Days after Jeffrey E. Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking by federal prosecutors, the fallout spilled into the media world, with a former Vanity Fair journalist saying that she had been prepared to report on accusations of sexual misconduct against the financier years ago, but that the magazine had declined to print them.
The journalist, Vicky Ward, leveled her accusation against the magazine’s former editor Graydon Carter in several forums, including her own Twitter account, Slate’s “What Next” podcast and BuzzFeed’s “AM to DM” talk show.
As part of her reporting for an article published in Vanity Fair’s March 2003 issue, Ms. Ward said, she had collected on-the-record accusations against Mr. Epstein from three women, two of whom said they were victims. Those accusations did not make it into the published version.
A longtime writer on finance and politics, Ms. Ward first went public with the claim that the profile had been toned down in a 2015 article she wrote for The Daily Beast.
“It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s,” she wrote, adding that “at the time Graydon believed Epstein.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Ward said that two young women, who are sisters, had separately given her on-the-record interviews to describe their claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Epstein. One of the two women was under 18 at the time of the events she described, and their mother corroborated the accounts, also on the record, Ms. Ward said.
In an emailed statement, Mr. Carter, who stepped down as the editor of Vanity Fair in 2017 after a 25-year run, disputed Ms. Ward’s version of what had happened to the article during the editing process.
“I respected the work Vicky Ward did at Vanity Fair, but unfortunately her recounting of the facts around the Epstein article is inaccurate,” he said. “There were not three sources on the record, and therefore this aspect of the story did not meet our legal and editorial standards.”
In a second emailed statement, Mr. Carter said: “If we had had three people on the record willing to stand up for us in court if Epstein had chosen to sue, we would have run it. Period. End of story.”
After the article was published, the three women decided against going on the record in any possible later story, Ms. Ward said. “They felt this was exactly what they feared would happen — that they wouldn’t be believed,” she said.
The Vanity Fair profile was published five years before Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution. He ended up serving 13 months of an 18-month sentence. The plea deal in that case is now under Justice Department scrutiny. It was overseen by Alexander Acosta, who was then the United States attorney in Miami and is now President Trump’s labor secretary.
The Vanity Fair article was not a glowing portrait of Mr. Epstein. In addition to exploring questionable financial practices, including insider-trading and stock-price manipulation, to which Mr. Epstein had reportedly been adjacent, it said he was “known about town as a man who loves women — lots of them, mostly young.”
The tone was in contrast with a profile of the same man that ran in New York magazine a few months earlier, an article that included statements of praise for Mr. Epstein from his friends, though even one of these was suggestive of something else. “Terrific guy,” a real estate tycoon named Donald Trump was quoted as saying. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Ms. Ward said she did not impute bad faith to Mr. Carter.
“I understand there are instances where editors make decisions that reporters disagree with,” she said. “I happen to think this was a wrong decision.”