary pyramid scheme, and I wish I had, because obviously you're right. I mean, I went to Batman for The Farmer sisters 100%. I mean, I. I really feel there was nothing more I could have done to have got their stories into the magazine. But obviously if we, if I'd got five other stories along with theirs, it would have been that much more powerful and we could have stopped him. I mean, the, the sadness of not getting their stories into Vanity Fair back then is, is of course appalling for them, but it's also appalling for all the other victims that he then went on to abuse.

Al Letson (13:11)

Talk to me about finding the Farmer sisters and what they told you.

Vicki Ward (13:17)

So, believe it or not, you know, sometimes you need a bit of luck as a reporter. And I was lucky because somebody, an old English friend of mine, who, believe it or not, had been at school with me in England at high school and at university, who both had been invited to a party at Jeffrey Epstein's house one time and had thought that there was something off in the room. I think she mentioned that the former Prince Andrew had been there, but she thought that something about the women there was strange. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. But she said to me, you know, she said, I know an artist called Maria Farmer who has a story to tell about Jeffrey Epstein. And she made the introduction. So that was actually quite easy for me. Maria Farmer at that time was living, was painting. She had a studio in New Jersey. Maria and I are exactly the same age. So I phoned her up and she wanted to talk, she wanted to tell me what had gone on. It was the first time in my reporting as Maria started to talk to me. First she talked over the phone and then she came over. We met in person. She came to see me at home and I was shocked by the story she told me about how Jeffrey Epstein had sort of used her to get to her younger sister who was then in high school, aged 15, 16. But I was also really shocked at what she told me about Ghislaine, because Ghislaine Maxwell was somebody who had grown up in England like me. She was about five, six years older than me. And I would see her run into her at sort of parties in New York. A lot of the British expats kind of know each other and she was always this very glamorous, very exotic social fixture who was the sort of life and soul, the center of these cocktail parties. And she was always name dropping people like Bill Clinton and the fact that she was flying, piloting a Black Hawk helicopter. And I could not have told you what she spent her days doing. I mean, I had no idea she even knew Jeffrey Epstein. And the idea that she was in fact spending her time glued to Jeffrey Epstein and then helping him entice young underage girls into his orbit and sort of posing as their chaperone was just extraordinary to me. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, if people don't know. What Maria said was that she had been thrilled in her early 20s as a young artist to have been introduced to Jeffrey Epstein, absolutely thrilled to be hired by him as a sort of art curator. It was a great job that she was going to help him find other young artists and help him go out and collect young artists and boost their careers. It was a great, great job. But what happened was that he encouraged her to invite her younger sister to stay for the weekend in New York and he sent them off to Broadway. He gave them a limo driver to take them around and unbeknownst to Maria, he took them to the movies one evening and sat between the two sisters and in the dark he reached out and started holding her younger sister's hand. And Annie Farmer did not want to mention this to her older sister at the time because she didn't want to blow this great job opportunity that her sister had. Of course she didn't. And you know, Jeffrey was very clever. He discovered that Annie was very smart, very ambitious, wanted to go to an Ivy League school. And so he said, oh well, I can help you. I can, you know, fund a trip abroad which would be boost up your resume. But in order to do that, Annie, I need to get to know you better. And that's where Ghislaine came into the picture because Annie Farmer's mother told me she would never have let her young, I think she was then 16 year old daughter go and spend a weekend on a. It was, Jeffrey said, come to the ranch in New Mexico. She would never have let her 16 year old daughter go and spend a weekend alone with Jeffrey Epstein. But Ghislaine Maxwell got on the phone and told Annie's mum that it was going to be totally fine. There were going to be a lot of teenagers that Jeffrey mentored, a lot of teenagers, they were all going to be there. That Ghislaine Maxwell would be there sort of at chaperoning and in charge. And so that's why Annie's mum said, okay, you know, this could be an opportunity for you. Off you go. And Annie then, I never met her in person back then. She talked to me on the phone because she by then was an undergraduate at Penn University and she told me that the whole weekend had been utterly bizarre. She got there, she found she was completely alone with Jeffrey and Ghislaine and that Ghislaine had given her this topless massage. She'd never had a massage, let alone a topless massage. It was terrifying. And she had got this feeling that Jeffrey Epstein was watching the whole thing. And how the next morning she'd woken up and Jeffrey Epstein had climbed into bed with her and pressed himself against her. And here was the kicker, the worst thing about all of this was she did not want her older sister's job to be jeopardized. So she flew home and kept her mouth shut.

Al Letson (19:35)

Why wasn't all of this included in the Vanity Fair story?

