WASHINGTON – Annie Farmer waited more than two decades for the kind of meeting that happened Thursday afternoon at the Justice Department. She sat down with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and left calling him “abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal.” The private session that a senator demanded as the price of his confirmation vote now raises questions about whether it will deliver one.
Farmer, one of the most publicly recognized voices among Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors, came to the meeting with specific demands. She wanted Blanche to commit to investigating why her sister Maria’s 1996 FBI complaint about Epstein was ignored, a documented failure in a case built on them. He would not. She challenged his account of his contact with Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite convicted of sex trafficking in 2021. His explanation, she said, was “wholly dissatisfactory and contrived.” Survivors left feeling, Farmer wrote afterward, “trapped in the same endless loop of searching for answers and receiving none.”
The meeting was not scheduled voluntarily. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the Republican votes Blanche cannot lose on the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the meeting a condition of his support. During Thursday morning’s confirmation hearing, Tillis said he expected the meeting “to occur before I vote to vote out of this committee.” The session happened that same afternoon. His public response to its outcome had not been released by Friday.
Blanche’s office framed the encounter as substantive. A spokesperson said he “answered questions and walked through what is needed for investigations to proceed.” Blanche reportedly urged survivors to bring information to the FBI, saying he wanted to “prosecute anybody that we can for committing crimes.” That pitch asked victims to extend again to federal law enforcement the trust that a succession of federal institutions has already exhausted.
Dani Bensky, a second survivor who testified publicly during the morning session, also attended the private meeting and called it “emotional” and “not productive.” Her position at Thursday’s hearing had been pointed: Bensky told senators that Blanche had not responded to repeated requests for a meeting before his confirmation proceedings began. When senators pressed him on this, Blanche initially said he could not meet with legally represented victims, then corrected himself moments later.
The meeting included FBI agents and a sex trafficking prosecutor alongside Blanche, a configuration its organizers may have expected to signal institutional commitment. Farmer’s phrase “intentionally noncommittal” is a precise accusation. It does not describe confusion or oversight. It describes someone who understood what was being asked and declined to commit, without giving a reason for that decision.
Republicans hold an eleven-seat majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, whose seat was draped in black fabric during Thursday’s proceedings. A single Republican defection ends Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said Wednesday he was “not there yet.” Blanche needed Thursday’s private meeting to move at least one of those positions. What survivors reported publicly afterward suggests it moved in the wrong direction.
The question of Epstein accountability has attached itself to the Blanche confirmation since the start of his Senate confirmation hearings. The department he leads has faced sustained criticism over Epstein file redactions, the original non-prosecution agreement that shielded Epstein’s associates in 2008, and accusations that it withheld documents relevant to Maxwell’s pending habeas petition. In each case, the department maintained a posture of claimed transparency while survivors and their lawyers described something different. Thursday’s private meeting fits the same pattern.
Blanche’s acting status does not require a Senate vote in the short term. The political cost of a stalled nomination compounds over time, and the survivors who left the Justice Department Thursday without the commitments they came for represent a problem the meeting itself was supposed to resolve.
Whether Tillis considers Thursday’s session sufficient, whether he decides that a meeting which ended with survivors calling the nominee “abrasive” qualifies as what he required, is his calculation to make. According to ABC News, Tillis had tied his vote directly to the meeting occurring. It occurred. The survivors who left the room that afternoon offered their public assessment in three words from Annie Farmer: abrasive, condescending, intentionally noncommittal.
