Maria Farmer is the artist who says she made the first criminal complaint about Jeffrey Epstein to the FBI, in 1996, more than a decade before his first conviction. In a 2020 interview she said she had named the powerful men she saw around Epstein at the time, including Alan Dershowitz, Donald Trump and the Clintons. Those names are her account of who visited, not findings of any court: none of these men has been charged over Epstein, and Dershowitz and the White House have rejected her claims about them.
What has been confirmed is more limited, but it matters. Police records show Farmer went to a New York precinct in August 1996. The FBI interviewed her again in 2006. And in December 2025 the Justice Department released the handwritten FBI complaint form from September 1996. Below is what she alleged, what the records support, and how the case against Ghislaine Maxwell ended.
Who Maria Farmer is
Farmer is a painter from Kentucky. She studied at Santa Clara University and earned a master’s degree at the New York Academy of Art in 1995. Around that time Epstein hired her, first to help acquire art and then to work at his Manhattan townhouse, where she says she staffed the front desk and saw who came and went.
In 1996 Epstein offered her studio space at a guest house on the Ohio estate of retail billionaire Les Wexner. In a sworn affidavit filed in federal court in 2019, she said Epstein and Maxwell sexually assaulted her there and that estate security kept her from leaving for hours until her father collected her. Her younger sister Annie Farmer has said Epstein assaulted her at his New Mexico ranch in 1996, when she was 16, and Annie later testified at Maxwell’s trial.
What she reported in 1996
Farmer has long said she went to the police and the FBI that summer and that nothing happened. For years there was little paperwork to show it. In July 2025 The New York Times reported that New York police records confirm she went to the 6th Precinct in August 1996, and that notes from her 2006 FBI interview include the line that the precinct had told her to call the FBI.
The complaint itself surfaced in December 2025, when the Justice Department published a tranche of Epstein records under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Dated 3 September 1996, the handwritten form accuses Epstein of taking photographs of her sisters, then aged 12 and 16, and possibly selling them. It was filed under the category of child pornography. Whatever was done with it, Epstein was not charged for another decade.
The names in her 2020 interview
Farmer appeared in Netflix’s Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich in May 2020 and, that summer, gave a long interview to journalist Whitney Webb. In it she said she believed her report had been brushed aside partly because of whom she had mentioned. She described it this way: “I named everyone who I thought was a co-conspirator at the time.”
It is worth being precise about what that means. Farmer was describing people she saw at Epstein’s properties and whom she suspected; she was not presenting evidence that any of them abused anyone. Asked by the Times in 2025, she said she had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Epstein’s associates.
- Donald Trump. Farmer told the Times that in 1995 Trump arrived at Epstein’s Manhattan office late one night while she was there, stared at her, and that Epstein told him she was “not here for you.” She said she saw no other alarming behaviour from him. The White House disputed the account, saying Trump was never in that office and had thrown Epstein out of his club. Law enforcement has not accused Trump of wrongdoing.
- Alan Dershowitz. Farmer has said she regularly saw Epstein’s future lawyer at the townhouse. Dershowitz says she lied, pointing out that he had not met Epstein at that time.
- Bill and Hillary Clinton. Farmer listed them among the visitors she remembers. Bill Clinton’s documented ties to Epstein, including flights on his plane, date mainly from the early 2000s; he has denied knowing of Epstein’s crimes. No charges or findings name either of them.
The Rothschild story and why caution matters
In the same interview Farmer recalled Maxwell boasting about her family’s influence: several passports, a powerful father, and a claim that the Rothschild family protected them. Farmer also said she later received threats she believed were linked to that circle. None of this has been substantiated. It reached us only as Farmer’s memory of things Maxwell said to intimidate her, and abusers commonly exaggerate their connections to make victims feel powerless.
There is a second reason for care. “The Rothschilds” have been the centrepiece of antisemitic conspiracy theories for two centuries, and claims like this travel fast online without context. Reporting that Maxwell said it is fair; treating it as evidence of anything beyond Maxwell’s bragging is not.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
Epstein’s cases, from 2008 to 2019
Epstein was a New York financier with homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico and the US Virgin Islands. A Florida police investigation in the mid-2000s led to a 2008 plea deal: he pleaded guilty to two state prostitution charges, one involving a minor, served about 13 months with daily work release, and registered as a sex offender. The leniency of that deal was later widely criticised.
On 6 July 2019 he was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and charged with sex trafficking of minors between 2002 and 2005. He died in his cell in Manhattan on 10 August 2019. The death was ruled a suicide by hanging. Lapses at the jail, including guards who failed to make checks, fuelled theories that he was killed, but no investigation has found evidence of homicide, and the charges against him were dismissed after his death.
Maxwell’s conviction and sentence
Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of British media owner Robert Maxwell, who was found dead in the sea off the Canary Islands in November 1991; an inquest recorded accidental drowning, and it emerged afterwards that he had taken hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds.
When Farmer gave her 2020 interview, Ghislaine Maxwell had just been arrested by the FBI in Bradford, New Hampshire, on 2 July 2020. Commentators at the time speculated that she might trade names for leniency. That did not happen. In December 2021 a jury convicted her on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor, and on 28 June 2022 US District Judge Alison J. Nathan sentenced her to 20 years in prison and fined her $750,000. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction in September 2024, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal in October 2025.
What her story shows
Farmer’s account is a reminder of how long credible warnings about Epstein were on file before anyone acted. It is also a lesson in reading allegations carefully. Her reports about what happened to her and her sisters have been backed by records and by the Maxwell verdict. Her lists of famous visitors are something else: recollections of who was around, which public figures dispute and no court has tested.
If you are researching the case, start from court records and named, dated reporting rather than viral summaries, and keep the difference between “was seen with Epstein” and “committed a crime” clearly in view.
Sources: Wikipedia: Maria Farmer; The New York Times via Boston.com, July 2025: An accuser’s story suggests how Trump might appear in the Epstein files; WHYY (AP), 28 June 2022: Ghislaine Maxwell sentenced to 20 years in prison; Wikipedia: Ghislaine Maxwell; Wikipedia: Jeffrey Epstein. Interview by journalist Whitney Webb (2020).
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