Radar Online
British socialite turned convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell reportedly helped kill a damning Vanity Fair exposé of her sex crimes, according to a newly revealed interview transcript from 2002.
According to the newly released transcript, the 60-year-old former lover and confidante of late billionaire and fellow sex offender Jeffrey Epstein pressured a Vanity Fair reporter to kill a scheduled magazine exposé revealing her then-alleged sex crimes nearly 20 years ago.
Besides persuading the reporter to kill the exposé, Maxwell also reportedly claimed that Epstein was “very, very good” to his accusers, according to the newly released transcript of the 2002 interview.
Now, days after Maxwell was found guilty of five out of six charges of grooming and trafficking underage girls for her “partner in crime” Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan federal court, Vanity Fair reporter Vicky Ward is speaking out regarding both the planned exposé and her subsequent interview with Maxwell from 2002.
“We never got to hear from Maxwell herself this whole trial. Her defense’s strategy was to undermine the credibility of the accusers, not to explain her narrative,” Ward says before sharing the 2002 interview transcript with Maxwell on her Substack, an online publishing platform for journalists.
“So I went back and looked over the transcript of my 2002 interview with Maxwell about Maria and Annie Farmer, the latter who so bravely testified a couple of weeks ago. It was the one and only conversation I had with her on the topic of Annie and Maria Farmer,” Ward writes, regarding two of Maxwell’s victims who testified during the four-week trial.
What follows in the transcript with Maxwell is nothing less than saddening, especially following what was revealed regarding Maxwell, Epstein, and Maria and Annie Farmer during the recent trial.
In fact, Ward herself says it was her “eternal regret” that Vanity Fair did not run the 2002 accusations by the Farmer sisters, whose testimony was crucial to Maxwell’s guilty conviction on Thursday.
“These are two girls that benefited greatly from Jeffrey’s generosity, and absolutely nothing untoward in any stretch of the imagination ever took place with them,” Maxwell told Ward during the interview.
“You’re going to believe her over me? Is that what you’re saying to me?” Maxwell later asks Ward, according to the transcript as she tries her best to discredit not only the victims but the exposé itself.
While the transcript of the interview goes on, perhaps the biggest bombshell Ward recently revealed was how both the exposé, and her interview with Maxwell, were ultimately cut from the magazine following a meeting between Epstein and her Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
“But Vanity Fair had other plans,” Ward writes. “Carter had said I didn’t have sufficient reporting. I disagree.”
Now, nearly 20 years after Maxwell allegedly killed a story shining a bright light onto her sex crimes, she has been found guilty by a jury of her peers for the very things she claimed never even occurred.