By Son of Bangkok
Yesterday, the New York Post reported that financier Leon Black, who was last year named chairman at the Museum of Modern Art, retained Epstein as the sole non-family director of his family charity for more than a decade.
Tax records indicate that Epstein stayed with the Black Family Foundation through the end of 2012, four years after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to two charges of soliciting prostitution — one involving a minor — which resulted in a sweetheart deal of only 18-months with 13 months served.
An unnamed source told the newspaper that Epstein’s personal relationship with Black has continued through the years. In 2015, the disgraced billionaire was spotted at a lavish pool party thrown at Black’s Hamptons estate. Black — who amassed his $7 billion fortune after co-founding the buyout firm Apollo Global Management — has not yet responded to press inquiries for comment.
Federal prosecutors intercepted Epstein on Saturday at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey after investigators discovered a cache of lewd photographs of girls kept within a safe stored at the billionaire’s 45,000-square-foot mansion located on Museum Mile.
Hours after his arrest, several other women contacted the bureau with complaints against the former convict.
One of the latest accusations comes from Maria Farmer, who filed an affidavit in April claiming that Epstein leveraged her dreams of becoming an artist against her when she was a 25-year-old student at the New York Academy of Art. The billionaire allegedly assaulted her and her younger sister, who was only 15 years old at the time.
“Epstein said that if I sold him one of my paintings for half price he would help me with my career,” Farmer wrote about their encounter at her art opening in 1995, according to the affidavit. She agreed and sold him an artwork for $6,000.
A year later, Farmer was recruited to help Epstein “with acquiring art.” The job included both buying art and monitoring who came into his home. During this time, she claims to have seen numerous young girls come through the house, some still in uniforms. She also claims that attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was there and would sometimes go upstairs where the girls were led.
The account appears within Virginia Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz, who has been accused of participating in Epstein’s trafficking operation. (Dershowitz has also served as Epstein’s lawyer over the years.) Giuffre claims that when she was a 16-year-old locker-room attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to work as a masseuse for Epstein.
Her lawsuit claims that Epstein later “lent” her out for sex to his friends, including Dershowitz.
The summer after Farmer began working for Epstein, he arranged for her to work on an art project at the Ohio mansion of his friend Leslie Wexner — the billionaire businessman and Victoria’s Secret founder – who gave Epstein his New York mansion. It was there that she claims she was sexually assaulted by Epstein and his girlfriend Maxwell.
“I fled from the room and called the sheriff’s office but did not get any response,” Farmer writes in the affidavit. “The Wexner’s security staff refused to let me leave the property. I pleaded with them and my father drove up from Kentucky to Ohio to help me. I was held against my will for approximately 12 hours until I was ultimately allowed to leave with my father.”
She filed a report with the FBI upon returning to New York but says she doesn’t know if any action was taken.
That summer, Epstein allegedly flew Farmer’s younger sister to visit him at his New Mexico ranch where he “directed her to take off all of her clothes and get on a massage table,” whereupon he and Maxwell molested her, according to the affidavit. “It was not until later in the summer … that I learned what had happened to her,” Farmer wrote.
The artist couldn’t escape the billionaire and British socialite, even upon returning to New York.
“Maxwell and Epstein contacted my art clients and individuals in the art community in an effort to ruin my art career,” she wrote. They “were successful and I was shut out of all art-related opportunities.” She also said that she’s had to move several times in order to hide from Epstein, who worked to ensure her art career was “ruined.”
In an interview with Democracy Now, the journalist Vicky Ward said that she first learned of Farmer’s allegations while reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003.
Unfortunately, the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, cut that section from her piece after taking a meeting with the billionaire. Ward also verified Farmer and her sister’s account with several witnesses, including the artist Eric Fischl, who had been a postgraduate instructor for Farmer at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Last year, Epstein was the subject of a Miami Herald report on how Alexander Acosta (then a US attorney in Miami and now President Trump’s Secretary of Labor) offered the billionaire the plea deal of a lifetime despite ample evidence and a 53-page federal indictment. Victims in the case were not notified of the deal, which also ended an FBI probe into the allegations.
In January of last year, Acosta tried to slash the budget of a government anti-trafficking program by almost 80 percent.
“I have struggled throughout my life as a direct result of Epstein and Maxwell’s actions,” Farmer wrote in the affidavit, “and my hope is that they will be held accountable for their crimes.”