Epstein's Birthday Book Triggers Difficult Memories

I Went Back To The Time I Gave Birth To My Sons Much Too Soon

I spent Tuesday reading and re-reading Epstein’s birthday book.

Yes, as others have pointed out the whole package is misogynistic and lewd, and it beggars belief that the alleged Trump artwork, is not by Trump.

But it’s the jokes about my 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein by Alan Dershowitz and Leon Black - and I suspect a veiled allusion to it by Mort Zuckerman - that are personally triggering.

They bring back memories I have long tried to suppress, about a truly hideous time in my life, when I worked night and day to get to the bottom of something I could sense was evil, only to get outmaneuvered by Epstein, who was supported, it turns out, by a cabal of guys, who joked about my efforts to expose him and his crimes.

The pages took me back to a wintry morning in early 2003 when I decided to take a cab uptown to the hospital because I hadn’t been able to sleep. I felt a throbbing pain in my lower back, and I felt unwell in general. But I’d felt so unwell in general in this pregnancy, stressed and overwrought for months, mostly because of harassment and threats from Jeffrey Epstein, that this day didn’t feel much different. My babies were not due for another two and a half months.

But by the time I got to the hospital, I was screaming.

Next thing I knew, I was in a ward, surrounded by an army of doctors and nurses who were shouting at each other. “Do this,” “Do that,” “Someone hold her still. She’s got to get an epidural…”

“Can’t you give me an injection to stop the labor?” I asked someone… “It’s too late,” I was told. “You are fully dilated and I see a head.”

My husband arrived just as someone told me, “We are cutting you now.” He grabbed my hand. I’ve never felt so relieved and afraid at the same time. This couldn’t be happening, I kept thinking. But it was.

I glimpsed Baby A, who looked like a little martian, and then Baby B, who I already knew was way, way too small. Then they were gone. I had no idea where. Seconds later, I threw up and passed out.

When I woke up, I was hooked up to drips, in a small dark room off of the labor ward and I looked straight into the anxious face of my doctor, Robert Sassoon, who had lived too far away to get there in time for the birth.

“Oh My God,” I said to him. “What a fuck up.”

In that moment, I realized two dismal things simultaneously:

1. I had just given birth in a dramatic and completely horrifying manner at just 30 weeks, to two tiny babies, weighing 2lbs and 3lbs respectively, who now faced an uphill battle to survive. I did not know if they would make it, and, if they did, in what shape.

2. Jeffrey Epstein had won. He had told me he’d curse my unborn children - and, it now seemed, he had done so successfully. What else might he now do to harm them further?

You are not supposed to feel terrible despair when you give birth. But that’s what I felt.

I have always been a Type A person. I have always given 100 per cent to everything I’ve ever done. I had worked like a maniac in the past months to try to expose Jeffrey Epstein for the con-artist I sensed he was, and I’d tried to get the stories of sexual abuse I’d gotten from Maria and Annie Farmer on the record into the magazine. I had failed at the last part, because Epstein had gone around me to my boss, Graydon Carter, while I was at home on bedrest and had convinced him to take them out.

All these years later, the story of what happened is well-known. It’s been told many times by me and by others.

Back then, it wasn’t.

It was just me and my thoughts raging in a little hospital room, tears cascading down my face, as I wished the universe would swallow me up.

I’d failed at the very first step of motherhood. I’d failed my children, and I’d failed my husband. My babies would not start out life with an advantage. They were starting out severely handicapped. And it was all because of my pursuit of Epstein and the truth.

What had I been thinking?

Back in late October when Epstein and I were going at it on the phone almost daily my husband had sent me an article about the correlation of stress in pregnancy and autism and other issues. Dr Sassoon had said to me repeatedly, “I need you to stop working on this piece.”

But, I thought, I wasn’t going to be beaten by Epstein.

Except, ultimately, I was.

And for what? And, at what cost?

As I lay there in the hospital room, I knew the article I’d written was still likely to piss off Epstein when it appeared on newsstands in the next day or two, even without the Farmer sisters in it.

I knew I’d got to get to the people in charge of the hospital NICU and tell them that I had good reason to think that someone dangerously well-connected could come for my babies. That someone had reason to harm them…

My husband entered the room and we talked it over. In that period of our life, we made an excellent team.

We agreed that we were going to fight for our kids. We were going to try to excise Jeffrey Epstein from our lives. We were going to look forward and not back. We were going to make up for what had happened every day of our lives.

So…..those are the deeply painful memories I have tried to keep buried for over two decades, because they don’t help me or my children, who are now 22, or my now ex-husband, who is still my best friend, in any productive way.

But it’s in this context that I viewed Epstein’s 50th Birthday Book. And the memories flooded back.

The date of the book matters because it was given to Epstein on January 20th, 2003 (his birthday), which was just days after the on-record allegations from the Farmer sisters were pulled from the final galley of my Vanity Fair story, which circulated among the staff in January 2003. I was still answering fact-checking questions via email on January 15th. The magazine was due to hit newsstands on February 10th. I went into labor and had an emergency C-Section on February 8th.

