Ghislaine Maxwell yukked it up with celebrities at a Vanity Fair Oscar party — years after the magazine killed an exposé detailing her role in aiding pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s sex abuse of girls. The 60-year-old madam was photographed in a glam, sparkly evening dress at the party in West Hollywood in March 2014. Maxwell was shown grinning widely in a series of photos at the event, hugging one guest in a suit and posing beside the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who later insisted she photobombed him. The party was thrown by Vanity Fair’s then-editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter — who’d also been at the helm in 2002 when the mag refused to run an interview with Annie Farmer, one of the four accusers whose testimony led to Maxwell’s recent sex-trafficking conviction. The magazine’s then-star journalist, Vicky Ward, last week revealed a transcript of Maxwell angrily demanding that VF nix the interview from a piece on Epstein. Ward noted how Epstein also “paid a visit to Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair offices” before the article was spiked. Months later, the magazine instead wrote a society profile titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein,” starting with glowing praise about the “charming,” “enigmatic” and “very generous” multimillionaire. In the 2002 article, Epstein bragged about his ties to the rich and powerful, including Prince Andrew and former President Bill Clinton, and called Maxwell his “best friend.” Epstein would go on to plead guilty to soliciting sex from a minor in 2008 and later be charged with sex-trafficking, including of underage girls, before he hanged himself in a Manhattan lockup in 2019 while awaiting trial. Maxwell was arrested on related sex-raps in 2020 and convicted last month. Ward last week said it was her “eternal regret” that Vanity Fair refused to run the damning interview with Farmer and her older sister, Maria, detailing the now-notorious late pedophile’s abuse and Maxwell’s role in it. “I submitted the story to my bosses at Vanity Fair — with the Farmers’ description of events and a general denial from Epstein and Maxwell included,” Ward wrote on her Substack. “I did my journalistic duty: telling both sides of this ugly story. … But Vanity Fair had other plans,” the scribe wrote. Ward noted that “shortly after my interview with the Farmer sisters and the follow-up with Maxwell, Epstein paid a visit to Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair offices, and the Farmers’ allegations were cut from my article. “Carter has said I didn’t have sufficient reporting. I disagree,” she wrote. Carter — who ended his 25-year run at the mag in 2017 — confirmed to the New York Times Magazine that Epstein “showed up at the office one day, and he was sitting in our lobby. “I don’t know how he got there,” Carter said, adding that it was “absolutely not true” that the visit played a role in the Farmers’ claims getting cut. “The fact is that editors make tough decisions every day, and at Vanity Fair, we had an army of fact-checkers and lawyers and other editors to help us make the right ones. It’s easy for people to question those decisions 20 years on,” he said. Carter reportedly had an even more unpleasant run-in with Epstein when another reporter, former NYPD Detective John Connolly, planned a 2007 story. At the time, Carter’s family arrived at their country home in Connecticut to find “the head of a cat on their porch,” Connolly previously told The Post. “No question it was left by Epstein or by somebody on his behalf,” Connolly insisted. Despite VF’s background digging into — but not printing — the ugly allegations about Epstein and Maxwell, the disgraced madam still managed to party at the mag’s 2014 Oscar event, one of the most sought-after invites on the social calendar. It was not immediately clear who invited Maxwell, who now faces up to 65 years in prison when sentenced at a yet-unscheduled date for her crimes.
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