A FIVE-STAR FUGITIVE
$20m from Epstein. A luxury hideaway bought in cash. And a pampered life on the run a world away from the jail cell where she awaits her fate...
GHISLAINE Maxwell was never going to turn up shivering in a backwoods cabin or swatting away bugs in some grass hut on an uncharted tropical island. The public-school and Oxford-educated socialite was the spoilt favourite child of an indulgent tycoon father, and moneyed companion of billionaires and heads of state. The woman who was until this week the world’s most famous fugitive hasn’t let her standards slip.
When the FBI and police finally caught up with her on Thursday morning, it was at the imposing entrance to a luxurious New England home worth more than $1million (£860,000) which she’d bought in cash in December – continuing what the FBI acidly described as her ‘life of privilege’.
The contrast with her former companion and alleged partner-incrime Jeffrey Epstein, who spent his final days looking over his shoulder in a grim New York jail cell, couldn’t have been more stark. A year ago this month, the paedophile financier was arrested in Manhattan for the sex trafficking of minors. The alleged ‘madam’ accused of procuring him underage girls and sometimes taking part in the abuse herself mysteriously slipped out of sight.
Maxwell, the 58-year-old daughter of the late, disgraced newspaper tycoon Robert, was photographed sitting in an outdoor Los Angeles burger bar days after Epstein’s death. However, it was revealed the picture had been staged, designed to throw pursuers off the scent.
So where was she? The disappearing act, even as the FBI made clear it wanted to talk to her, was so impressive some concluded her bevy of rich and powerful friends must have been sheltering her.
THE sightings and rumours were appropriately glamorous and exciting – she was reportedly staying at the £2million seafront home in Massachusetts of a rich boyfriend, Scott Borgerson, and later she was spotted at a ritzy resort in Brazil with a friend of Epstein, the boss of a model agency.
Maxwell’s mother Elisabeth was French and she has family in France, so it didn’t seem too surprising when it was rumoured she was staying in a chateau in the south of that country; only a few days ago, we were confidently told she was staying in the Paris flat of a French millionaire.
And given rumours that Epstein and Maxwell were Mossad spies, nor did it sound completely outrageous when she was reported to be living in an Israeli ‘safe house’. In February, it was even claimed she was hiding on a submarine.
The reality, it has now emerged, is less thrilling. According to US prosecutors, Maxwell spent the year ‘hiding out in locations in New England’, finally finding what she thought was the perfect bolthole, one so secure and secluded that nobody would find her. The large hillside home she bought in December in the isolated and deathly quiet New Hampshire town of Bradford, certainly lives up to its name – Tuckedaway.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t tucked away enough. The FBI not only arrested her there on Thursday morning but then filed a court memo which laid bare how its investigators had known a lot more about what Maxwell has been up to than she probably realised.
Describing how she went to ‘extreme lengths’ to remain undetected over the past 12 months, they said she had moved at least twice in that time but remained in New England – one of those locations could well have been the boyfriend’s multi-million pound home in Massachusetts. Not only that, she switched her primary phone number, which she registered under the name ‘G Max’, and email address, ordering delivery packages under a pseudonym.
Maxwell did all she could to move to Bradford without leaving a trace, say investigators and the estate agent who handled the deal.
After the vendor of the house refused to let her buy it without her name being on purchase papers, Maxwell did it through what officials called a ‘carefully anonymised LLC’, a private company set up to conceal her identity.
And she hasn’t been alone in all these shenanigans. A mystery man with a posh English accent accompanied Maxwell twice to look at the property, presenting themselves to the estate agent as husband and wife. The agent concluded Maxwell must have been a film star as the man was so anxious to keep her identity a secret.
He sounds like the same tall and bearded man who opened the door to police on Thursday morning.
Maxwell reportedly ran into a bedroom but eventually came out, demanding her lawyer.
The charges are extremely serious, carrying a risk of life imprisonment if she is found guilty.
