Jeffrey Epstein: there is definitely nothing to see here folks, I am feeling very sleepy, I think I'll take a nice nap. (7 Viewers)

At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive — not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers — has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations. They declined to identify the eight.

Investigators suspect that at least some of these individuals also knew Epstein had been left alone in a cell before he died, and they are working to determine the extent of such knowledge, these people said, cautioning that the apparent disregard for the instruction does not necessarily mean there was criminal conduct. The explanation, they said, could be simpler and sadder — bureaucratic incompetence spanning multiple individuals and ranks within the organization.

The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.

“It’s perplexing,” said Robert Hood, a former warden at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. “If people were given instructions that Epstein should not be left alone, I don’t understand how they were not followed.”

Hood, who also once served as the Bureau of Prisons’ chief of internal affairs, said it was disconcerting that officials might have thought they were putting Epstein on a less-intensive form of suicide watch.

Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center during the early morning of Aug. 10. He had been held at the facility in Lower Manhattan for more than a month on sex trafficking charges that could have led to a prison sentence of as much as 45 years. He had pleaded not guilty, and the case was due to go to trial next year.

Epstein hanged himself using a bedsheet fastened to his bunk bed, according to a person familiar with the investigation. New York City’s medical examiner has ruled the death a suicide — a finding not accepted by Epstein’s lawyers, who said they are conducting their own investigation.

The death has prompted investigations and a leadership overhaul at the Bureau of Prisons, the federal agency that runs the jail. On Monday, Attorney General William P. Barr named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer its new director, having replaced the detention center’s warden days earlier.

The circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death are being investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Speaking Wednesday at an unrelated event in Dallas, Barr said that the investigation is “well along,” adding, “I think I’ll soon be in a position to report to Congress and the public the results.”

Barr said there had been some delays in the investigation “because a number of the witnesses were not cooperative. A number of them required having union representatives and lawyers.” He also said there were “serious irregularities at the center. At the same time I have seen nothing that undercuts the finding of the medical examiner that this was a suicide.”

The investigations already have found a troubling lack of follow-through by Bureau of Prisons personnel after a July 23 incident in which Epstein may have tried to kill himself, according to people familiar with them.

In that incident, guards rushed to Epstein’s cell when his cellmate at the time, Nicholas Tartaglione, began yelling, according to these people . Tartaglione told officers he had noticed Epstein had a bedsheet around his neck and appeared to be trying to kill himself, the people said.

Epstein denied that, they said, and told prison staff that he had been attacked — something Tartaglione denied.

Some MCC staff doubted Epstein’s claim that he was attacked, suspecting instead that he either faked a suicide attempt or intended to take his own life, the people familiar said.

Epstein was placed on suicide watch, but officials lifted those measures six days later, on July 29. On that day, MCC officials returned Epstein to a special housing unit known as Nine South — where officers were directed to check on him in his cell every 30 minutes. The other explicit condition of his removal from suicide watch was that Epstein would not be left alone in a cell, these people said.

That instruction was spelled out widely within the chain of command, people familiar with the matter said, and one of the issues investigators are trying to understand better is how so many people could have known of the instruction and still failed to enforce it.

Upon his return to the special housing unit, Epstein was placed in a cell with a suspect other than Tartaglione, according to people familiar with the case. Authorities have not identified that individual, who was moved out of the cell Aug 9. By the next morning, Epstein was dead.

Investigators are examining exactly why that cellmate was relocated, people familiar with the matter said, and why detention center staff failed for several hours to make the required checks on Epstein every 30 minutes. He was found about 6:30 a.m. as breakfast was being delivered to inmates.

The head of the local union that represents MCC staffers did not respond to requests for comment. An FBI spokesman and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan declined to comment.

The death of such a high-profile defendant has brought intense scrutiny to the Justice Department generally and the Bureau of Prisons specifically. Union officials have said such a suicide was inevitable, given long-term shortstaffing at the MCC and throughout the bureau, a situation that has led to employees working extensive overtime.

The two staffers assigned to check on Epstein the morning he died were both working overtime — one forced to do so by management, the other for his fourth or fifth consecutive day, the president of the local union has previously said.

Epstein’s death has sparked renewed criticism of the Justice Department from lawmakers and others who have accused officials of not taking the Epstein case seriously.

Epstein was arrested July 6 after landing at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport. The sex trafficking charges filed in New York involved dozens of girls and alleged incidents spanning 2002 to 2005.

In 2008, he pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges based on similar conduct, as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors that has been widely criticized as too lenient. That deal allowed Epstein to avoid being accused of federal crimes, and he ultimately spent 13 months in jail with flexible ­work-release privileges.

