Maria Farmer's FBI complaint against Epstein/Maxwell stamped, ignored for a decade

The FBI complaint filed by artist Maria Farmer against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — describing sexual assault at Les Wexner’s Ohio estate, Epstein’s theft of nude photographs of her 16- and 12-year-old sisters, her belief he was selling the photos to “potential buyers,” his request that she “take pictures of young girls at swimming pools,” and his threat to burn her house down if she told anyone — is stamped September 3, 1996. The document was released, heavily redacted, as part of the Justice Department’s Dec. 19, 2025 Epstein-files release; it is the specific document USA Today reported on Dec. 21, 2025, and the one Rep. Robert Garcia cited when he asked the DOJ Inspector General on Dec. 23, 2025 to investigate the FBI’s decade of inaction. The FBI took no action on the complaint for roughly a decade, until the 2005 Palm Beach Police investigation eventually surfaced Epstein’s abuse independently.

This document is distinct from — and filed five days after — Farmer’s Aug. 29, 1996 report to the New York Police Department (see 1996-08-29–maria-farmer-nypd-report-epstein-maxwell). NYPD had advised her to also contact federal law enforcement.

This entry replaces a prior cascade-timeline entry dated 1996-08-26 (“maria-farmer-reports-epsteinmaxwell-assault-to-fbi”), whose date was unsourced and did not match either the NYPD (Aug. 29) or FBI (Sept. 3) document dates established by primary reporting on the Dec. 2025 DOJ release. That entry’s three cited sources (2019 Daily Beast, Business Insider, Guardian pieces) predate the DOJ release and did not establish a specific complaint date; the Business Insider URL is now dead (404).