What the newly-released pages in the Birthday book showed me clearly for the first time, is that while I was battling to have the Farmers allegations in the piece, while fearful of Epstein and his threats, Epstein and his friends were yukking it up, celebrating his birthday and teasing him in writing about the upcoming magazine profile that he had proudly worked overtime to manipulate. I wonder if they realize how far he went to manipulate it.

A reminder of the timeline of events in my life in 2002/2003:

August: I am expecting twins due in early April; it’s a high-risk pregnancy. I need to take it easy.

Late September: The New York Post reports that Bill Clinton has been flown to Africa on the plane of Jeffrey Epstein. It’s very unusual for Epstein to be mentioned in print.

The editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, assigns me a “piece that should be easy,” Find out how the mysterious Jeffrey Epstein made his money.

I reach out to Epstein’s office and he calls me back. He tries to dissuade me from doing the piece; I tell him I will be writing it regardless. He tells me that this will be like playing a game of chess. “You be white. You get the first move.”

October: A series of weird things happen.

I receive an unsolicited call from James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Sterns. It’s an invitation to visit Cayne that very afternoon. He waxes lyrical about Epstein for hours.

Epstein says he won’t be granting me an on-record interview, but he gives me a list of people he wants me to call.

They include David Mitchell, Marshall Rose, Joe Pagano, Henry Rosofsky, Alan Dershowitz, Martin Novak; Murray Gellman; and Rosa Monckton.

A puff piece about Epstein quoting Donald Trump suddenly appears in New York Magazine. I interpret this as Epstein’s effort to quash mine. It doesn’t work.

He starts phoning me daily to ask me: “What are you hearing? Who have you spoken to? What’s the direction of this piece?”

I phone David Mitchell, who is a businessman, and in our conversation, I mention to Mitchell that Epstein has told me he’s in Tokyo.

Epstein goes berserk. He sends a note to Graydon Carter complaining about me.

When I speak to Epstein on the phone he tells me I “seriously violated” our “arrangement” by mentioning his location, because Mitchell will somehow take advantage of this in the markets. “You have to be very, very careful on financial things,” he tells me, “because people then trade on that information. And you get in serious trouble. Financial markets aren't your deal ... but you have privileged information that you really don't know how sensitive it is.”

I am deeply puzzled by this. It makes no sense. But, I start to learn that many of the things Epstein tells me are garbage and make no sense. I start to get the feeling he’s enjoying himself, at my expense.

I run into Ghislaine Maxwell at a friend’s baby shower, and I mention I am doing a story on her friend Epstein about his money. She starts to cry. I think this is very weird. What, I wonder, is buried in Epstein’s finances that she doesn’t want me to know about?

A girlfriend of mine tells me that she’s heard that dark things go on with women at Epstein’s house and I should speak to an artist called Maria Farmer. I phone Maria Farmer and she comes to see me at my home in Greenwich Village.

We sit in my living room and talk for hours. The stories she tells me are bloodcurdling. She says to me, “You look very shocked.” I am. Not just about Epstein, but about Maxwell.

Another friend of mine, the late journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation of Jeffrey’s) tells me he’s known Jeffrey since the 1980s through his friend the British corporate raider Jimmy Goldsmith. Goldsmith believed Jeffrey had swindled his daughter. Ed Epstein tells me he believes Jeffrey is a crook and he’d once looked into his computer and had some proof of it. He tells me there is a guy whose name he cannot remember, who is in jail, convicted of a massive ponzi scheme - and this guy was Jeffrey’s secret benefactor. He paid his office rent in the 1980s.

I cast through a pile of financial records looking for any traces of Epstein. There don’t seem to be any. There’s no footprint of him in the markets.

Meanwhile, all the people Epstein tells me to speak to tell me how talented, brilliant, and erudite Epstein is.

I keep trying to get hold of Annie Farmer, Maria’s sister who is a student at Penn. This proves to be tricky because …she’s a student at Penn.

I finally wind up meeting Epstein for tea at his home on the understanding that I can’t write about the meeting or our conversation directly. I find him cold and rude. I find his house creepy. There’s a life-size stuffed dark poodle on his piano.

When I get home, there’s a knock on my door, and a messenger delivers a book, “Math for Dummies,” for me. Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff phones me and tells me that Jeffrey thought I was so pretty.

Ugh.

November: Ed Epstein remembers the name of the guy who is in jail. It’s Steve Hoffenberg. I get in touch with Hoffenberg and I make arrangements to go visit him in prison outside of Boston. When I get there he tells me Jeffrey runs a ponzi scheme and rips off his wealthy patrons, knowing they will never go to the authorities.

I start looking for financial and legal records on Hoffenberg and Towers Financial and this provides all sorts of new leads.

