From spoiled child to jailed sex trafficker
’Ogres’ who dominated shamed socialite’s life
THE last time I met Ghislaine Maxwell she ran across the room, gave me a hug and a kiss and thanked me for helping her. That was 30 years ago, shortly after the death of her father, the former Mirror publisher Robert Maxwell.
It was days later that it emerged that he had stolen millions of pounds from the pension funds of companies he owned, including the Mirror Group.
Now, as she begins her 20-year jail term for trafficking schoolgirls to satisfy herself and her paedophile lover Jeffrey Epstein, she will have plenty of time to reflect on the two men, often described as ogres, who dominated her life.
Was her demise caused by her affection for these two unsavoury characters?
Our last meeting was in London. I was the reporter who had accompanied her, alongside her mother Betty and brother Philip, to the Canary Islands where her tycoon father had fallen overboard from his yacht – named the Lady Ghislaine after his favourite child.
There we retrieved the body and flew it to Jerusalem for an elaborate funeral and burial on the Mount of Olives. Robert Maxwell was then still regarded as a respected former army officer, MP and successful publisher.
Ghislaine joined us on the yacht after flying from New York, where she lived. She obviously adored her father but, like her mother, shed no tears of grief in public.
She was pleasant company, reminiscing at meals about the good family times.
When it was decided it would be a good idea if she spoke to the massive media presence waiting alongside the moored yacht, she asked if I could write her a short speech.
She delivered this calmly, showing no obvious emotion. A noted linguist, like all her family, she switched easily to flawless Spanish for the local journalists. On the flight from Las Palmas to Jerusalem (in a specially chartered plane as the coffin was too large and heavy for the Maxwell Gulfstream jet) Ghislaine led her mother and brother to the rear compartment where they stood for a moment while she placed flowers on the coffin. On arrival at the airport, Ghislaine organised the unloading of the coffin. Throughout she was the kind, loving daughter. Later, when the rest of the Maxwell family had flown to Israel from London, Ghislaine called me to her room at the King David Hotel, where she asked if I would write her appreciation of her father for the Daily Mirror. Was she aware then of the fraudulent actions committed by him, which were soon to come to light?
A pointer had come as we were all leaving the Lady Ghislaine late at night for the 2am flight from Gran Canaria.
As we walked down the gangplank, with the sky lit up by TV cameras and flash lights, Betty noticed Ghislaine was missing. She asked me to hurry her up.
I found her in the lounge of the yacht grabbing pieces of paper and ordering the crew to shred documents. Did she have an inkling of what had been going on?
There have even been suggestions, all unproven, that Robert Maxwell helped finance Epstein at an early stage.
Ghislaine was very young when she first let it be known she was not to be ignored.
She was born on December 28, 1961, the ninth and last of the Maxwell children.
Three days later her eldest brother Michael, then aged 15, was in a serious car crash which left him in a coma until his death seven years later.
The trauma brought about by this tragedy overshadowed Ghislaine’s arrival.
As the family trudged backwards and forwards from visits to Michael, Ghislaine, then three, declared: “Mummy, I exist.”
There is every indication that Robert Maxwell made up for this as she grew up.
Mum Betty Maxwell said: “Ghislaine became spoiled, the only one of my children I can truly say that about.”
At the time of her father’s death, Ghisrk, laine was living in New York where she was his representative after he acquired the struggling New York Daily News.
There, she began a romantic relation ship with financier Jeffrey Epstein after being introduced to him by her dad in the 1980s.
With her family’s reputation in ruins, and two of her brothers, Ian and Kevin, arrested and charged with fraud, she was forced to move out of her impressive four-storey Upper East Side mansion to live in a studio flat near Central Park.
But while her father’s guilt was obvious to most people, Ghislaine continued to defend him. “He wasn’t a crook,” she told an interviewer in 1992.
“A thief to me is somebody who steals money. Do I think that my father did that? No. I don’t know what he did. Obviously, something happened. Did he put it in his pocket? Did he run off with the money?
No. That’s my definition of a crook.” Ghislaine began working at an estate agent’s office in the city, while she also had an £80,000-a-year income from a trust fund her father had set up for her.
But it was not enough to have paid for her rise to prominence in the following years as a New York socialite.
Billionaire Epstein had taken the place of her father in financing her lifestyle.
While the nature of their relationship is still unclear, several of Epstein’s household employees later testified that he referred to her as his “main girlfriend” who also hired, fired, and supervised his staff.
The couple were known to have friends including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew. In 2000, Maxwell and Epstein attended a party thrown by Prince Andrew at Sandringham, which Andrew later insisted was “a straightforward shooting weekend”.
Of course now we know that Ghislaine also lured young girls to Epstein’s mansions to be molested. In her trial the prosecutor said she had “preyed on vulnerable young girls, manipulated them and served them up to be sexually abused” by the disgraced financier, who killed himself in jail in 2019.
She will spend the next two decades behind bars – a shocking and sad end to her story and not one any of us imagined when we saw her during the happiest times of her life at her father’s side.
Like when Maxwell announced that the Mirror’s Who Dares Wins contest would produce the first £1million prize, and “Mr Maxwell’s pretty daughter Ghislaine, 22, was on hand to see the cash in all denominations wheeled out under the watchful eyes of police and bank security staff ”.
And the time I sat with the two of them in the directors’ box at Maxwell-owned Oxford United as they pawed each other excitedly as their team won a cup match. Robert Maxwell, in a somewhat Michelin Man impression, later ran a lap of honour.
These will be the memories Ghislaine Maxwell will be left with in the loneliness of her prison cell.
She was a winner that day in Oxford – but no longer.
Ghislaine became spoiled.. the only one of my children to be so
BETTY MAXWELL GHISLAINE’S MOTHER