Ghislaine Maxwell’s Life of Secrets
Even if Ghislaine Maxwell did pull something out of her mental basket of deplorables and heaped sexual calumnies on leading Democrats and said that Trump didn’t write that birthday message to Epstein, why would anyone believe her? In a break from the usual DOJ protocol, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went himself to interview Ghislaine in Tallahassee, where she’s serving her 20-year sentence, but he is hardly well versed in her complex history of contortions and excuses or, as federal prosecutors put it, “her willingness to brazenly lie under oath.”
The reason why Ghislaine has never spilled what she knows before is that she has always pretended she doesn’t know anything. In a 2016 deposition for a defamation suit filed against her by the late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, Ghislaine said, “I never saw any inappropriate underage activity with Jeffrey, ever.” That deposition led to two perjury charges against Ghislaine that were dropped only after her conviction on five federal charges of sex trafficking, which she has always denied. The more knowledge she shows now of illegal depravities she witnessed as Epstein’s wingwoman, the more she reveals her own culpability and her own dishonesty in the past. Maxwell missed every opportunity to flip on Epstein, but, as Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies put it to me, Ghislaine “had skated by so long, she may have believed she was above the law.” Epstein’s inconvenient and mysterious death in his cell at the MCC in August 2019 achieved the worst possible outcome for Ghislaine. She became the stand-in for the most notorious pedophile in the world, and would pay not just her price, but his.
Monster Daddy
Darkness and fakery have followed Ghislaine all her life. American audiences are less aware than the Brits what an outsize figure her father, the press baron and publisher Robert Maxwell, was in London. With his bellowing voice, huge car-wash-brush eyebrows, and shock of inky black hair, he bestrode the UK social and political scene, bullying journalists, employees, and his family of nine children, whom he used to ritually humiliate, one after the next, at Sunday lunch.
He turned Oxfordshire into West Egg, hosting glittering parties with his French wife at his 51-room mansion Headington Hill Hall. Ghislaine, the youngest, was the vivacious star of the family and the toast of Balliol College at Oxford. Her father named his £15 million yacht “The Lady Ghislaine.” She was always on the mountainous Maxwell’s arm, at birthday parties for Elton John, football matches, and media salons, and was dispatched by him to New York when he bought the Daily News to sweeten his path as social ambassador. Pleasing him and winning his attention was Ghislaine’s abiding obsession.
In the course of writing The Palace Papers, my 2022 book on the royal family, I came across a shocking story in a memoir by Eleanor Berry, daughter of the then-Daily Telegraph owner Lord Hartwell. Berry tells how, at the age of ten, Ghislaine invited her to come upstairs and see her bedroom. Berry noticed an odd-shaped hairbrush, a strap, a slipper, and other implements laid out on the child’s dressing room table. Ghislaine proudly said, “This is what Daddy uses to beat me with. But he always allows me to choose which one I want.” This sadistic offering of power to the powerless—her father asking her, in essence, to procure herself for him— makes it more understandable how susceptible she would be to the twisted machinations of Jeffrey Epstein.
Groomer and Charmer
It’s doubly ironic that Robert Maxwell’s death was as shrouded in mystery as Jeffrey Epstein’s. In 1991, Ghislaine’s Zeus-like father disappeared in the dead of night off the side of his yacht, into the waters off the Canary Islands, and was found floating stark naked the next day. Whether it was a suicide, an accident, or a murder has never been fully resolved. After his death, it was revealed he had stolen £460 million from the Mirror Group’s pension fund, robbing his own employees. Ghislaine, the pampered daddy’s girl, was now the offspring of a posthumous pariah, a fall from grace that forever traumatized her. Shortly after, she fled to New York to reinvent herself as a fashionable Upper East Side socialite.
Ghislaine, like her father, was a pretender, desperate for recognition, and, in her childhood terrors, had absorbed his perversity. Her own affair with Epstein, when she first arrived in New York, was brief. She was never his physical type, to her anguish, but she built her indispensability in his life by finding him the teenage girls who were. With her charm and her connections, one could argue it was Ghislaine who industrialized Epstein’s hitherto amateurish predator MO.