Its terms were approved by Alex Acosta, who was then the U.S. attorney in Miami. Acosta served as President Trump’s labor secretary, though he resigned from that post July 12 after Epstein’s arrest raised new scrutiny of Acosta’s handling of the previous case.

Meanwhile, the federal judge overseeing Epstein’s case has ordered a hearing next week before he dismisses the charges against the deceased financier. The decision is somewhat unusual, but U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman said he would allow Epstein’s alleged victims to speak at the hearing, as well as prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers.

In a court filing Wednesday, Berman said that since the defendant “died before any judgment has been entered against him, the public may still have an informational interest in the process by which the prosecutor seeks dismissal of an indictment.”

Justice Department officials have pledged they will continue investigating, and could still bring charges against anyone found to have conspired with Epstein.

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As more women have come forward in recent days to describe assaults at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Maria Farmer finds herself distraught, wondering what might have happened if someone had taken her seriously.

Twenty-four years ago, Ms. Farmer was an artist who had entered the unorthodox life Mr. Epstein lived behind the doors of his luxury estates. Mr. Epstein had offered to help her painting career, but it all came to an abrupt end one night in the summer of 1996, when she says Mr. Epstein and his companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, began violently groping her.

She learned later that her 16-year-old sister, Annie Farmer, had been subjected to a troubling topless massage at Mr. Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.

[Several of Mr. Epstein’s accusers spoke at a hearing. “Justice has never been served in this case,” one said.]

Ms. Farmer contacted the New York Police Department, and said she then went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offering to share what she knew about Mr. Epstein and the parade of young women being brought to Mr. Epstein’s houses. Though the bureau has never acknowledged such a contact, Ms. Farmer said the F.B.I. must have had a record of it, because agents came back to her — years later — with questions. She also went to leaders in the New York art world that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell frequented, and the sisters tried to tell their story to a national magazine.

In each case, their reports went nowhere.

Finally, facing what she said were threats as a result of the sisters’ claims, Ms. Farmer abandoned her New York art career and stopped painting altogether.

“I did not want another young lady to go through what Annie went through,” Maria Farmer said in a recent interview. “I could handle what happened to me. I could not handle what happened to her.”

Mr. Epstein would continue to lure vulnerable girls into his predatory circle for another nine years before investigators began diving deep into his world. After being arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors in New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein died earlier this month in what the authorities said was an apparent suicide.

Other women have come forward in recent years with even more serious claims of rape and child abuse against Mr. Epstein, but the Farmer sisters’ reports — made 23 years ago — are the earliest known allegations about Mr. Epstein’s troubling physical contact with girls and young women. In their detailed accounts, told here for the first time, they offer a glimpse of how Mr. Epstein managed to avoid significant scrutiny for years, even as concerns about his conduct began to pile up.

Ms. Farmer said that she feels guilty about having brought her sister into Mr. Epstein’s orbit. She mourns the victims who came after her, she said, her voice cracking each time she mentioned the name of one of them. She has spent years trying to live in seclusion.

Ms. Farmer moved to New York in 1993, eager to pursue her passion for art, and enrolled at the New York Academy of Art.

She already had a specialty, exploring figures of nudes and adolescents, and had a chance to train under one of her idols, the painter and sculptor Eric Fischl. One of her paintings was done in a voyeuristic style, showing a man in the frame of a doorway looking at a woman on a sofa — a painting she said was inspired by Edgar Degas’s famous piece “Interior,” which is sometimes known as “The Rape.”

At a gallery show for her graduation, Ms. Farmer said, the dean of the academy, Eileen Guggenheim, introduced her to Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and told her to sell them the painting with the man in the doorway at a discount. (Ms. Guggenheim said she did not recall such an interaction.)

Afterward, Ms. Farmer said, Mr. Epstein called her to offer her a job acquiring art on his behalf, and later managing the entrance to a townhouse he was renovating.

There, at the age of 25, she was introduced to Mr. Epstein’s odd life, with girls and young women coming through for what she recalled Ms. Maxwell describing as modeling auditions for the lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret. The house at times bustled in anticipation of potential visits from Bill Clinton, although she never actually saw him there.

She said she met Donald J. Trump one day in Mr. Epstein’s office, recalling Mr. Trump eyeing her before Mr. Epstein informed him that “she’s not for you.” Ms. Farmer’s mother, Janice Swain, recalled her daughter detailing the interaction with Mr. Trump around the time it occurred.

Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump have acknowledged knowing Mr. Epstein, with Mr. Clinton denying knowledge of anything improper and Mr. Trump saying he was “not a fan” of Mr. Epstein.

Ms. Maxwell was charming and friendly, Ms. Farmer said, and as Mr. Epstein’s companion, she offered young women a level of assurance that they were safe in his presence. But she also seemed to play an important role in bringing young women in, Ms. Farmer said, recalling that Ms. Maxwell would leave the house saying, “I’ve got to go get girls for Jeffrey.”

