The Setiles

From Kate Briquelet's 5-17-20 The Daily Beast article entitled "Epstein Victim Is Painting His Enablers as Murderous Lizard People":

In Maria Farmer’s “FBI diagram,” dead sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is in a flying saucer, Ghislaine Maxwell is a bloodthirsty reptile, and a pantsless Alan Dershowitz is shushing victims underneath a tree of poisoned apples.

“I’m going to be working on a series all about the elites,” Farmer told The Daily Beast of her whimsical painting, a depiction of heaven and hell that features Les Wexner, the former chairman of Limited Brands and an Epstein associate, as the head of a snake. “As someone who’s been hurt by these people, I can translate it in a way that people can see.”

Farmer, 50, is believed to be the first victim to report Epstein to police. She says Epstein and Maxwell assaulted her at Wexner’s Ohio estate, where she stayed in the summer of 1996 while working on an art project. (Wexner has denied knowing Farmer.) She later learned that Maxwell had allegedly assaulted her underage sister, Annie, at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch. In a recent court filing, Maxwell has denied these accusations.

According to Farmer, Maxwell threatened her and worked to destroy her reputation in New York’s art scene after the alleged incident. The young painter fled the city, leaving a promising art career behind. “I was terrified of Maxwell and Epstein and I moved a number of times to try to hide from them,” Farmer stated in an affidavit filed last year, when her story became public for the first time. Months after the court filing, Epstein would be dead. At age 66, the financier killed himself in a Manhattan jail as he awaited trial on child-sex trafficking charges.

Farmer says she stayed under the radar for 24 years, feeling her life was in danger because of the politically connected pair. She swapped high art for quietly selling antiques and restoring old houses across the southeast.

Now Farmer is creating again in earnest, drawing pastel portraits of Epstein's victims and painting fantastical scenes taking aim at what she refers to as “the elites,” or the socialites and dignitaries who turned a blind eye to the perverted wealth manager's abuse [...].

On her website, Maria says, “After a 20 year sabbatical of sorts, I’ve returned with a series about the seemingly impossible. After my experiences of the NYC ‘elites,’ I recognize that anything is possible! This consideration broadened my mind and made me reassess ‘fantasy’ vs ‘reality.’” [...]

“The Setiles,” her playful and biting landscape depicting the glitterati linked to Epstein, was inspired by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a 15th century triptych oil painting. Her version also illustrates victims’ lawyers who fought for justice.

The title was inspired by a friend who is writing a sci-fi novel. “Instead of elites, why don’t you just call them setiles?” the confidant asked. Farmer clarified to us: “It’s like elites but switching the letters around.”

Scrawled above Farmer’s 7-foot-wide painting are the words “FBI Diagram.”

“I wanted to do it from a child’s viewpoint,” Farmer said. “What I’m really doing is saying: FBI, if you can’t follow this, you can’t follow what a child would draw.” [...]

In the painting, Epstein looks out from a flying saucer because “I wouldn’t have been surprised if Epstein went up in a spaceship,” Farmer said. “He almost got away with this.”

“This is about corruption at a much higher level, and he was just one of the pawns,” Farmer added. The drawing emphasizes “the absurdity of the fact that they let him go for so long.”

Maxwell is inside a giant plastic bubble, attached to which is a “property of FBI” tag. Asked why the heiress was portrayed as a lizard in pearls who bit the head off a schoolgirl, Farmer said, “She only has a reptilian brain. She doesn’t care about what happens to anybody.”

“I’m looking at the French Revolution drawings of that era,” Farmer added. “They’re comedic. You don’t get too wrapped up in the gore.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.