This mystery is far from over
So Ghislaine Maxwell has finally been flushed out of her double-height party barn in New Hampshire, a ‘‘timber-framed’’ Hansel and Gretel gingerbread lair where she’s apparently been holed up playing Jenga for months.
Not Paris, Scotland, Los Angeles or any of the other farflung and exotic places she’d been rumoured to have fled to with her signature wardrobe of padded jackets, statement tankinis and doughnut hats, but a quiet nowheresville just a hundred miles from her last bolthole near Boston.
In fact, she became such a mystery, you’d have thought the FBI would have been falling over itself to parade her in public after arresting her on charges of sexual abuse, like an X-rated Big Foot. But no. Harvey Weinstein was practically dragged out in leg irons; Jeffrey Epstein’s mugshot was everywhere. But of his ‘‘best friend’’ we saw zero – no details, no pictures, no reports from the court she attended via video link. It felt very controlled.
Where does this make me think the whole case is heading?
Into the sunlit uplands of clarity, truth and closure, or back to the murky Florida swamp? Will we really get to the bottom of this sordid circus, or simply be treated to the carefully choreographed results of months of horse-trading and behind-the-scenes legal bargaining in which the only real objective, yet again, is damage limitation for rich, powerful, shyster men?
Even the events surrounding her arrest seemed woolly: why did the FBI pounce now, when it has been ‘‘keeping tabs’’ on her for months? Why did we immediately learn she will be ‘‘naming names’’ and ‘‘cooperating’’ fully, when no-one with her intelligence would blab the moment she was arrested?
Conclusion: what we were looking at wasn’t the beginning of a negotiation, but the end. While the victims tell the stories of their terrible rapes to courts and camera crews, I wouldn’t be surprised if Maxwell doesn’t even have to testify in open court.
Of course, the victims will want as much information as possible to come out into the open. If I were the New York prosecutor, I wouldn’t stop until every shred of video footage from the many secret cameras at Epstein’s satanic homes was laid out for examination, so every last name of every last man who slept with underage girls at his properties was available for the world to see.
Who were these dreadful crocodiles who hung out by the pool on his crappy Virgin island? And who were the women? His three personal assistants – who were lavished with gifts, including cars and nannies for their children – have vanished.
The billionaires and politicians will hope Prince Andrew continues to take the global flak – for the past decade the royal dunderhead has been performing a distraction service for billionaire sex cases worldwide. Through a combination of thickness and pompous naivety, there hasn’t been one snafu he hasn’t made.
It’s unlikely he’s grasped how high the stakes are, or twigged that Ghislaine is now the most powerful woman in America. Whatever she says in the coming months could be terminal for any politician, although probably not for the already terminated Andrew.