An artist named Maria Farmer claims that armed guards employed by Victoria’s Secret billionaire Leslie Wexner allegedly kept her from leaving a house on Wexner’s Ohio compound for two months, during which time she was reportedly assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
According to Farmer, she was commissioned in the mid-90s to create two paintings for the film As Good as It Gets and was invited by her then-employer, Epstein, to complete the paintings in a house given to Epstein by Wexner situated on 336 acres in Ohio owned by Wexner and guarded by armed security personnel.
In the two months Farmer reportedly spent on the property, she says she was not allowed to go outside unless given permission over the phone by Wexner’s wife, Abigail. Though Farmer says she never met Leslie or Abigail, Farmer claims she spoke with Abigail on the phone several times that summer, according to the Washington Post:
“Whenever I wanted to exit the guesthouse, I’d have to call the main house and get Abigail on the phone to ask her permission to go outside,” Farmer recalled.
During the last of several visits Epstein and Maxwell made to the Ohio house, Farmer was allegedly sexually assaulted by both of them, whom she’d trusted as friends beforehand: “They asked me to come into a bedroom with them and then proceeded to sexually assault me against my will,” Farmer said in an affidavit for what the Post calls an “Epstein-related lawsuit.”
In an interview with the Post, Farmer claims that when she tried to report the assault to the local police, she was told that their loyalties were to the Wexner family:
“Maria Farmer remembered calling 911, being put on hold, and then being hung up on. She also called the Franklin County sheriff’s office, she said.
She didn’t know Wexner had contracted with the sheriff’s office to help protect his property. She recalled the person on the other end of the phone telling her, ‘We work for Wexner,’ and that an officer was at the gate.”
Following the assault, armed security guards employed by Wexner allegedly held Farmer in the house for 12 hours against her will until her father arrived to take her away from the estate.
For their part, Leslie and Abigail Wexner claim to have never heard of Maria Farmer and said in a statement that they cut all ties with Epstein in 2007. However, during the summer she stayed in Epstein’s house, Farmer obtained an Ohio driver’s license in order to pick Epstein and Maxwell up from the airport; the address listed on the license was Wexner’s.
Though Wexner declined to speak to the Post, in a recent meeting with investors, he seemingly alluded to the dozens of women who have accused Epstein of sex trafficking and rape without mentioning his former friend by name: “Everyone has to feel enormous regret for the advantage that was taken of so many young women,” Wexner reportedly said.
Ah yes, nothing says “I had no idea what was going on” quite like performing complicated linguistic gymnastics in order to make sure no alleged abusers are forced to take responsibility even at the sentence level.