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Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Annie Farmer, the fourth accuser in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the first of her accusers to testify under her true name, spent the morning on Friday describing for a jury in federal court her first encounter with Ms. Maxwell at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.
There, she said, Ms. Maxwell directed her to undress and gave her a massage, first on her back and then having her roll over.
“She pulled the sheet down and exposed my breasts and started rubbing on my chest and on my upper breasts,” Ms. Farmer testified. “I was surprised. I wanted so badly to get off of the table.”
Ms. Farmer, 42, testified in Federal District Court in Manhattan on the tenth day of Ms. Maxwell’s trial, in what appeared to be the culmination of the government’s presentation before the jury. Prosecutors told the judge, Alison J. Nathan, this week that they expected to rest their case as early as Friday.
Ms. Farmer said that she first met Mr. Epstein after Christmas in 1995 when he bought a plane ticket for her to fly from Arizona, where she was a high school student, to New York City, where her older sister, Maria, worked for Mr. Epstein.
“She had said that Epstein was interested in possibly helping me with my education and this was one of the reasons that he was purchasing the ticket,” Ms. Farmer said.
One night, the sisters met Mr. Epstein at his home before going to see “The Phantom of the Opera,” for which Mr. Epstein had bought tickets but did not attend with them. Ms. Farmer said she found Mr. Epstein to be down to earth and easy to talk with.
But there was another encounter with Mr. Epstein that Ms. Farmer described in a near-contemporaneous journal entry as “a little weird.”
While at the movies with her and her sister, she testified, Mr. Epstein put his hand on the armrest between their seats, caressed her hand and rubbed her foot and leg.
“I was very nervous and anxious,” she testified. “I was sick to my stomach.”
Ms. Farmer said she and Mr. Epstein spoke on the phone two or three times after the visit. Then, in the spring of 1996, he flew her to his ranch in New Mexico for the visit where she first met Ms. Maxwell.
Ms. Farmer recalled Ms. Maxwell as a “trim attractive woman” who did not seem surprised to see her. “She had a British accent and she was well spoken and articulate and she was enthusiastic in greeting me,” Ms. Farmer said.
She testified that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell took her shopping, bought her a pair of cowboy boots and took her to see a movie. During the film, she said, Mr. Epstein held her hand and rubbed her foot and her arm, similar to what he had done in New York, she said, only “more blatant.”
At one point, when they were back at the ranch, she said, Ms. Maxwell instructed her on how to give Mr. Epstein, who was barefoot, a foot massage. She did so, she testified, feeling very uncomfortable. “I did not want to be touching his feet.”
Ms. Farmer also recalled waking up one morning to find Mr. Epstein “bounding into the room in this playful way, saying he wanted to cuddle.”
He got into her bed and lay behind her, and pressed his body into hers, Ms. Farmer testified. “He kind of had his arms around me and I felt kind of frozen,” she said.
Telling him that she needed to use the bathroom, she shut the door and kept it closed. “I remember thinking, I wanted to be in there long enough that hopefully this situation would be over.”
Asked by a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, if she told Mr. Epstein that she did not want to cuddle, she said no, adding that on the ranch, “I was aware at the time that I was very isolated.”
Colin Moynihan and
