Days after Jeffrey E. Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking by federal prosecutors, the fallout spilled into the media world, with a former Vanity Fair journalist saying that she had been prepared to report on accusations of sexual misconduct against the financier years ago, but that the magazine had declined to print them.

The journalist, Vicky Ward, leveled her accusation against the magazine’s former editor Graydon Carter in several forums, including her own Twitter account, Slate’s “What Next” podcast and BuzzFeed’s “AM to DM” talk show.

As part of her reporting for an article published in Vanity Fair’s March 2003 issue, Ms. Ward said, she had collected on-the-record accusations against Mr. Epstein from three women, two of whom said they were victims. Those accusations did not make it into the published version.

A longtime writer on finance and politics, Ms. Ward first went public with the claim that the profile had been toned down in a 2015 article she wrote for The Daily Beast.