Maria Farmer, who provided the first criminal complaint to law enforcement about Jeffrey Epstein, asked police to check on Steven Hoffenberg, who she described as “family.”
Steven Hoffenberg, a convicted Ponzi schemer and one-time Wall Street mentor to multimillionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his Connecticut apartment this week after a survivor of Epstein’s abuse called local cops to do a welfare check.
Maria Farmer called Derby police to check in on Hoffenberg, 77, after she failed to reach him over the phone. The two had been friends for years and spoke nearly every day. “He was family to me,” Farmer told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “I loved him.”
In Hoffenberg, Farmer saw a kind-hearted person who became another fall guy for Epstein. He was someone who lost his wealth and became estranged from most of his family after his criminal case. In prison, he became a born-again Christian. Farmer says that in recent years, he was one of a handful of people to support her during cancer treatments. Now it appears he died alone in his modest apartment not long after getting COVID.
On Thursday, Derby Police Lt. Justin Stanko told The Daily Beast that authorities believe a man discovered Tuesday at 8:08 p.m. is likely Hoffenberg but that they were waiting for the medical examiner to make a positive identification. “Every piece of evidence, his lease, paperwork, driver’s license… is pointing to the fact that it’s Mr. Hoffenberg,” Stanko said.