I finally get hold of Annie Farmer, who tells me a shocking story about Ghislaine Maxwell giving her a topless massage and Jeffrey crawling into bed with her.

I reach out to the Farmers’ mother and to other people Maria says she talked to at the time about what happened. They corroborate their stories.

Epstein, meanwhile, meets privately with Graydon, who wants him to agree to pose for photographs for the magazine. Epstein senses, correctly, that this is his leverage, so he holds off agreeing to do this. Graydon later tells me Epstein has sent him a watch. I don’t know what to make of this. But I trust Graydon. I keep going.

I take an editorial assistant, Fred Turner, with me to Philadelphia to go through boxes in a legal warehouse. I need help because I am too pregnant to bend over and we are not allowed to write anything down inside the room, so I want Fred to help me remember whatever details we find.

We find a deposition by Epstein and others that are helpful and shed light on the fact he was asked to leave Bear Sterns in 1981 because of a violation. This is something he’d denied. “You remember five things, and I’ll remember five,” I tell Fred. We write them down as soon as we are outside. We are euphoric.

Epstein calls me every day. He senses that I must be going off-script and doing my own research, because I am not asking him for more people to call. So, he begins his threats: “If I don’t like this piece, I will have a witch-doctor place a curse on your unborn children. That’s off the record,” he says.

He also tells me he’ll have my husband fired; and that my kids will never get into a good school; he’ll sue me personally; and he tells me what will happen to my vaginal canal when I give birth - and he already knows all the doctors in all the New York hospitals. Each time he says things like this, he adds that it’s off the record.

What do I do with this? Robert Walsh, VF’s legal affairs editor, tells me I must record Epstein.

We all wonder, who the heck is he? Is he part of the mob? Leslie Wexner, his billionaire main client, is in retail. He owns Victoria’s Secret.

And then my husband’s uncle and boss, the Canadian newspaper owner, Conrad Black weighs in, at Epstein’s behest. He phones me and says he wants to know what I’m writing. I can’t tell him, I say, very annoyed to be put in this position. Conrad not only knows Epstein and Maxwell, he knows Epstein’s benefactor Leslie Wexner well.
”Do you want to be responsible for losing one of Conde Nast’s biggest advertisers?” he asks me.

For Fuck’s Sake, I think. My husband is supportive, but I know that this puts him, unfairly, in a bind.

Ed Epstein’s memory has been spurred and he helps me find other one-time business partners of Epstein. One of them tells me the only safe place to meet is in the back of his limo. I don’t know what to make of this, but I go, and I learn stuff that supports Ed’s thesis that Jeffrey is a con artist.

I write the piece and hand it in, knowing that the legal and fact-checking team will help me craft the questions about the allegations in it to Epstein.

December: The Vanity Fair editors are working with me on the draft.

It’s time to put the allegations - financial and sexual to Epstein.

I deliberately go through the financial stuff first, and I record his answers at the instruction of Robert Walsh. Epstein pretends to find it ‘boring, boring”.

When I bring up Hoffenberg, he pretends to barely know him. And he reminds me that anything Hoffenberg says is worthless, because he’s a convicted felon. Of course, I know that, which is why I needed to get ahold of the depositions.

I leave the Farmers’ allegations until last. And, he goes off the deep end, and faxes me pages of material that he says completely refute what they say.

Maxwell calls me about Annie’s allegations, which have been faxed to her by someone at VF, and the transcript of our very unpleasant conversation is HERE.

BUT I am winning - or I think I am…the piece is going through. I double down on backing up the allegations.

But, a fact-checker, Mary Flynn sends me an email on December 4th that reads: “Bless you -- guess who just appeared in Graydon's office? Jeffrey Epstein”

What?

It’s explained to me that Epstein bypassed security. This does not make sense. Conde Nast is in the middle of Times Square. No one bypasses security.

Still, I think, no need to panic. Graydon’s got my back.

Except, it emerges, he doesn’t. “He’s sensitive about the girls” Graydon tells me after their meeting… He also tells me that he believes Epstein.

I expect, therefore, that the stuff about the Farmers will be “watered down.” I expect their stories will be trimmed. I do not expect, however, that they will be cut from the piece entirely.

On December 11th Epstein faxes me a note accusing me of all sorts of malpractice and again threatening to sue me. I forward it to Robert Walsh and he helps me draft a response.

January: The final galley of the piece is circulated with no mention of the Farmers in it at all.

“It’s better as a business piece,” the line editor, Doug Stumpf, tells me.

I cry and cry. I phone Maria Farmer, who says kindly: “Maybe it’s for the best.”

But it isn’t. It isn’t at all.

We all know that.

So, you can imagine, perhaps, what I feel when I read all the male jubilation and jocularity expressed in the pages of Epstein’s birthday book about the “Vanity Unfair” article that I sacrificed so much for - in vain.

It’s an understatement to say: not much.