The Miami Herald is reporting a brand new accuser has joined the Virginia Roberts lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein -- an accuser who says she reported his crimes to the FBI, but they did nothing:

A new victim has gone public in the Jeffrey Epstein case, filing a sworn affidavit in federal court in New York Tuesday, saying that she was sexually assaulted and her then-15-year-old sister molested by Epstein and his companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 1996.

Maria Farmer, then 26, claims that she was employed by Epstein, a multimillionaire financier who lived in a vast mansion on New York’s Upper East Side, and that she frequently saw “school-age girls’’ wearing uniforms come into the mansion and go upstairs. She was told that the girls were auditioning for modeling work, according to her affidavit.

Then an art student in New York, Farmer said she reported her assault to New York police and the FBI in 1996. FBI documents released April 1 make a reference to Farmer having been interviewed in 2006 or 2007. However, Farmer, now 49, said the FBI did not take any action against Epstein and Maxwell.

“To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI. It took a significant amount of bravery for me to make that call because I knew how incredibly powerful and influential both Epstein and Maxwell were, particularly in the art community,’’ she wrote.

Farmer’s affidavit is one of 15 exhibits attached to a defamation complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s most vocal and powerful attorneys.

Giuffre claims in the lawsuit, as she has in past court filings, that Dershowitz, 80, knew about and participated in a sex-trafficking operation involving underage girls and run by Epstein and Maxwell, and that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and other prominent, wealthy men when she was underage.

Dershowitz has railed against the allegations for years, maintaining that he has never met Giuffre. He also says he has documents and other evidence that prove she is lying.

Farmer’s affidavit and other documents attached to the lawsuit are meant to bolster Giuffre’s case that Dershowitz has maliciously spread false information on behalf of Epstein in order to intimidate and silence her and other victims, according to the lawsuit.

“No sensible person looks forward to litigation,’’ Giuffre said in a statement. “And I know that standing up for myself and others will cause Mr. Dershowitz and Mr. Epstein to redouble their efforts to destroy me and my reputation. But I can no longer sit by and not respond. As my complaint shows, my abusers have sought to conceal their guilt behind a curtain of lies. My complaint calls for the accounting to which I, and their other victims, are entitled.”

Dershowitz said he welcomed the opportunity to finally prove in court that Giuffre is lying.

“Virtually everything in the complaint is false, and I will be able to disprove all of this in a court of law. I have told the truth throughout and I’ll be able to prove it. ... I never met her, I never heard of her,’’ Dershowitz said.

In recent months, Dershowitz has waged a public relations war against Giuffre, her lawyers and the Miami Herald, which published a series of articles about Epstein in November. The series, “Perversion of Justice,” focused on how the former U.S. attorney in Miami, now Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, brokered a non-prosecution deal giving Epstein federal immunity, despite overwhelming evidence that he had sexually assaulted dozens of girls. The series mentioned Dershowitz, who represented Epstein during the negotiations, including Giuffre’s sex abuse allegations against the Harvard lawyer.

Giuffre’s lawsuit does not provide evidence of Giuffre having sex with Dershowitz, or provide dates when the abuse allegedly happened. But it does provide a chapter-and-verse history of Dershowitz’s public statements and attempts to take each statement he’s made and discredit them.

For example, Dershowitz has said that he has never seen any underage girls when he visited Epstein at the financier’s various homes in Palm Beach, New Mexico and New York. But Farmer, who now lives in Kentucky, claims that one of her duties working for Epstein was to staff the front door to his New York estate and to keep track of visitors.

“On a number of occasions I witnessed Dershowitz at the NY mansion going upstairs at the same time there were young girls under the age of 18 who were present upstairs in the house,’’ she said in the affidavit, asserting that Dershowitz was so comfortable he would walk into the mansion and go directly upstairs.

Dershowitz said that would have been impossible because he did not meet Epstein until August 1996 on Martha’s Vineyard.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article229277874.html