Vicky Ward Accuses Graydon Carter of Misogyny in Raging Battle Over Why Epstein Abuse Allegations Were Cut From 2003 Vanity Fair Article

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Veteran journalist Vicky Ward and the famed former editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, have been engaged in a heated back and forth regarding a 2003 article from which sexual abuse allegations against Jeffery Epstein were cut before publication.

The saga between Ward, a former Vanity Fair contributing editor, and her one-time boss at the prestigious Condé Nast publication has gone through multiple rounds of accusations and been aired in various publications across the country, most recently in the New Yorker and The Daily Beast.

After Epstein’s horrendous crimes were made public and the New York socialite and financier faced justice, Ward’s articles for Vanity Fair received renewed scrutiny. Ward initially defended herself, revealing in a 2015 column that her 2003 Epstein profile had been revised to exclude the accusations. Ward wrote, “It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s… and at the time Graydon believed Epstein.” She added, “In my notebook I have him [Carter] saying, “I believe him… I’m Canadian.”

The profile in question was a March 2003 piece titled, “THE TALENTED MR. EPSTEIN.” For the piece, Ward interviewed two sisters for the article, whose accusations against Epstein she claimed were “removed shortly before the piece went to press.”

“We were ready to go,” Ward told Mediaite founder Dan Abrams in July of 2019. But then Epstein visited Carter at Vanity Fair’s offices, she said, “and between them, they cut a deal to take the women’s stories out.”

“It was explained to me that Graydon felt that [Epstein] was ‘sensitive about the women,’” Ward explained.

Carter responded at the time in a statement to Politico that “we didn’t have confidence in Ward’s reporting.”

More from Carter: “We were not in the habit of running away from a fight. But she simply didn’t have the goods.”

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) July 8, 2019

Ward detailed the editing of the article in a Feb. 9th post on her Substack. In the post, Ward claimed she was the “first journalist to talk with two women — sisters Maria and Annie Farmer — who had on-the-record sexual abuse allegations against Epstein.”

Annie Farmer, who testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, told Ward that Epstein and Maxwell sexually abused her during a weekend stay at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch in 1996 – when Farmer was only 16.

Ward’s Substack post is titled, “What the New Yorker Got Wrong” and is a response to what she claims are “malicious inaccuracies” in a Feb. 8th article by Isaac Chotiner.

Chotiner’s piece, titled “Why Didn’t Vanity Fair Break the Jeffrey Epstein Story?,” details the “conflicting accounts” between Ward and Carter as to why the Farmer’s accusations were cut.

Chotiner casts doubt on Ward’s accusations that Carter was alone in cutting the Farmer’s accusations from the article.

“Carter, who now says that he distrusted Ward as a reporter, has offered conflicting explanations for his magazine’s decision not to run the sisters’ allegations,” Chotiner writes. “For her part, Ward has repeatedly misrepresented her reporting on Epstein, changing her story from year to year and at times from day to day, and was a far less heroic actor than she would have her audiences believe.”

Chotiner quotes from a 2011 article by Ward, “Jeffrey and Ghislaine: Notes on New York’s Oddest Alliance,” to illustrate Ward’s problematic timeline. She wrote at the time:

And Ghislaine? Full disclosure: I like her. Most people in New York do. It’s almost impossible not to. She is always the most interesting, the most vivacious, the most unusual person in any room.

I’ve spent hours talking to her about the Third World at a bar until 2 a.m. She is as passionate as she is knowledgeable. She is curious. She has spent weeks at the bottom of the ocean, literally going deeper than anyone else.

Ward reacted to Chotiner’s article on Twitter, vowing to “release the transcripts of what Graydon Carter and Maria and Annie Farmer said to me back then so that you can read it for yourself and judge if what Vanity Fair did was right.”

Later today, I am going to release the transcripts of what Graydon Carter and Maria and Annie Farmer said to me back then so that you can read it for yourself and judge if what Vanity Fair did was right.

— Vicky Ward (@VickyPJWard) February 8, 2022

She published the following exchange, purportedly between her and Carter, on her Substack:

WARD: And, so, what I have, these two girls really in detail on the record about how they got manipulated by him. And I mean, you know, their stories in themselves are kind of, like, gripping.
CARTER: Oh, you want to play hardball?

Carter said he wanted more on Epstein’s money and he thought I need to find another girl to harden up the Farmers’ allegations. I again brought up the Farmers as being a huge part of the story and Carter said something quite extraordinary:

WARD: Well, I think I do. I mean, these two girls, the story of what happened to them. And that alone …
CARTER: Are they both under-age?
WARD: One was in her very early 20s. And one was 16.
CARTER: Okay. The 16 … I mean, what people do in their private lives, I mean, is not that, you know, earth-shattering. I think the money thing is more interesting.

“Think about that: ‘16….what people do in the private lives is not that earth-shattering.’ In hindsight, the poor Farmers didn’t stand a chance against that attitude. Nor did I,” Ward writes of the exchange.

She then goes on to claim “Carter himself behaved inappropriately.”

“He says no one trusted me? How does he think I felt when, just a few months into me working there, he decided to burden me with the details of his private life that involved a former employee, who happened to be a friend of mine?” Ward writes.

She adds that Carter would make negative comments about her personal appearance:

And how did he think I felt during years of being on the receiving end of critical remarks about my clothes (‘mutton dressed as lamb’), my face (‘save the Botox for when you need it’), and my marriage?

“Unfortunately, it seems, that the same misogyny is prevalent at the top of Condé Nast today,” Ward wrote, adding, ‘Bash the woman’ is the message, rather than report the inconvenient facts. The same patriarchy that victimized and tortured these women is once again circling the wagons to protect itself.”

Kate Briquelet, who chronicled the whole saga in The Daily Beast, reached out to Carter for comment on Ward’s accusations.

Carter responded by dismissing Ward entirely: “Sorry, it’s impossible to deal with a serial liar. Nothing Vicky Ward says is true. Nothing.”

The Beast also reached out to the Farmers for comments on Ward. Maria told the Beast that the New Yorker story was “an incomplete analysis of her lies and her coverup for her friends Jeffrey and Ghislaine.”

“No matter what Vicky Ward does, it’s to help Vicky Ward,” Maria told the Beast. “Vicky Ward has never once cared about the children involved in this story, about my baby sister who was 15 when this happened, she doesn’t care about anything but prestige and money.”

“She has milked us to death,” Maria told the Beast. “How dare she try to defend herself right now.”

When it comes to Epstein and the media there is plenty of blame to go around. In this case, both Ward and Carter reportedly offered conflicting accounts of what happened in 2003. But if Ward’s transcripts are correct, and Carter dismissed those serious allegations, he still has questions to answer.