A robustly UN-BBC telling of Ghislaine’s grisly tale
‘This is a fairy story the wrong way around,” says the reporter John Sweeney at the beginning of his new podcast, Hunting Ghislaine, an in-depth investigation into the life of Ghislaine Maxwell. “Where a princess becomes something of a monster herself.” How did the elite socialite Ghislaine Maxwell end up where she is today, embroiled in an international scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, and awaiting trial in the United States for sex trafficking?
Sweeney is familiar with the monstrous, and those who are accused of being so. In his career with the BBC, in particular with Panorama and Newsnight, he reported on murders, wrongful accusations, and, most famously, Scientology, which led to an encounter in which he shouted at the Scientology representative Tommy Davies (Sweeney later apologised). He left the BBC last year.
This podcast comes from the corporation’s competitor, Global.
In the first episode, the focus is on Ghislaine’s childhood, and her father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, an intimidating, powerful brute of a man with disturbing habits who died in mysterious circumstances on the yacht named after his daughter. There were troubling insights into Ghislaine’s early years: Robert Maxwell often publicly humiliated his children, and although Ghislaine was his favourite, there were suggestions that he beat her, and the relationship was not normal or healthy. Did these early experiences affect her future actions and her relationship with Epstein?
The storytelling over the initial 40-minute episode is pacy and well-structured thanks to some slick production from Ruth Barnes, director of the podcast production company Chalk + Blade. More than once, Sweeney invites Barnes to discuss a particularly complex aspect of the story with him in order to get it straight. These are helpful interludes, with Barnes’s careful, inquisitive rationality providing a useful temper for Sweeney’s more blasting style.
But Sweeney’s voice, his rumbling growl and his geezerish attitude to chasing down a story no matter how unsavoury the people it concerns, all turns out to be rather a good fit for this subject in particular. He does a brief but wonderfully disgusting impression of the foul Robert Maxwell devouring caviar like a hog at a trough. This is a story about sex trafficking, abuse, blighted childhoods, astonishing cruelty, gangsters and deeply messed-up people. Sweeney leans into the horrors of his reporting and certainly relishes the details, but isn’t ever seduced by them; he tells the story from a blazing moral core.
And he seems to thoroughly enjoy being unshackled from the BBC’S requirements of impartiality. It will be interesting to compare the podcast to the BBC’S own TV series on the Maxwell family, due for broadcast next year. Here, Sweeney is almost defiantly UN-BBC. At one point, he presents some of Robert Maxwell’s claims for the legitimacy of his business dealings, then immediately dismisses them as “b------s”. He quotes Larkin’s This Be the Verse without censorship, and calls Ghislaine Maxwell “a handmaiden to child abuse”. Perhaps Sweeney’s got the gloves off because you have to get your hands dirty in order to understand these people.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, with the potential to implicate high profile figures around the world, is set to be one of the most explosive international news stories of the era, and Sweeney’s unravelling of her life is a gripping, essential introduction to what happened and what could be at stake.
In happier news, Boom Radio is a new radio station announced this week aimed at baby boomers, which is to say the 14 million people in the UK between the age of 55 and 75. It will launch on DAB next year. Early indications from the team, which includes radio industry veterans Phil Riley and David Lloyd, suggest that the focus will be on music from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a selection of programmes about interests such as gardening and books.
Self-described boomers I’ve spoken to insist that although they are indeed heartily sick of radio that ignores older listeners in favour of a youth demographic, the radio they really want to hear should feel current, not stuck in the past. People over 55 have not been in a coma for 30 years.
It sounds as if this station will be a welcome competitor for Radio 2, but is it, dare I say, a little ageist to suggest that all over-55s want to hear the same sort of radio? This age group contains people with a diverse mixture of tastes, and plenty to contribute themselves. Let’s hope that Boom Radio hasn’t underestimated those it wants to attract.