Considering the macabre details of Jeffrey Epstein’s home life and his totallack of remorse over his predation, it shouldn’t be surprising that his efforts to intimidate journalists investigating his dealings went beyond the usual playbook of harassment and bury-’em-in-paper lawsuits. According to a report by NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Epstein gruesomely threatened Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter into pulling journalist Vicky Ward off the trail of Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors after she wrote a profile on him in 2003.
Last month, Ward accused Carter of removing on-the-record allegations of abuse from sisters Maria and Annie Farmer — who claim Epstein sexually assaulted them when Annie was 15 years old — after the financier pressured the editor in person. “It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s,” she wrote in the Daily Beast in 2015, adding that “at the time Graydon believed Epstein.” Carter also stated this week that the reason the allegations of sexual abuse were cut was because Ward did not have three sources to verify the claims, and that the reporting did not meet the magazine’s “legal threshold.” In a statement to NPR, Carter said that Vanity Fair didn’t pull the reporting because of any sense of threat.
But according to “All Things Considered,” shortly after the publication of the Epstein profile in March 2003, Carter called contributing editor John Connolly — who published a book about Epstein with James Patterson in 2017 — and told him that a bullet had been placed outside his front door:
Even in the absence of any evidence Epstein was involved, Connolly says, both Carter and he considered the bullet a clear warning from Epstein. Another former colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls receiving an anguished call from Carter linking the bullet to Epstein. (NPR asked Carter repeatedly over the course of a week for his recollections of the bullet incident along with other elements presented here. After this story was broadcast and posted, his spokeswoman wrote to say Carter recalled the bullet appearing in 2004, not 2003.)
In 2006, as federal authorities investigated Epstein for soliciting minors, Connolly went to Florida on a reporting trip to speak with the financier’s female employees. While there, he says Carter called him and told him that in his front yard in Connecticut, there was the severed head of a cat. Other Vanity Fair staffers confirmed that there was contemporaneous office talk around the dead cat. “It was done to intimidate,” Connolly told NPR. “No question about it.” (In a statement to New York, Carter said: “There was no investigation and I have no idea who was responsible, but my wife and I remember attributing them to the work of aggrieved George W. Bush supporters. To suggest that either of these incidents affected my editorial judgment is flatly wrong.”) – READ MORE