Daddy’s girl who thrived on tough love
Ghislaine Maxwell was her bullying father’s favourite child. Rosie Kinchen reports on the ultimate in flawed families.
There was a time when everybody wanted to know what it was like to have Robert Maxwell as a father – even Prince Charles.
When I interviewed Ian and Kevin Maxwell two years ago, Ian, the elder of the brothers, remembered the heir to the throne asking him the question in the late 1980s. ‘ ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘It’s like the Chinese proverb: never be so far from the sun that you freeze; never be too close to it that you burn. It’s a damn narrow line’.’’
I thought about that interview when their younger sister, Ghislaine, was arrested and charged with assisting the late billionaire Jeffrey Epstein to abuse minors, and recruit and groom underage victims.
I had ostensibly been meeting her brothers to talk about their charity venture, a think tank to understand extremism, but it was the first interview they had given in 30 years and a tantalising chance to find out about the one of the most infamous families of the 20th century.
Even then they were keen to distance themselves from their sister. ‘‘Ghislaine is the one I probably see the least,’’ Ian told me as the photographs of her, Epstein and a young blonde teenager began to emerge. She is ‘‘pretty quiet about that part of her life’’.
But as I listened to them talk about their childhoods, it was clear that Maxwell had branded all his children with his mark.
Ian, now 64, remembered a comment made by Maxwell’s former chief of staff: ‘‘ ‘Bob only understands two forms of relationships: master and slave, buyer and seller.’ That isn’t completely true but if you took the shilling you were his slave and you did what you were told.’’ That applied to his children as much as anybody else.
He was ‘‘extremely tough’’ as a parent, said Kevin, now 61, and school holidays involved the sort of ‘‘physical punishment for bad school reports which parents today would be completely shocked by’’. His affection, when his children had it, was lavish, but it could just as quickly be taken away.
Ian recalled: ‘‘When you were top child the embrace was suffocating and so loving, everything came your way, and then, when you were in disgrace, you’d blotted your copy, no matter what you had done, you were cast out. This was not a man who was beige in any shape or form.’’
Two of the nine Maxwell children died young: Karine of leukaemia aged three, and Michael, the eldest son, who died aged 21 after falling into a coma following a car crash in 1961.
This split the remaining seven children into two groups: Philip, Anne and twins Christine and Isabel, and the younger group of Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine. The older children bore the brunt of their father’s irrational rages.
The focal point of family life was Headington Hall, Maxwell’s mansion in Oxford, where the family would gather for Sunday lunches. ‘‘There was usually one kid in the doghouse and my
mother [Elisabeth] and the other children would rally around.’’ It was the middle of the 1960s, and children were rebelling. ‘‘My father was not into rebelling children,’’ said Ian.
Ian and Kevin responded to their father’s attacks by forming a unit. ‘‘We were very close and the value of that is powerful, it is like two interlocking knights. The most defensive position you can have.’’
Ghislaine, on the other hand, was on her own. Maxwell had been tougher on his daughters. ‘‘I think that’s to do with the Jewish patriarchal view,’’ Ian suggested.
But by the time Maxwell got to Ghislaine he was starting to relax. She is generally considered to have been his favourite. Confident and ambitious, she was the one he took to the glitziest events. He named the £15 million yacht he would later disappear from Lady Ghislaine.
All the children joined the family business. Anne sold its books when her acting career failed to take off. Philip was the managing editor of scientific encyclopedias, Christine edited a bilingual Spanish series for preschool children in America.
Ghislaine dealt with clients – she was in charge of Maxwell’s corporate gifts and sold advertising space. When her father was buying the New York Daily News she was sent ahead to do the groundwork.
Only Ian and Kevin were implicated in the financial scandal that unfolded. When Ian was told his father had gone overboard in November 1991 near the Canary Islands he told me he was simultaneously ‘‘exhilarated to be free of this extraordinary alpha male presence’’ and scared of what the future would be.
The truth was that none of his children would really be free of Maxwell’s presence. The legal case against Ian and Kevin went on for four years, but the public anger over the raiding of the Mirror Group’s pension fund encompassed them all.
The most successful were Christine and Isabel, 69, who started an internet company and amassed a £100m fortune in the 1990s. Philip, 71, lives quietly in London, where he is writing a book. Anne, 70, is a hypnotherapist in Surrey, specialising in children with anxiety disorders.
Ian and Kevin moved into property, with mixed success. Their marriages fell apart. When I met them in 2018 they were in the process of advising developers in Italy who were building student accommodation.
Only Ghislaine could not stay away from the flame. She was said to be inconsolable with grief when her father died. She moved to New York while the trial against her brothers continued.
The year after her father’s death, she was seen on the arm of financier Jeffrey Epstein. She moved into a US$6m apartment.
The source of this wealth has never been clear. She and Epstein are thought to have been a couple briefly, later becoming colleagues, confidants and, in his words, ‘‘best friends’’. Whatever her role, he was powerful and demanding – and those were characteristics Ghislaine knew very well.
The siblings remained close long after Headington Hall was sold. ‘‘We were all a unit before he died – in some ways were more so after his death,’’ said Ian. He and Kevin agreed that their younger sister ‘‘has had some terrible exposure in this country and she is doing what she can to deal with that’’.
At the end of the day, sighed Ian: ‘‘Ghislaine is Ghislaine’’.