Vicki Ward (19:39)

Well, now, that's a great question now, isn't it? So go back to 2002 and long time before the MeToo movement. Right. I mean, I think one of the things that journalists all learnt during MeToo many, many years later was that there is a standard of reporting that you have to get if you're going to put victims allegations on record. And you need to have people on the record who were contemporaneously told about the abuse. Ironically, I did get that. I don't know why the allegations of the pharma sisters were cut. I know that Graydon Carter, the editor of the magazine, has in the last few years said my reporting didn't meet the standard. And why it's complicated is that in the middle of fact checking the piece at exactly the same moment in time when Jeffrey Epstein was going berserk because I had finally put the pharmacist's allegations to him and he was faxing over all this documentation that he claimed showed that they were liars and thieves and this, that and the other. Jeffrey Epstein went into the Vanity Fair offices and met with Graydon Carter. And I know this because I got an email from a fact checker saying you're not going to believe who's sitting here in Graydon Carter's office, Jeffrey Epstein. And I was like, what the hell? What is going on here? This, you know, none of this is normal.

Al Letson (21:17)

Coming up on More to the Story. Jeffrey Epstein was the center of a rich and influential network of soft power.

Vicki Ward (21:24)

I mean, what the Epstein files has done is crystallize for all of us how power actually works in the shadows.

Al Letson (21:37)

But before we get to that, listen, I gave you a little break. I didn't bring it up much. I tiptoed around it, but now I got to ratings and reviews. They are really important. Look, I love, love, love, love, love, all the love. I mean, you can keep giving me the love, but give me the love in a rating and review. It really helps our show and helps other listeners find it. Okay, so go to the Reveal feed on your podcast app. Scroll down to the bottom mash. 5 stars. Yes, 5 stars. Write something wonderful probably about the host and that's it. That's all you have to do. Please. Thank you. Okay, more with journalist Vicky Ward coming.

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Al Letson (24:11)

This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson and we're back with journalist Vicki Ward. I can imagine from your experience with him, with Jeffrey Epstein and the way he was threatening you, I mean, going so far to threaten your children, I can imagine that he employed similar tactics. Maybe not the exact same thing. Maybe, you know, I think that these men who move in these circles can speak to each other in ways that, like they don't have to outright threaten to threaten.

Vicki Ward (24:48)

Well, you do see in the Epstein files now, I have seen that they were Definitely corresponding about the allegations of the Farmer sisters. And, you know, there are notes to Graydon that I was not privy to back then, where in which Epstein talks about the allegations against Ghislaine. Well, the allegation, the only allegations against Ghislaine were to do specifically with Maria and Annie Farmer. So, of course, I have to wonder what went on. You know, I've since been asked, you know, if Tina Brown or any other woman had been an editor at Vanity Fair at the time, do I think the Farmer's sister's allegations would have run? And of course, the answer to that is absolutely, yes, I do, unquestionably. And I think it's very easy out for Graydon Carter to say, oh, well, you know, I, Vicky Ward, am a terrible journalist. Which is what he went on to say, and completely untrustworthy. Which begs the question, why did I stay at the magazine for the next 10 years and get to write a lot of really great pieces? I mean, so it's very easy for him to just turn around and dump on me.

Al Letson (26:05)

I'd like to step back just a little bit. You were reporting on this in 2002, 2003, the story breaks big. Within the last, let's say, four years or so, the story has broken really big. All of these Epstein files have come out. I'm curious, going through the Epstein files, what is your thought about how big the files are, how big Jeffrey Epstein was and also. But the state of the world. Because I feel like, for me, when I think about the Epstein fil, what it did for me is make me understand that there are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there who believe that the world is run by a secret cabal. And I thought, yeah, rich people run the world. But then when you read the Epstein files, it's like, wow, actually, that's true. It's true. And that cabal has basically told you that it's those people over there, but actually it's them. And Jeffrey is kind of at the center of it. I'm just curious if you had the same. The same feeling like going through all these files and looking at the depravity, but also looking at all the powerful men that were a part of it.

Vicki Ward (27:18)

I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head, Al. I mean, what the Epstein files has done is crystallize for all of us how power actually works in the shadows. I think that this is why there has been such bipartisan support for the victims, actually, is because the people on the right and the left have always worried that real power gets wielded in the shadows. And you see in these files how Jeffrey Epstein not only understood that, but was at the center of this hidden elite. He was, if you like, the conductor of the entire orchestra, moving these really powerful, whether they're international politicians, they're royalty, they're billionaires, moving them around. Jeffrey Epstein, you see in these files, is moving these people around like chess pieces to suit his own ends. But even those who weren't involved, they were complicit because they were all prepared to look away at Epstein's sex conviction, you know, as a sex offender. They were all prepared to keep on emailing him, to accept his invitations to lunch, to accept his invitations to dinner. Why? Because they were benefiting materially from it,

Al Letson (28:50)

their access to power. I think that the question I have when you bring that up that comes to mind is we can see all over the world how different governments have dealt with people that were in the Epstein files. But when you talk about here in America, you don't really see a whole lot of change happening over people who have clearly been in contact with Epstein. Why is it that in the United States we have not held anybody really accountable for this behavior?

