Jeffrey Epstein showed up in Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter’s office in 2002 during a furious bid to suppress the truth about his sick sexual practices — which the magazine did not publish.
The pedophile went straight to Carter after reporter Vicky Ward had spoken to two of his victims, Annie and Maria Farmer, who had blown the whistle on his sordid practices.
Maria Farmer was a New York Academy of Art grad student, 25, when Epstein took her on as an art scout.
She told Ward how in 1996, Epstein sexually assaulted her at billionaire Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner’s Ohio home — and Ghislaine Maxwell held her hand.
Her sister Annie told Ward that Maxwell sexually assaulted her by groping her breasts when she was just 16 and trained her to give Epstein foot massages.
Epstein’s encounter with Carter came in the run-up to Vanity Fair publishing its profile of him in March 2003 — without any references to the Farmers’ revelations —under the headline: “The Talented Mr. Epstein.”
Epstein’s pressure campaign came into focus Friday after the release of thousands of pages of previously redacted court documents showed that the pedophile’s most high-profile victim, Victoria Guiffre, had claimed it was former president Bill Clinton who had tried to censor Vanity Fair.
An email in that trove showed that she wrote, “When i was doing some research into VF yesterday, it does concern me what they could want to write about me considering that B. Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex trafficing articles about his good friend J.E.”
Ward told The Post that she believed Giuffre had been mistaken. Carter also said that Clinton had not appeared in his office. “This categorically didn’t happen,” a spokesperson for the former Vanity Fair chief told The Post.
“I never heard about Bill Clinton coming into the office,” Ward, who now writes Vicky Ward Investigates, said. “I think that Jeffrey Epstein got conflated by the time it reached Virginia.
“Jeffrey Epstein, while the piece was going through fact-checking, appeared in the office. A fact-checker named Mary Flynn emailed me and said that Jeffrey Epstein was standing in Graydon’s office.”
The email reads, “Bless you – guess who just appeared in Graydon’s office? Jeffrey Epstein.”
The move came after Epstein’s all-out attempt to keep the truth from coming out in Vanity Fair.
“He and I had gotten very contentious,” Ward said. “I had put the allegations of Annie and Maria Farmer to him and Maxwell. They went nuclear.”
“He said he would get a witch doctor to put a curse on my unborn children if he did not like the story.”
When Ward heard Epstein was in the office, she was on bed rest while pregnant.
“I phoned my editor immediately and said, ‘What the hell is Jeffrey Epstein doing there?'” she told The Post. “The idea that he was standing in Graydon’s office was appalling.”
Carter, in 2019, told the New York Times that Epstein had turned up in the Vanity Fair offices, but not his own office.
“As we were closing the story, I’d asked him to pose for photographs, and he showed up at the office one day and he was sitting in our lobby,” Carter, who edited Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017 said. “I don’t know how he got there.”
His spokesperson told The Post Friday, “There’s nothing new to comment on.”
Ward and Carter have feuded over why the Farmers’ revelations were removed from the story.
Carter told The New Yorker in 2022 that multiple executives, including Vanity Fair’s legal advisor, did not feel that Ward’s reporting would stand up in court and removed the Farmers’ account as a result. He also said that Ward’s reporting was widely distrusted inside the magazine.
Ward told The Post, “Graydon said I did not have enough sources. But I had them on the record. So, what else did he need?
“Graydon said I’m a s***ty journalist and my sources were terrible. He employed me for 10 more years. So I couldn’t have been that terrible.”
Vanity Fair also abandoned reporting on Epstein in 2007, the year he was first federally investigated for preying on underage girls, the writer John Connolly told The Post in 2020, before his death in 2022.
Carter’s family found a severed cat’s head on the porch of their country home in Connecticut, Connolly claimed in 2020. “No question, it was left by Epstein or somebody on his behalf,” he said.
That Monday, “I came to the office and Graydon was still upset,” remembered Connolly, who had been an NYPD detective. “He asked if we should still do the story. I said no….it just wasn’t worth it. Epstein surrounded himself with people who can be scary if you’re not a tough guy.”
Carter however said that he and his wife believed the cat’s head was left by “aggrieved George W. Bush supporters,” and said: “To suggest that it affected my editorial judgment is . . . wrong.”