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1) and husband,
river Brian Vickers,
he red carpet at the 141st
the Kentucky Derby
ll Downs in Louisville,
(Jeff Moreland / Icon
via AP Images)

Good flight!

Michael and Janet Reiter at the Palm Beach Police Foundation Policemen’s
Ball at Mar-a-Lago, January
2012 (Debbie Schatz / Palm Beach
Daily News / ZUMAPRESS.com)

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FILTHY RICH

guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculp-
ture of a naked African warrior.”

The journalist had confirmed that several prominent names—
Mort Zuckerman, the famous real estate mogul and publisher;
Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold; and Donald Trump
among them—had dined at the residence. She’d interviewed
several of Epstein’s friends and ex-friends: Nobel Prize–winning
scientists, financiers who worked with Epstein at Bear Stearns.
She’d handled Steven Hoffenberg with aplomb. And, working
with Vanity Fair’s editors, she’d figured out ways to slip even more
information between the lines, in ways that would allow readers
to form their own questions about Epstein’s finances.

In that respect, she’d fulfilled her original assignment perfectly.

What Carter needed to figure out was what to do with the
artist, her sister, and their mother’s story. But before he could
swipe his key card to let himself into the magazine’s offices, Car-
ter saw a man standing in the reception area.

The man was motionless. He’d been waiting for Carter.

It was Jeffrey Epstein. Nonplussed, Carter invited him into
his office.

Epstein denied the claims involving underage women. No crimi-
nal charges had been filed. And so Vanity Fair decided not to
include the claims in Ward’s article. But, according to Ward,
when her editor Doug Stumpf called her, she cried.

She’d worked so hard on the piece, gotten so stressed out that
one of her twins had begun to grow more slowly than the other.
On doctor’s orders, she’d been put on bed rest.

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