How the DOJ Is Re-Traumatizing Epstein’s Survivors

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Picture this: A beguiling British socialite takes an interest in you. She tells you you’re special — that she can help make your dreams come true. You’re sixteen, full of ambition but unsure of your place in the world. She knows a prince. A president. Her father owned the New York Daily News and MTV Europe. She lives in one of the largest townhouses in Manhattan. She and her “husband” can’t have children — but they say they want to sponsor girls like you. Girls with promise. Girls whose single mothers can’t afford college.

That fantasy, carefully built over months of grooming, is how Annie Farmer ended up on Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. She was 16 when Ghislaine Maxwell crossed physical boundaries, touching her teenage breasts. That night, Epstein entered her room.

Farmer would go on to become a key witness in the case against Maxwell — not just because she was lured in by her, but because she was personally harmed by her.

She’s had to tell that story again and again: to the prosecutors who didn’t deliver justice in 2008, to civil attorneys, to journalists, to victim compensation funds. And then again in 2021 — in the one criminal trial that finally brought even a shred of accountability.

And then, just like that, it all came rushing back — when Farmer learned that Ghislaine Maxwell had quietly met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“My stomach immediately dropped,” she told me in an interview airing tomorrow on The Tara Palmeri Show on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

“It felt very ominous — that they were at this place, considering speaking with someone who had been accused of lying under oath.”

Farmer’s heartbreak is calm, but unmistakable.

Her sister Maria, who also says she was abused by Epstein and Maxwell, feels the same. Both sisters, and many other survivors, now fear the government is preparing to negotiate with the very woman they fought to hold accountable.

As The Bulwark first pointed out, political figures close to Donald Trump — like Charlie Kirk and Newsmax host Greg Kelly — appear to be softening the public toward that possibility. Kirk said Maxwell’s plea for immunity should be “worthy of praise, and worthy of our encouragement.” Kelly — who was once the subject of serious allegations but never charged — publicly questioned whether Maxwell should still be in prison at all.

For survivors, those kinds of comments aren’t just offensive — they feel like betrayal.
“They erase what we went through,” Annie said. “Everything we’ve had to relive. The times we weren’t believed. The government that ignored us.”

“Coming forward is exhausting,” she said. “The trial takes over your life. But I did it because I knew so many people were harmed. And I wanted to do the right thing — for them.”

Maria reported Epstein to the FBI in 1996 and again in 2006. Both times, she was ignored.

“It takes a toll,” Annie said of the trial. “There are delays, long gaps between a verdict and sentencing. It drags on. You think it’s over, but it never really is.”

And now, the one piece of justice they were given — Maxwell’s conviction — feels like it may be slipping away.

“I don’t think they really care about victims,” Annie told me. “Even just talking about her like this — it feels like a betrayal. It’s giving her credibility again.”

From the beginning, survivors were locked out of the process. That 2008 non-prosecution agreement protected Epstein’s co-conspirators — named and unnamed — and left the women in the dark.

“We don’t know what’s going on now,” she said. “We’re not kept in the loop. And so again, it feels like we’re being blindsided. Like the government is going to let us down again.”

If Annie could speak directly to Blanche, she’d say this:

“He said it took courage to speak with Maxwell. But don’t forget the courage it took for us to testify against her.”

Maxwell’s conviction was never the end. It was the only win. The only proof that what they endured mattered. And now, even that feels at risk…