The press that looked away

In 2002 and 2003 Vicky Ward reported a Vanity Fair profile of Epstein. Maria and Annie Farmer told NPR in 2019 that they had both spoken to her on the record, by name, about abuse by Epstein and Maxwell. The piece that ran in March 2003 was a tough look at his money and lifestyle, but without their accounts. [1][2]

Editor Graydon Carter has said Ward did not have enough sources that met the magazine’s legal threshold. Ward says Epstein pressured Carter and that the material was cut. A contributing editor, John Connolly, told NPR that Epstein harangued Carter, that Carter later found a bullet outside his door and the severed head of a cat in his yard, and that Connolly then stopped pursuing the story himself. Those last details rest on Connolly’s account and office lore; no one has tied them to Epstein directly. [1][2][3]

In 2015 ABC’s Amy Robach and producer Jim Hill interviewed Giuffre, the network flying her family in and putting them up in a hotel. The interview did not air. One ABC staffer told NPR the network received a call from Alan Dershowitz, who confirmed to NPR that he had called producers and a lawyer: “I did not want to see her credibility enhanced by ABC.” [1]

In November 2019 a leaked hot-mic video showed Robach saying she had the story three years earlier and that the Palace had “threatened us a million different ways.” ABC said the reporting had not met its standards for airing. Robach said afterwards that she had been upset and was speaking in a private moment. [2][3]

Landon Thomas Jr. of the New York Times had known Epstein since 2002. In 2018 he told his editors he had solicited a $30,000 contribution from Epstein for a Harlem cultural cause; NPR found the 2017 gift to a Montessori preschool. The paper said the request violated its ethics rules, and by early January 2019 Thomas was gone. His 2008 profile had largely presented Epstein as a man who solicited prostitutes. A 2017 email in the estate files has Thomas asking Epstein whether his “Saudi friends” had survived the purge. [1][3]

The author Michael Wolff appears in estate emails from December 2015 advising Epstein on how to handle questions about Trump, including the line that he should “let him hang himself.” In 2010 Epstein’s townhouse hosted a dinner for Prince Andrew attended by George Stephanopoulos, Katie Couric and Charlie Rose. [1][2]

The case for a cover-up says these are not lapses but how power protects itself. The case against says it was the press, from Palm Beach to Miami to New York, that eventually forced the story into the open; see “Perversion of Justice”. The record supports both. [1]