Annie Farmer’s Boots

The mugshots in the gallery,
Look down on greedy eyes,
Where people proffer their abuse
In different shades of lies.
The lawyers for the reptiles swank
In thousand dollar suits,
Obsessing on the scuff marks found
On Annie Farmer’s boots.

We hunger for the gods to fall,
Like salivating hogs,
Forgetting who the victims are
Cast out to feed the dogs.
We prune the sleaze from toxic trees
But never find their roots,
So all we have to show for it
Are Annie Farmer’s boots.

Because it happened more than once
We dress it up as “choice,”
To shame their culpability
And suffocate their voice.
Shipwrecks on this poisoned sea,
And all that it pollutes,
Too blind to taste the salty tears,
On Annie Farmer’s boots.

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Annie Farmer is a 46yo qualified psychologist living and working in the southwestern United States. When she was sixteen, she and her sister were drawn into the network surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. They reported their abuse to both the NYPD and the FBI at the time—over thirty years ago.

Few of the young women abused in that network have seen anything resembling timely justice. Many have spent decades living with the consequences.

Annie Farmer, in that context, is someone to be admired—not only for speaking out in the first place, but for continuing to pursue justice while rebuilding her life.

During Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, a pair of cowboy boots—bought for Annie—were presented in court. The defence noted that they were scuffed, implying that she had worn them, and by extension that she must have understood and accepted the circumstances in which they were given.

That moment stayed with me.

It reflects a broader and deeply troubling instinct: the tendency to scrutinise victims for signs of complicity, while ignoring the behaviour of those who exploit them. Society often reaches for narratives like “they knew what they were getting into,” or shifts blame toward upbringing or past experience. In reality, the opposite is frequently true—those who have previously suffered abuse are often more vulnerable, not less.

As Lucia Osborne-Crowley writes in 'The Lasting Harm', responses to trauma are not limited to fight or flight. There is also “freeze”—a well-documented survival response that is too often misunderstood or dismissed.

Osborne-Crowley attended the Maxwell trial in person, standing outside in freezing New York conditions to ensure these stories were witnessed and recorded properly. She is herself an abuse survivor, and has faced intimidation for her work. Her reporting is a reminder that this is not history—it is ongoing.

On the day those boots were presented in court, Annie Farmer was forced to revisit some of the worst moments of her life. Much of the media attention, however, focused on the boots themselves—what they implied, how they looked, what they said about her.

That distortion—of attention, of empathy, of responsibility—is what this poem responds to.

There are powerful people who still have questions to answer. But focusing solely on the notoriety of Epstein and Maxwell risks turning real harm into spectacle. What matters—what should always matter—is the victims, the systems that failed them, and the need to prevent such abuse from continuing.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lasting-Harm-explosive-behind-scenes/dp/0008591180

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