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Vicky Ward’s new Jeffrey Epstein podcast, “Chasing Ghislaine,” and her upcoming Discovery+ documentary is retraumatizing some of his victims, they claim.
Maria Farmer — who provided the first criminal complaint about Epstein, with her sister, Annie — is so fed up with Ward allegedly “profiting” from their stories that she says she sent her a cease-and-desist letter.
“I am horrified. Just leave us alone! Can’t she make money off of other victims? She’s a ‘presstitute’ and vulture… She won’t stop torturing us, and it is hurting so badly. Whenever we hear the name ‘Vicky Ward,’ we cringe,” Farmer told Page Six ahead of Ward’s podcast premiere.
Ward told us it’s “categorically untrue” there’s a cease-and-desist, and insisted that her new Epstein projects are “not focused on the sexual allegations.”
“It’s focused on men and male power … The invisible men, who we’re slowly learning more and more about, two years after Epstein’s death,” she said.
“There was a circle of men… [and] Ghislaine [Maxwell] is the gateway to that word. Without them it wouldn’t have been possible for [Epstein] to perpetuate any of his crimes, sexual, financial … It is not rehashing stories of survivors at all,” Ward said.
Farmer’s disdain for Ward stems from a 2003 Vanity Fair profile on Epstein, in which Farmer and her sister, Annie, opened up to the British journalist about how they were “locked in rooms, kidnapped and raped” by the billionaire pedophile, only to not have their story run.
“[Vicky] courted me… begging for this story, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to die.’ She promised me and my family safety,” Farmer told us. “I told her everything in great detail about what happened. She knew it all. I didn’t tell anyone in that great of detail again for [years].”
Ward paints a different picture in her podcast but told us she understands Farmer’s anger. She maintains that “the magazine let her down,” and has blamed former VF editor Graydon Carter for believing Epstein over her sources.
Carter has called her account of the situation “inaccurate.” He previously told The New York Times: “If we had three people on the record willing to stand up for us in court if Epstein had chosen to sue, we would have run it. Period. End of story.”
Farmer, on the other hand, alleges it was Ward’s chummy relationship with Epstein enabler Maxwell that kept her story from being published and claims it put her life in danger. A subsequent blog post Ward penned in 2011 on Maxwell and Epstein — in which she admitted to hearing stories about Maxwell procuring young girls for him, but “not knowing quite whom to believe” — made Farmer question putting her faith in Ward.
The post has long been removed, and Ward blamed VF’s edit.
Ward told us: “There is no universe in which Jeffrey Epstein and I, or Ghislaine Maxwell and I, had a cozy relationship.”
Ward said she takes a moment in the podcast to “really apologize” to Farmer. “She was done a great disserve. [Epstein] ruined her life. I’m hugely sorry for my role in that. She obviously sees me as the enemy, which is very upsetting,” she said.
Still, Farmer, who is battling cancer, told us of Ward: “I feel revictimized every time I see her, or hear her little British accent. I tried to re-watch ‘Downton Abbey.’ I can’t. It makes me cringe because I think of Vicky! It feels like it’s not going to end,” she said.
Ward’s podcast will get the small screen treatment from Discovery+ later this year ahead of Maxwell’s trial.
Maxwell, 59, is charged with recruiting teen girls for Epstein to sexually abuse between 1994 and 2004. She has pleaded not guilty in the case and is being held in federal custody in NYC ahead of a November trial. She appealed five times to be released from jail pending trial — but has been rejected each time.
Convicted pedophile Epstein infamously died in an apparent suicide in 2019, while being held without bail pending trial on child sex-trafficking charges.
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