In Virginia Giuffre’s unpublished memoir, Billionaire’s Playboy Club, which was submitted as evidence in her lawsuit against Ghislaine, she tells how she first met Ghislaine when she was working as a 16-year-old locker room girl at Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2000. Giuffre recalls that she was reading a primer about massage therapy when she was approached by a tall, poised woman with a cut-glass English accent, who mentioned she knew a rich guy who was looking for a traveling masseuse. The career opportunity turned out to be more than a back rub. The depraved complicity between Epstein and Ghislaine was immediately clear to Giuffre when she joined them at his Palm Beach mansion. She alleges that Epstein and Ghislaine laughed together as Ghislaine removed Giuffre’s bra and “love-heart” panties. Ghislaine, she says, demonstrated how Epstein liked to have his nipples pinched, and instructed her to straddle him “until he finished.” He apparently approved of Virginia’s performance. “She’s a keeper,” Giuffre says he told Ghislaine after they showered, according to Giuffre’s attorney Brad Edwards.
In the 2016 deposition, when asked about her alleged role in procuring girls for Epstein’s sexual pleasure, Ghislaine retorted, “I totally resent and find it disgusting you use the word recruit.” The late investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein, who often socialized with Maxwell, told me how, one evening in the aughts, he saw her recruiting style in action. At a dinner with friends at Elio’s restaurant in Manhattan, a twittering party of lissome teenage models was hanging out at the bar. Halfway through dinner, Ghislaine disappeared. “Where did she go?” Ed Epstein asked another guest at the table. “She’s getting their phone numbers,” the guest said. “For Jeffrey.”
Caged Animal
Ghislaine and Epstein parted ways around 2009, but Ghislaine seemed to know her past would catch up with her. In 2010, at a dinner in New Orleans, The Daily Beast’s then west coast editor Gabé Doppelt found herself seated next to Ghislaine. Doppelt asked her what it was like to “be [Ghislaine] right now.” According to Doppelt, Ghislaine picked up a pat of butter, rolled it into a ball, and proceeded to squash it flat with her fist. “Like that,” she replied, with agonized ferocity.
Ghislaine worked overtime to rehab her image. I saw her around town at book parties and dinners, always alone, but there was something about her hard, shiny edge that I found inauthentic. She pitched me hard to be included at my annual Women in the World summit to talk about her new TerraMar Project, an effort to recast herself as a guardian of the oceans. “She stopped talking about sex and started talking about dolphins,” as one of her former friends put it to me. I elected not to feature her.
Pardon Me
Now that the desperate distractions thrown out by the flailing Trump (from suing the WSJ to accusing Obama of treason) have failed to banish Epstein from the headlines, he’s dependent on the woman who was no less than the monster’s sidekick to bail him out. This time, the gambit is that, if Todd Blanche extracted enough dirt on Dems from her in their Tallahassee sit-down, MAGA will forget she’s supposed to be evil incarnate, or as an increasingly bewildered Speaker Mike Johnson put it “a person who's been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts against innocent young people.” Slowly but surely, Ghislaine is being reframed as a scapegoat. This week in Scotland, when a reporter pressed Trump about whether he would consider a pardon for Maxwell, the president resorted to strategic vagueness: “I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it. It’s in the news – that aspect of it – but right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”
It would be a stunning denouement if the MAGA uproar over the DOJ’s failure to release the complete Epstein files leads to his closest accomplice being sprung or having her sentence reduced. Trump can’t make such a politically dicey move before the midterms. But at the end of his presidency, like Joe Biden when he appalled his own party by pardoning his son Hunter, how much will Trump care about a firestorm from his base if he lets his old friend Ghislaine walk free? The acrid smell of impunity is in the air.
Once again, Tina, I’m so glad you’re here on Substack giving us the details behind the headlines. Talk about Daddy issues . . .
From first hearing about these dreadful people, I’ve wondered about the young women, the teenagers, recruited into this life. I wondered who the girls were and are there a lot of nubile 14 year olds working at Mar a lago as “towel girls”? And where are their parents?
Please keep investigating these poor women. I’d also look into hiring practices at Maralago.