Maria Farmer

In the summer of 1996, Farmer was commissioned to create two artworks for the film set of As Good as It Gets.[17] At the time, Farmer was living in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village.[17] Epstein offered her more space to create the artwork as an artist-in-residence[18] at a (10,600 sq. ft.) guest home on Les Wexner's property in New Albany, Ohio. In May 1996, Farmer traveled to the Wexner property in Ohio in a rental truck with her art materials and supplies.[17] The property was spacious but Farmer was disturbed to learn after arrival that the home was guarded by Wexner's armed security personnel and she was required to phone Wexner's wife, Abigail Wexner, for permission to leave the home or property.[19][17]

Farmer stated, in an affidavit filed in support of a defamation lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre against Alan Dershowitz, that Epstein and Maxwell came to the property in Ohio and sexually assaulted her.[16] She managed to escape into another part of the house and barricaded herself inside by pushing furniture up against the door.[2] She contacted members of her family, her mentor artist Eric Fischl,[20] and reached out to authorities.[2] Security guards on the property told her that she could not leave and she was held against her will for 12 hours.[12][21] Farmer was eventually able to depart the scene when her father arrived, after driving from Kentucky to Ohio, to pick her up.[4]

Later that summer, Farmer learned that her younger sister Annie had also been assaulted by Epstein when Annie had visited him at his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico in April 1996.[22][17] In a lawsuit filed in 2019 against Epstein's estate, Annie Farmer stated that Epstein had groped, harassed, and crawled into bed with her in New Mexico,[22] whereas Maxwell had given her an inappropriate topless massage.[17]

Farmer called the New York City Police Department and the FBI on August 26, 1996 and reported the assault.[2] The authorities did not take action regarding the assault.[23] The NYPD did make a report about the property theft of Farmer's artwork by Maxwell and Epstein.[2]

In 2002, Farmer, her sister, and her mother also shared their stories with journalist Vicky Ward, then at Vanity Fair, who was writing a profile on Epstein.[24] Despite the Farmer sisters and their mother giving voice to the misconduct, their mention was excluded from the final story by then-editor Graydon Carter.[16][25] NPR and the New York Times reported that Carter had been pressured by Epstein at the time of publication to omit mention of the Farmer sisters;[4] Carter's residence and the Vanity Fair office had each received ominous signals (a bullet and a cat's head) at times corresponding to when they might have further investigated Epstein.[24]

The art collector Stuart Pivar confirmed that he learned of Farmer's experience shortly after it occurred.[26] Artist Eric Fischl also corroborated Farmer's account and confirmed being contacted by her.[4] Maxwell threatened Farmer's life repeatedly after the event in an effort to enforce her silence.[18] Following the Vanity Fair profile on Epstein in which editors decided not to publish Farmer's account, she has stated that the threats intensified, leading her to leave the New York art world.[4]

Farmer has stated that she received multiple direct threats from Maxwell and Epstein, who also called her clients and contacts in the art world in an effort to destroy her credibility.[27] She stated: “I was terrified of Maxwell and Epstein and I moved a number of times to try to hide from them.”[27] After enduring persistent threats, Farmer changed her name and moved first to North Carolina.[28] For 24 years, she quietly sold antiques and restored houses in the American Southeast, in an effort to stay under the radar.[8]

The FBI reappeared in 2006 at Farmer's door to question her just before Epstein's arrest for his first criminal prosecution, but little came of the matter.[18] Farmer was contacted once more in 2016, this time by lawyers who were working with Virginia Giuffre.[3] Still in hiding, Farmer recounted her experiences with Epstein and Maxwell to Stanley Pottinger and Bradley Edwards to assist in a better understanding of the defendants' patterns over time.[3]

External video
The first person to report Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to the FBI 5:27 video from 60 Minutes Australia July 2020
Right Hand Woman 27:21 video from 60 Minutes Australia July 2020 (Farmer's interview starts at 4:50)

After being diagnosed with a brain tumor by early 2019, Farmer described her realization and anger over the impact that the abuse (plus the years of hiding after threats to her life) had on her and her family, as the impetus for speaking out publicly.[8] On April 16, 2019, Farmer filed a sworn affidavit in federal court in New York, alleging that she and her 15-year-old sister, Annie, had been sexually assaulted by Epstein and Maxwell in separate locations in 1996.[17]

In an interview with Grazia in September 2019, Farmer expressed that it was the betrayal by women that she found hardest to bear in addition to the disinterest with which the authorities handled her early reports of abusive behavior by Epstein and Maxwell.[29] In November 2019, Farmer was also interviewed by Anthony Mason for CBS This Morning.[30]

ABC News reported that Farmer and her younger sister Annie shared similarities with Chauntae Davies and her younger sister Teala in that Epstein manipulated the trust within both family groups to further his criminal interest in abusing young girls.[31]

In late 2019 and early 2020, five wrestlers, survivors of the Ohio State University abuse scandal, publicly called on state and federal officials to conduct further inquiry into Farmer's allegations of sexual assault at the Wexner property.[19][32] The wrestlers called for greater accountability regarding the Wexner family's involvement in Epstein's abuse and raised their concerns about the continuing influence of Abigail and Leslie Wexner serving as the "biggest and best-known benefactors" of the university.[19][32]

Farmer appeared in a four-part Netflix series, released in May 2020, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, directed by Lisa Bryant and based on the earlier book of the same name by James Patterson.[33]

In January 2020, Farmer was reportedly working on a series of paintings and pastel drawings called “The Survivors Project” consisting of individual portraits of known survivors of Epstein's abuse.[2][8] She claims the harm experienced by countless other victims of Epstein could have been prevented had authorities acted when she first reported the abuse.[2]

Farmer created a seven foot long artwork on canvas about the Epstein abuse network which depicted individuals involved in the scandal in a style akin to Hieronymus Bosch.[8]