It was Epstein, not Clinton, who came to VF

Here's the proof...

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From: Mary_Flynn@condenast.com <Mary_Flynn@condenast.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 4, 2002 3:37 PM
To: vickyward@att.net <vickyward@att.net>
Subject: RE:

Bless you -- guess who just appeared in Graydon's office?  Jeffrey Epstein.

This is the email I received from Mary Flynn, the fact-checker, working on my 2003 profile of Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair. The piece appears in the March issue, which typically appeared on news stands in early February. Meaning that it had to be at the printers by early January.

You can see this email is dated December 4 2002. By now, I had wrapped my reporting and I was home on bed-rest, due to a high-risk pregnancy with my twins. My contentious interactions with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had not exactly lowered the stress and my doctors were concerned, with good reason as it turned out, because my sons were born in early February at 30 weeks weighing 2 and 3 lbs apiece.

But you can imagine my surprise on receiving this email from Mary. What the heck was Epstein, who, the staff knew had been threatening me and my unborn kids - doing in the office of Graydon Carter, VF’s then editor in chief? At a time when we were closing the issue?

I phoned Doug Stumpf, the editor directly in charge of my piece, and others in the office. I was told that Epstein had arrived unannounced to see Graydon. This seemed pretty unlikely because VF shared an elevator bank with the law firm Skadden Arps, and security was tight.

Still, I hoped for the best, because many people at the magazine knew what a nightmare it had been for me dealing with Epstein and his threats. So, I naively thought the team would go to the mattresses for me.

But, as has been well-documented, what happened next - in terms of the piece - was that in the next few weeks mention of the two Farmer sisters who had been on the record alleging sexual abuse at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell was removed.

Stumpf told me the piece was better as a pure “business piece”, upon which I burst into tears. Carter said nothing at all. No one said anything about not meeting legal standards - which is what Carter has said since. He has also said, basically, that I am a terrible journalist.

Yet he continued to employ me for a further 10 years, contracting me to write more in-depth articles per year than most of the other contributors.

The story about Epstein showing up, turned into office mythology, along with other odd things that were speculated to be Epstein-associated such as a bullet appearing on Carter’s stoop (he phoned me about that one) and a decapitated animal in his back yard. (The late NYPD cop and VF reporter John Connolly told me about that one).

I have to wonder if all this is the root of what led Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre to write in a newly public email to British journalist Sharon Churcher: “B. Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend J.E."

When stories like the one about Epstein showing up in the office get passed along from the water cooler, they often get distorted. Epstein WAS friends with Bill Clinton until Clinton, as he has said publicly, broke it off. (Clinton has said he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes). And someone did stride into the office of Vanity Fair, determined to stop any allegations of Epstein’s sex crimes being published.

But, as you can see from the above email: That someone was Epstein. So, headlines about Clinton suggesting impropriety should stop, in my view, because they are misleading and wrong.

There was some very poor, ill-judged behavior. It just had nothing to do with an American president.