Vicki Ward (29:25)

It's a great question, Al. I mean, I think there's no question, but we have seen by the different reactions of different countries to this that there is def. There are definitely different levels in what I would call the culture of shame. And, you know, I think you see there are big investigations going on in England into Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and into Peter Mandelson, very prominent politician who was the British ambassador to Washington. There are investigations in Poland, there are investigations in Norway. There's an investigation in France. And yet here we are in America, at least, we do have the House Oversight Committee pulling people in and deposing them on oath. And that is a start. And I think that, look, there are people. Katherine Ruemmeler, you know, the general counsel for Goldman Sachs, had to step down. Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, had to. I mean, he hasn't left the law firm, but he had to step down. I think it is worth remembering that a lot of the powerful people in America who Epstein was wheeling and dealing with weren't in public office. And so that is right there a difference between England. I mean, the reason Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Peter Mandelson are being investigated is because they allegedly broke the law. I mean, they were both in public office. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was British trade envoy when he handed over Jeffrey Epstein financial information that he that was government sensitive, likewise Peter Manelson. So they were breaking sort of Official Secrets act, as it were. I mean, that's what they're being investigated for. And I believe in Norway as well. You're talking about politicians and diplomats who again, betrayed their public office and in. In Poland and France. So. So we don't have an instance in the Epstein files that I've yet seen where someone who was in government handed Jeffrey Epstein illegal information. Instead, you have this, the shadow elite soft power. It is corruption, but it's not. It's soft power rather than hard power.

Al Letson (31:52)

What are your thoughts around the speculation surrounding Epstein's death?

Vicki Ward (31:57)

Well, I mean, I'm very much looking forward to when one of the prison guards comes to testify before Congress, I've got to say, because I think there are a lot of questions she needs to answer. I think we do learn from the Epstein files that he was, to your point, at the center of this hidden elite, this global hidden elite. He was like the conductor, the unofficial conductor of that orchestra. And even if he had got out of jail, if he hadn't faced a trial or, you know, that he had somehow wriggled his way out of that, I don't think he would have been able to resume his place in the middle of that elite in the way that he'd had it before. And I kind of think that that was what he lived for. That was his identity.

Al Letson (32:51)

Vicky Ward, thank you so much for coming to talk to me today.

Vicki Ward (32:54)

Thank you so much for having me, Al.

Al Letson (32:57)

That was author and journalist Vicki Ward. After we chatted, we reached out to Graydon Carter for his version of events, and he referred us to his answers from a 2022 article for the New Yorker. In it, Carter said that Ward included the Farmer's allegations too late in the editing process and didn't have credible evidence of those allegations that would stand up in court. In a later 2019 interview for the New York Times Magazine, Carter denied he spoke to Epstein about Vicky Ward's reporting on the Farmer sisters. We'll put links to both of these articles in our show notes. We also reached out to Maria and Annie Farmer for their own reaction to Vicky Ward's reporting. They sent us a statement through their lawyer blaming Ward herself for cutting their story from the 2003 Vanity Fair article, which they argued sanitized, shielded, and even enhanced Epstein's reputation. Articles like Ward's they continued allowed Epstein and Maxwell to continue targeting other young women and girls who with the same abuse for decades afterward. We wanted to get Vicki's reaction to this statement. Vicki said that she, quote, understands their frustrations and disappointment and she stands by her apology to them. In her podcast Chasing Ghislaine, Vicky said she did additional reporting on what happened inside vanity fair in 2015 with Maria and Annie's permission. Vicky ended her reply by saying, I also understand that the internal politics inside inside Vanity Fair are small fried compared with what Maria and Annie have suffered. I wish them nothing but the best. You can read these statements in full in our show notes. If you like this interview, I think you should check out our reveal episode about the wealthy hiding their assets right here in America. It's called Inside America's Race to Hide the World's Money. We'll also put a link to that in our show notes. This episode was produced by members of the Justice Society, Josh sandburn and Carl McGurk. Allison help this week came from Ashley Kleek, Artist Cheriscus fact checked the story. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. James west edited the show theme music and engineering helped by Fernando my man Yo Arruda and Jay Breezy. Mr. Jim Briggs, I'm Al Lets and you know, let's do this again next week. This is more to the story.

Vicki Ward (35:41)

From prx.