Prosecutors have further justified their insistence that Maxwell is denied bail by pointing to evidence of her huge wealth, arguing she poses a flight risk. She is currently held in a nearby jail. An American investigation of her finances found she had held 15 bank accounts since 2016 and that huge amounts have been transferred between them and between accounts associated with Epstein.
In total, Maxwell is alleged to have received more than $20million from Epstein between 2007 and 2011.
In addition, she admitted she has foreign bank accounts with more than $1million in them, said officials. She also received a large sum from the proceeds from a house she sold in Midtown Manhattan in 2016 for $15million (£12.1million), and which may have been given to her by Epstein.
At about the time she sold the mansion, and US authorities began examining hundreds of criminal complaints against Epstein, Maxwell – once ubiquitous on the New York social scene – started shun
ning the limelight. In 2017, her lawyers told a judge that they had no idea where she was. They thought she might be in London, but claimed to have no current address.
And yet investigators now say she has taken at least 15 international flights, including to Britain, Qatar and Japan, in the past three years. She has three passports – British, American and French.
While using the passports would have rung alarm bells, it appears she has been able to travel within the US. Henk van Ess, a respected Dutch investigator, claimed on Thursday that by working out Maxwell’s computer address from emails she sent to an environmental charity she set up, he had been able to plot her locations, finding that she recently travelled from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire.
ExPErTS believe the FBI didn’t act earlier because it was waiting until it believed it had a copperbottomed case against her. Her closest neighbour in Bradford, who asked to be identified as ‘John’, said he had noticed an unusually higher number of helicopters and light planes flying overhead since she bought the house in December. Might she have been aware she was being watched? Interestingly, the agent who sold Maxwell the house said she had asked questions about how often planes flew over the property.
As to what she has been doing in hiding, Vanity Fair yesterday cited friends who say her once-opulent life has been ‘stripped down to the bare essentials’ – iPhone, iPad, laptop, casual clothing, and an inexpensive pressure cooker with which she emulated her Cordon Bleu–trained mother’s French recipes: Beef bourguignon, red cabbage and apples, and leek soup.
She keeps fit obsessively, running and swimming. Before gyms closed down, she regularly boxed.
She began to take extra precautions when she started receiving death threats, both online and by phone. The threats accelerated with Epstein’s arrest and have become ‘a routine part of her life’.
Every day she spoke with her lawyers about her defence, paying a team in New York, Colorado, the UK and the Virgin Islands rates of up to $1,500 an hour.
A friend said: ‘She speaks to lawyers and blood relatives. That is her universe. Defending all of these cases is a full-time job.’
At night, she read – including Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill and a book about Epstein by Bradley Edwards, the Florida lawyer who pursued him.
Bradford is a classic pretty little New England town of 1,650 people with white clapboard houses and – as every resident was happy to admit – nothing going on.
Hearty summer pursuits of hiking, camping and boating on the numerous local lakes are attractions, while amenities don’t run beyond a takeaway pizza restaurant, a branch of Dunkin’ Donuts, a petrol station, a small organic vegetables market and a restaurant offering ‘casual country dining’ which staff categorically confirmed Maxwell had never visited. Most of the neighbours are bluecollar types in modest homes.
It is, for all these reasons, possibly the last place one would expect to find a jet-setting, networking, party-loving bon viveuse like Ghislaine Maxwell. But it’s one great strength was its near-invisibility. The entrance is a heavily wooded track running off a remote hilly road, unsurfaced in places, on the outskirts of Bradford.
The timber-frame house has four bedrooms, four bathrooms and sweeping views of the Mount Sunapee foothills.
Built in 2002, it has a ‘great room’ with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and ‘cathedral ceiling’.
Many locals weren’t even aware it existed and drove round looking for it after news of the arrest broke. ‘We’ve been here 20 years and this is the most excitement we’ve ever had,’ said neighbour Tricia Dunne. Dick Morris, who lives opposite her drive, wasn’t fazed by her infamy. ‘She was just trying to keep herself out of prison,’ he said.