Virginia Giuffre, who accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexually abusing and trafficking her when she was a child, wrote in an email to a journalist in 2011 that former president Bill Clinton threatened Vanity Fair not to write articles about sex trafficking about “his good friend J.E.,” according to newly unredacted emails published today by a New York court.
The files are being released at the tail-end of a long legal process following a civil suit Giuffre filed against Maxwell for defamation in 2015. Giuffre and Maxwell settled confidentially in 2017 as Maxwell worried about mounting revelations in the civil litigation and wanted to avoid a protracted legal battle.
But after the settlement, members of the media, led by the Miami Herald, intervened in the case to try to get the many of the filings and depositions initially entered into the record confidentially unsealed.
One document unsealed in the latest tranche today features emails that Maxwell’s lawyers tried to argue proved that Giuffre and Sharon Churcher, a journalist for the Mail on Sunday, fabricated their allegations against Maxwell and a series of powerful men. The emails include intimate, friendly discussions between Churcher and Giuffre, as well as discussions about potential book and film deals based on the stories about her time with Epstein that Giuffre began entrusting to Churcher.
In the emails, Churcher gives Giuffre advice on finding a ghostwriter and negotiating pay, and communicates with Brad Edwards, a Florida lawyer who pursued Epstein through the civil courts for years on behalf of victims.
Giuffre’s comments about Vanity Fair came in the context of a discussion with Churcher about whether to sell a piece to the magazine.
“When i was doing some research into VF yesterday,” Giuffre wrote in the email, “it does concern me what they could want to write about me considering that B.Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficking articles about his good friend J.E.”
Vanity Fair published an early profile of Epstein by the writer Vicky Ward in 2003, but the article was criticized by Maria and Annie Farmer, both victims of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. They said that Ward told them she would include their stories of abuse at his hands but ended up not doing so. Maria Farmer went further and said that it was Ward herself who tipped off Maxwell that the Farmer sisters were talking to Ward about their abuse.
Ward didn’t respond to a text about whether she remembered Clinton coming in to threaten the magazine.
A representative for Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s longtime ex-editor, denied that anything like it ever happened in a statement to the Telegraph.
