Vicki Ward

They were on the record.

I didn't find any other

girls, women at the time, they were the only two.

And I didn't back then have a sense of the scale of this operation that we now know to be horrendously enormous.

But I did have them.

And yet, Epstein's threats...

to my boss, compounded by the fact he visited the Vanity Fair offices at the time behind my back, were enough to get the pharmacist's cut from the article.

Which was a truly terrible, terrible, terrible thing to happen.

Because what it meant was that I had inadvertently exposed them to Geoffrey and Ghislaine.

I think Ghislaine then went on to make Maria Farmer's life...

horrendous, terrified, threatened her.

And we hadn't provided the protection that printing their allegations would have given them.

It also meant that it wasn't until well over a year later that the FBI phoned me because somebody must have told them that I'd, you know, spoken to the farmers and

And as we know, the FBI investigation took a long time, but ultimately, in 2008, it did wind up with the ridiculously cushy plea deal and the non-prosecution agreement that Jeffrey Epstein struck in Florida.

But meanwhile, hundreds of other girls, children...

went on to be abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

So what happened back in 2000, that was the fall of 2002 when I was reporting this piece, unfortunately is a really tragic, tragic mistake.

Well, mixed, to be honest.

I'm not an Epstein victim, but he did make my life hell.

And, you know, in the first few years, to be honest, I was glad...