Born into fabulous wealth. Impeccable connections. Toast of New York party set. So... How DID she plunge from society darling to sleazy ‘pimp’ and disgrace?
JEFFREY EPSTEIN, in one of the few on-therecord interviews he gave to someone who was neither a lawyer nor a policeman, was asked to explain his close but somewhat mysterious relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. He responded simply: ‘She’s my best friend.’ It was 2003 and the financier was speaking to Vanity Fair. The magazine’s reporter was puzzled by the exact role played by the British socialite, then aged 41, whose duties seemed to range from organising Epstein’s personal diary to running various households and popping up on his arm at glamorous social functions. Although the squalid chain of events that would end with Epstein taking his own life in prison had not yet begun, the magazine writer, Vicky Ward, got an inkling that something wasn’t quite right.
‘One young woman recalls being summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein’s townhouse where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far,’ she wrote. ‘These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners... many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.’
A source told Ward that at another cocktail party, also thrown by Maxwell and attended by Prince Andrew, the room was ‘filled with young Russian models’, adding: ‘Some guests were horrified!’
Compared with the revelations of subsequent years, in which Maxwell was directly implicated in a global paedophile scandal involving scores of victims, some as young as 12, this might seem relatively insignificant stuff.
YET it speaks to a simple truth: the journey that culminated yesterday with well-spoken, 58-year-old Maxwell being arrested by the FBI and taken into custody reflects her decision to embrace the role of Epstein’s official ‘best friend’.
The question of whether she will spend the rest of her life behind bars hinges on a simple question.
Was she really, as various accusers have already testified on oath, a sleazy madam who not only recruited vulnerable teenage girls to provide sexual services to her ex-boyfriend but illegally trafficked them around the world and took part in appalling episodes of abuse?
Or was she merely a naive party girl with a gift for networking, who helped the rich but somewhat awkward Epstein climb the social ladder, yet had little idea about the sordid sex crimes that he was committing?
One thing which can’t be denied is that no one has a better knowledge of the billionaire paedophile and his relationships with the great and good than Maxwell.
She beams like a proud mother in the notorious 2001 photograph of the Duke of York with Victoria Roberts, then a 17-year-old, who now claims Epstein paid her to sleep with the prince after a late-night visit to the nightclub Tramp. Epstein himself took the picture at Maxwell’s mews house in Belgravia.
Maxwell looks on as the prince drapes an arm round his painfully young acquaintance.
Maxwell also pops up in photographs of Epstein and Donald Trump taken at the latter’s Florida resort Mar-aLago, and in pictures that show her socialising with teenage girls (plus a middle-aged French model agent called Jean Luc Brunel, also allegedly implicated in Epstein’s crimes) on the late financier’s private island in the Caribbean.
And Maxwell’s name runs, like letters in a stick of rock, through the many lawsuits and legal depositions filed by Epstein’s alleged victims, many of whom accuse her of recruiting them, flying them around the world and, in several cases, presiding over sickening abuse.
Flight records show Victoria Roberts took at least 23
journeys with Maxwell on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’.
She says she was 15 years old when Maxwell first persuaded her to visit Epstein’s Florida mansion, where the walls were covered with pictures of naked girls and the bathrooms contained soap shaped like male and female genitalia.
She claims Ghislaine stripped naked and told her to do the same, before showing her how to wash the middle-aged financier with soap, then perform a series of sex acts. In court papers, she has said ‘Ghislaine took several nude photos of me for Jeffrey’ and used to buy erotic outfits for teenage visitors to his house to wear.
‘Jeffrey loved the latex outfits Ghislaine had for us girls,’ reads a 2011 court filing. ‘He had bondage outfits, he had all different kinds of outfit but his favourite was the schoolgirl.’
A second woman, Johanna Sjoberg, has testified that she was a cash-strapped student when Maxwell approached her on the campus of a small university in Palm Beach. She says she was offered $100 to perform foot massages at Epstein’s nearby home but ended up being told to strip naked while Maxwell performed a sex act on her.
In 2001, Sjoberg and Roberts say they took tea with Maxwell and Prince Andrew at Epstein’s New York home.
At one point, they allege, the Duke groped their breasts with a Spitting Image puppet.
A third woman, known as ‘BB’, claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that Maxwell ‘maintained a wardrobe at Epstein’s estate in which she kept sexual toys and outfits’, and ‘upon her own volition, actively and passively participated in sexual acts with minor girls she recruited’. And so on.
These and other alleged victims have doubtless been helping the FBI with their investigations. But however the legal case plays out, Maxwell has had plenty of practice at coping with public disgrace.
The favourite child of crooked newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, she had a gilded upbringing, attending Marlborough College and then Oxford University before moving to London in the 1980s to start the Kit Kat Club, which purported to be an alternative to the old-school-tie network for high-powered women.
She then worked for her father’s newspaper The European and was made a director of Oxford United football club, which he owned.
This happy existence imploded in November 1991 when her father drowned after falling off a yacht named Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter. It soon emerged that his newspaper empire was built on the proceeds of epic financial criminality, which had seen him defraud its pension fund of almost half a billion pounds.
Vilified in the UK, where Robert Maxwell’s victims were angered by the plush lifestyle his family had enjoyed at their expense, Ghislaine relocated to New York, where she took up residence in a small apartment and set about reinventing herself as a socialite. It was an inspired move. ‘Ghislaine has always been a prodigious networker,’ an acquaintance once told me. ‘People in New York didn’t care about the pensions scandal. And, of course, they are all suckers for an English accent.’
Maxwell, then 30, then met