Maria Farmer

In January 2020, Farmer was reportedly working on a series of paintings called “The Survivors Project” consisting of portraits of survivors of Epstein's abuse. She has stated that the harm experienced by countless others could have been prevented if authorities had listened when she first reported the abuse. An exhibition of Farmer's artwork was scheduled to open on March 14, 2020 at the Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles.

Farmer reportedly lives in the southern United States where she maintains an art studio. After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, she was receiving treatment for cancer in May 2020.

Later that summer, Farmer learned that her younger sister Annie had also been assaulted by Epstein when Annie had visited him at his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. In a lawsuit filed in 2019 against Epstein's estate, Annie Farmer revealed that Epstein had groped, harassed, and crawled into bed with her in New Mexico whereas Maxwell had given her an inappropriate topless massage.

In an interview with Grazia in 2019, Farmer expressed that it was the betrayal by women that she found hardest to bear in addition to the disinterest with which the authorities handled her early reports of abusive behavior by Epstein and Maxwell. Farmer was interviewed by Anthony Mason for CBS This Morning in November 2019.

In late 2019 and early 2020, five wrestlers, survivors of the Ohio State University abuse scandal, publicly called on state and federal officials to conduct further inquiry into Farmer's allegations of sexual assault at the Wexner property. The group of men called for greater accountability regarding the Wexner family's involvement in Epstein's abuse and raised their concerns about the continuing influence of Abigail and Leslie Wexner serving as the "biggest and best-known benefactors" of the university.

Maria Farmer (c. 1970 ) is an American visual artist known for filing the earliest known criminal complaint to law enforcement in 1996 about the conduct of the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Farmer, a figurative painter, had also described her and her sister Annie's experiences of sexual misconduct from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to a journalist in 2002 but the publication refrained from including it in their accounts.

In the summer of 1996, Farmer was commissioned to create two works for the film set of "As Good as It Gets" and Epstein offered her space to create the work as and artist-in-residence at a guest home on Les Wexner's property in New Albany, Ohio. Farmer has stated, in an affidavit filed in support of a defamation lawsuit between Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Alan Dershowitz, that Epstein and Maxwell came to the property in Ohio and sexually assaulted her. She managed to escape into another part of the house and barricaded herself inside by pushing furniture up against the door. Then she contacted members of her family, her mentor artist Eric Fischl, and reached out to authorities. Security guards on the property told her that she could not leave and she was held against her will for 12 hours. Farmer was eventually able to depart the scene when her father arrived, after driving from Kentucky to Ohio, to pick her up.

Maria Farmer went to the NYPD and the FBI in 1996 to report the assault. The authorities did not take action. In 2002, Farmer, her sister, and her mother also shared their stories with journalist Vicky Ward, then at Vanity Fair, who was writing a profile on Epstein. Despite the Farmer sisters and their mother giving voice to the misconduct, their mention was excluded from the final story by then-editor Graydon Carter. NPR and the New York Times reported that Carter had been pressured by Epstein at the time of publication to omit mention of the Farmer sisters; Carter's residence and the Vanity Fair office had each received ominous signals (a bullet and a cat's head) at times corresponding to when they might have further investigated Epstein.

At her graduate exhibition in 1995, the school's dean, Eileen Guggenheim, introduced Farmer to both Jeffrey Epstein, who served as a board member at the Academy from 1987 - 1994, and to his companion Ghislaine Maxwell. Although Farmer had already sold her painting for $12,000, Epstein reportedly wanted to buy it at the reception for half price and Guggenheim urged Farmer to cut him a deal.

In the summer of 1995, Farmer was one of four artists chosen to attend an all expenses paid trip to Santa Fe. Several of the artists reported attending a dinner party hosted by Epstein and Maxwell with Guggenheim that was designed to test the artists boundaries within a competitive environment where the women were promised that one would be rewarded with a major commissioned artwork for Epstein's New Mexico property. However, no commission materialized.

Farmer attended Santa Clara University and graduated in 1992. She relocated to New York City in 1993 to study at the New York Academy of Art. Farmer graduated with her master's degree from the Academy in 1995. She furthered her studies and attended a post-graduate workshop with Erik Fischl in 1996 at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.