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.”)
NPR’s David Folkenflik describes other attempts to kill the stories of Epstein’s accusers; while these efforts may not share the same intensity and mob-like intimidation, they depict the more traditional, and often successful, routes of the wealthy to suppress bad press. In 2015, ABC reporters Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with Virginia Giuffre, in which she discussed being sexually trafficked as a minor. The interview never aired.