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Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter made a disturbing discovery on his lawn, the severed head of a cat, just after a journalist began searching the alleged sexual misconduct of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a new report.
In 2006, as the federal government compiled the charges against the fund manager in Palm Beach, Florida, John Connolly, deputy editor of the magazine, went in search of an article, reported NPR.
But while Connolly, a supporter, was sitting with women working for Epstein, his publisher, Carter, was calling him to report the macabre cat's head in the garden of his Connecticut home.
"It was meant to intimidate," Connolly told NPR. "No question about it."
Connolly said that he had decided to stop talking about Epstein and had subsequently drafted a fictional book about the dishonored financier with successful crime novelist James Patterson.
But Carter told NPR that the magazine never stopped reporting on Epstein because of the perceived threat.
According to Connolly, it was not the first time that Epstein would have intimidated the editor of the magazine.
A few years earlier, Carter had commissioned journalist Vicky Ward to examine the source of Epstein's wealth and why he always spent time with younger women.
Ward interviewed two sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer, who claimed that Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell had attracted and sexually exploited them, according to NPR.
Maria told Ward how Epstein and Maxwell would have sexually assaulted her together in an Ohio apartment, and Annie recounted how, she says, Epstein had assaulted her in her apartment. New Mexico property.
Epstein went to the offices of Vanity Fair – and made it clear to Carter that he was not happy, Connolly told NPR.
"He was torturing Graydon," Connolly told NPR.
The financier begged Carter to kill the story and called him repeatedly after his visit, reversing any allegations of misconduct, according to Connolly.
The story was finally released in March 2003 and titled "The Talented Mr. Epstein", with no mention of the sisters' allegations.
"It was terribly painful," the sisters told NPR in a statement. "We hoped that history would warn people and that they would be prevented from abusing other girls and young women. This did not happen. In the end, the story told us erased our voices.
Shortly after publication, Connolly claimed that Carter had found a bullet right outside the door of his Manhattan home.
"It was not a coincidence," Connolly said.
But according to the magazine, the bullet did not appear immediately after the publication of the article, but rather in the "following years".
Carter said in a statement in the mail that the magazine never gave in to its reports because of the threats.
"During my 25 years at Vanity Fair, we have taken the legal requirements for extremely serious reporting in every story, especially in articles in which the subject was a private person and therefore rigorously protected by law. defamation, "he said. "And the fact remains that Ms. Ward's reporting on this very important topic did not reach our legal threshold when we published the article in 2003."
There has never been any evidence linking the threats to Epstein – or anyone else, he said.
"In the following years, I received many personal threats, including the delivery of a bullet to the door and a severed cat's head in the garden of our weekend home," added the editor. . "There was no investigation and I do not know who was responsible, but my wife and I attributed them to the work of George W. Bush sympathizers. To suggest that one or the other of these incidents has affected my editorial judgment is totally false. "
Carter wrote a book, published in August 2004, titled "What We Lost: How the Bush Administration Limited Our Freedoms, Mortgageed Our Economy, Ravaged Our Environment, and Damaged Our World's Reputation".
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