Ms. Maxwell would refer to the girls she was looking for as “nubiles,” Ms. Farmer said. “They had a driver, and he would be driving along, and Ghislaine would say, ‘Get that girl,’” she said. “And they’d stop, and she’d run out and get the girl and talk to her.”

Lawyers for Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The Younger Sister

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Annie Farmer had troubling encounters with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell when she was 16.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times

One of the girls in whom the couple took an interest was Ms. Farmer’s younger sister Annie.

Ms. Farmer had mentioned to them that her sister was looking to go to college. Mr. Epstein offered to help, and brought Annie, then 16 years old and living in Arizona, to visit New York.

Annie Farmer said she recalled Mr. Epstein as kind and casual, wearing sweatpants, pouring champagne and talking about her college plans. During the trip, they all went to see a movie. As the film progressed, Mr. Epstein began rubbing Annie’s hand, and then her lower leg, she said.

“It was one of those things that just gave me a weird feeling but wasn’t that weird + probably normal,” Ms. Farmer wrote in a diary entry dated Jan. 25, 1996. “The one thing that kind of weirded me out about it was he let go of my hand when he was talking to Maria.”

Mr. Epstein offered to send Annie Farmer on a trip to Thailand, and invited her to his New Mexico ranch for a weekend. Under the impression that the gathering would include a number of students chaperoned by Ms. Maxwell, Annie’s mother, Ms. Swain, said she allowed Annie to go. But when she arrived in New Mexico, Annie said, it was just her and Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell.

There were more uncomfortable interactions that weekend, she said. She recalled Ms. Maxwell persuading her to give Mr. Epstein a foot massage and then giving pointers as she performed it. They went to another movie, where Mr. Epstein continued another round of his petting touches, she said.

Then, when she woke up in the house one morning, she recalled him coming into the room, saying he wanted to cuddle, and getting into bed next to her.

Ms. Farmer also recalled Ms. Maxwell repeatedly asking whether she wanted a massage. Eventually relenting, Ms. Farmer followed directions by taking off her clothes and bra and getting under a sheet on a massage table. Ms. Maxwell performed the massage, at one point having Ms. Farmer lie on her back as Ms. Maxwell pulled down the sheet to massage her chest.

“I don’t think there was any reason for her to be touching me that way,” Ms. Farmer said.

Mr. Epstein did not participate, but Ms. Farmer said she could sense that he was in the area and possibly watching.

The First Reports

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A painting by Maria Farmer that she says she was asked to sell to Mr. Epstein.

At the time, Maria Farmer was unaware of the interactions her younger sister had in New Mexico. She went to Ohio around that time to focus on her paintings, utilizing Mr. Epstein’s large estate there. The residence was inside a complex developed by Les Wexner, the chief executive of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret.

Later in the summer, Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell paid a visit. One night, she recalled getting an unusual request: Mr. Epstein needed his feet massaged.

The foot massage was brief and awkward, Ms. Farmer recalled, as Mr. Epstein groaned with what seemed like exaggerated pleasure, followed by a yelp of pain. Then he invited her to sit on the bed, where he was watching a PBS program about math.

Ms. Maxwell joined them on the bed, Ms. Farmer said, and the night took a sudden turn: Both Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell began groping Ms. Farmer over her clothes, rubbing her body, commenting on her features, and twisting her nipples to the point of bruising. She said they did so in unison, mirroring each other’s movements. Fearing that she was about to be raped, Ms. Farmer eventually fled the room and barricaded herself in another part of the house.

She soon discovered that three nude photographs she had kept in a storage box were missing. The photos were of Annie and a third Farmer sister, who was 12, modeling for Maria’s figurative paintings.

Ms. Farmer said she began phoning people in a panic, looking for help. One of the people she reached was her art mentor, Mr. Fischl. In an interview, he recalled Ms. Farmer describing a physical encounter in the bedroom, fear for her sister and outrage about the missing photographs.

“I just kept telling Maria, ‘You’ve got to get out of there. You’ve got to get out of there,’” Mr. Fischl said.

Maria’s father, Frank Farmer, also recalled getting a call. He did not know the specifics of what transpired, but said his daughter was upset enough that he drove to the estate in Ohio from Kentucky to get her.

After speaking with Annie and learning that Annie had had her own troubles with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, Maria Farmer said, she returned to New York. She recalled getting a phone call from Ms. Maxwell, saying she planned to burn all of Ms. Farmer’s art and that her career was over. Frightened, Ms. Farmer said she went to a local police precinct to report what had happened to her in Ohio, and about the art.

