The Ghislaine TAPES
Revealed: Arrogant Maxwell’s combative interview with the lawyers of ‘sex slave’
HER arrogance was ultimately her undoing. She could have kept silent and exercised her rights under the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution which allows people to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate them.
But that wasn’t Ghislaine Maxwell’s style. No, this articulate, selfconfident and witty Oxford graduate wasn’t going to face searching questions about the alleged sex abuse of children by her paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein and say nothing.
Silence might have suggested she was guilty and – as she insisted (even as she tried to wriggle out of question after question) – she had nothing to hide.
At deposition sessions in April 2016 and another that July after she refused to answer certain questions, Maxwell was grilled by two top New York lawyers working pro bono for Virginia Roberts.
Now 36, she claims Maxwell recruited her as an underage sex slave for Epstein’s perverted child trafficking ring. The Mail has acquired a transcript of the video depositions in the offices of Miss Roberts’s lawyers, Boies Schiller & Flexner, when she was suing Maxwell for libel.
So cocksure was Maxwell, the entitled daughter of corrupt media mogul Robert Maxwell and friend of the super-rich and famous, she even accused Miss Roberts’s team of ‘mangling’ a question.
On another occasion, she asked one of the highly experienced lawyers to repeat a query ‘properly’. And, needless to say, Maxwell dismissed Miss Roberts’s claims as ‘rubbish’.
TO
date, this is the only account by Maxwell of her notorious relationship with the childabusing financier. In it, she certainly comes across as haughty and supercilious but, at the time, she may have felt she held the whip hand.
Epstein was still at large – he was to kill himself three years later in his New York jail cell – and had near-limitless funds to pay for the best lawyers.
Miss Roberts was an ordinary motherof-three with no powerful friends.
Pleading her innocence and ignorance of the twisted tale of sexual slavery related by Miss Roberts, the British socialite at one point slammed her hand down on the table, projecting the very picture of injured innocence.
This month, Maxwell was dramatically seized by the FBI from her million-dollar New England hideout and is languishing on suicide watch in a grim Brooklyn jail, awaiting trial on six counts relating to trafficking girls as young as 14.
Her blithe assurances in the 2016 depositions have come back to haunt her as two of the charges are for perjury in those interviews. If convicted, she faces up to 35 years behind bars.
New York prosecutors say Maxwell, 58, lied under oath about ‘her role in facilitating the abuse of minor victims by Jeffrey Epstein’.
Her lawyers have described the charges as ‘meritless’ and she is due to appear in court on a bail hearing next week.
Despite rumours Maxwell will try to wrangle a plea deal – agreeing to lesser offences in exchange for a shorter sen
tence – prosecutors will face immense pressure not to agree.
This follows outrage over a 2008 deal that saw Epstein serve just 13 months in a Florida county jail and Maxwell face no charges at all.
And if there’s no deal on the table, she may never talk. Her extraordinary 2016 depositions may well be the most she ever says about the scandal.
During those sessions, Maxwell’s lawyer Jeffrey Pagliuca aggressively interrupted at every turn to object to questions by Miss Roberts’s attorneys, which Maxwell often claimed not to understand.
Asked if she had seen an underage girl at Epstein’s home, she told the surprised lawyer: ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.
‘How would I possibly know how [old] someone is? ... As far as I’m concerned, everyone who came to his house was an adult professional person.’ Maxwell did not deny she was a recruiter for Epstein but insisted she was filling the myriad positions that any busy multimillionaire might need.
‘There were six homes,’ she said. ‘ I hired assistants, architects, decorators, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, pool people, pilots. I hired all sorts of people.’
Scores of alleged victims say she also hired them as underage sexual masseuses but Maxwell insisted otherwise. ‘A very small part of my job was from time to time to find adult professional massage therapists for Jeffrey,’ she said.
Photographs exist of Maxwell and Miss Roberts together all over the world – including, notoriously, with Prince Andrew in Maxwell’s London home in 2001 – but she still had difficulty recalling the girl.
ASKED
if she remembered the teenager giving massages to Epstein, Maxwell said vaguely: ‘Only in the most general terms. It would be somebody who would give him a massage, and that’s it.’ The women who massaged Epstein always ‘ seemed’ to be adults, she added.
Her comments about Miss Roberts, the vulnerable child of a troubled home, dripped with disdain.
Was Virginia somebody Maxwell had considered an adult? ‘I didn’t consider her at all because she is not somebody that I really interacted with,’ she replied loftily.
She had no recollection of giving Miss Roberts, as the younger woman had claimed, a mobile phone so she was always on call.
Nor could she remember how often Miss Roberts came to Epstein’s house to massage him; she could not recall her ever coming to his New York mansion.
The lawyer had to ‘understand’, she explained, that she ‘wasn’t with Jeffrey all the time’ but ‘only’ less than half the time.
When Maxwell was presented with flight records indicating that Miss Roberts travelled repeatedly with the paedophile on his private jet, Maxwell claimed to be flummoxed as to why she was there. It wouldn’t have been her job to know. ‘He invited her,’ she said.
‘What I can say is that I barely would remember her. If not for all of this rubbish, I probably wouldn’t remember her at all, except she did come from time to time.’
But her hazy memories abruptly cleared when she claimed to spot a mistake in Miss Roberts’s recollection of her first meeting with Epstein. While Miss Roberts said she had been driven to his Palm Beach home by her father, Maxwell insisted it was her mother.
She knew this, she said, because she had been outside chatting to her mother while Miss Roberts went inside to massage Epstein.
While Miss Roberts, then underage, has insisted she had sex with Epstein during that first massage, Maxwell argued bizarrely this would have been ‘impossible’ as she was outside with Miss Roberts’s mother ‘ the entire time’. When Miss Roberts’s lawyer tried to move on to her client’s second visit to Epstein, a flustered Maxwell objected.
She said: ‘I have been so absolutely appalled by her story…and I apologise for my banging at the table earlier, I hope you accept my apology.
‘It’s born out of years of feeling the pressure of this entire lie that she has perpetrated.’
Epstein, Maxwell alleged, received only one massage per day – nothing like the four or five others claimed.
The age of his masseuses was another issue she tried to avoid discussing.
‘ I looked for people... to fill professional jobs in professional situations,’ she said. Asked bluntly if she ‘ believed Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused minors’, Maxwell’s reply was a masterclass in prevarication. Five times she repeated her mantra that she could only ‘testify’ to what she knew and what she knew was that Miss Roberts was a liar. Asked if she had ever been involved in ‘ any illegal activity’, Maxwell disclosed that she had long ago been arrested for drinkdriving in the Uk. It was a rare, possibly unique, admission. Next week – four years on from her conceited encounter with Miss Roberts’s lawyers – Maxwell will again be under oath. This time, the stakes are infinitely higher.