Officers at the New York Police Department precinct took a report on the purported threat and on the art theft allegation, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. But they referred her to other agencies, including the F.B.I., concerning the assault allegation because Ohio was outside their jurisdiction, Ms. Farmer said.

Ms. Farmer said she called the F.B.I. and spoke for about half an hour with the agent who answered the phone. The agent did not say what would happen with her report, she said. She asked if she should phone other law enforcement officials in individual states, like Ohio and New Mexico, and was told that was “up to you,” she said. She recalled contacting at least one other jurisdiction — she did not remember which — and making no progress.

An F.B.I. spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the agency had a report of such a call from Ms. Farmer in its files.

In recent days, the art collector Stuart Pivar said he recalled running into Ms. Farmer at a flea market around that time, and hearing her discuss serious concerns about Mr. Epstein that she said she had reported to law enforcement.

Ms. Farmer said she also raised her concerns about Mr. Epstein with leaders in the art community, including Ms. Guggenheim, the dean at the art school who had first put her in touch with Mr. Epstein. But she said Ms. Guggenheim did not seem to take the issue seriously. Ms. Guggenheim said in an interview that the details she was aware of at the time did not rise to a level that would require intervention.

The two Farmer sisters made another run at telling their story in 2003 to Vicky Ward, a reporter for Vanity Fair, which had commissioned an article about Mr. Epstein’s complicated finances that would also mention his proclivity for young girls. The article was published with no mention of the Farmers, and they felt they were left badly exposed.

Ms. Ward wrote on her personal blog in 2011 that the article went in a different direction because of “not knowing quite whom to believe.” The editor, Graydon Carter, said in an email that Ms. Ward’s sourcing on the Farmers’ account did not meet the magazine’s legal standards. But Ms. Ward indicated on Twitter recently that she believed that Mr. Carter had succumbed to pressure from Mr. Epstein. John Connolly, a former contributing editor at Vanity Fair, said he recalled Mr. Carter talking about the efforts Mr. Epstein had made to influence the article.

When word got out that the sisters had given a detailed interview to the magazine, the angry phone calls to her resumed, Ms. Farmer said.

“Better be careful and watch your back,” she said Ms. Maxwell told her. “She said, ‘I know you go to the West Side Highway all the time. While you’re out there, just be really careful because there are a lot of ways to die there.’”

The Aftermath

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Maria Farmer recently moved to a new home in the South, where she has begun painting again.CreditAndrea Morales for The New York Times

Ms. Farmer said the threats led her to abandon her life in the New York art scene, where Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell still held considerable sway. While Annie has moved forward with life, obtaining a Ph.D. and working as a psychotherapist, Ms. Farmer struggled to move past the year she spent with Mr. Epstein. She felt sickened by her own paintings, which she realized Mr. Epstein had apparently appreciated not for their artistic value, but for their depiction of nude forms of girls.

Unable to forget the comments Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell had made about her breasts, Ms. Farmer said she underwent breast reduction surgery.

It was not until 2006, when F.B.I. agents knocked on her door in North Carolina, that Ms. Farmer found renewed hope that Mr. Epstein would be held accountable. New allegations about Mr. Epstein had surfaced the previous year, when a report by a teenager in Florida spurred an extensive investigation that uncovered a wide range of young girls who had been recruited to visit Mr. Epstein’s lavish home in Palm Beach.

Heavily redacted records released by the F.B.I. appear to show handwritten notes from November 2006 interviews with Maria Farmer and Annie Farmer, outlining key details of their stories, including Maria’s visit to the New York police and her referral to the F.B.I.

But though the investigation progressed, a widely criticized plea deal eventually quashed any federal prosecution. To the sisters, the 2008 plea agreement, which allowed Mr. Epstein to plead guilty merely to much less serious state charges, was deeply demoralizing.

Ms. Farmer was starting to put some of it behind her when the latest news about Mr. Epstein began to emerge, and more victims began coming forward. She found herself crying when she saw those accounts, wondering what it would have taken to stop him when she first tried. Though the time for a lawsuit has long passed, she has been working with a lawyer, David Boies, to support other victims of Mr. Epstein.

“Every time I hear one of the girls tell their story, it devastates me,” Ms. Farmer said.

Ms. Farmer, who recently received a diagnosis of a brain tumor, said she still had some fear about coming forward to tell her own story, even after Mr. Epstein’s death. She recently moved to a new home in the South to improve her privacy.

In her new residence, she has laid out an art studio in front of windows that offer a peek-a-boo view of a nearby lake. She has started painting again, for the first time in years, and new pieces are stacked up against the walls.

One day, she said, she will try to bring artistic shape to her experience with Mr. Epstein. But for now, she has been focused on a series of paintings of families and children.

They are not like her earlier paintings, the ones Mr. Epstein liked. All the girls are clothed.