Why ARE the rich and powerful so in thrall to Maxwell’s daughter?
By Guy Adams and Tom Leonard
AT A RECENT technology conference outside New York, delegates were introduced to a smartly-dressed woman with short, dark hair and a cut-glass English accent who would be giving a keynote speech.
According to the event’s host, this person was ‘easily one of the smartest and most fascinating people I have ever met’.
‘This is proven,’ he declared, ‘by the fact that she holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Oxford University, is a private helicopter pilot, a trained EMT [paramedic] . . . and a deep worker submarine pilot, in addition to being fluent in four languages.’
The name of this remarkable- sounding individual? Ghislaine Maxwell.
And her ensuing speech was one of a series that the 53-year-old made last year to promote the launch of her new marine charity, Terramar. Citing statistics about pollution and overfishing, Ms Maxwell urged her audience to become supporters of the non-profit organisation.
She explained how Terramar — which boasts her friends Sir Richard Branson and Lord Mandelson as supporters — runs a jazzy website which carries educational literature, petitions and fund-raising tools devoted to campaigning for marine conservation.
Maxwell’s speech hinged on a cute, if somewhat rambling, personal story: how she, the youngest daughter of press baron Robert Maxwell, had during childhood forged a lifelong obsession with the high seas.
‘I started diving when I was nine,’ she declared, adding that from a remarkably early age, she then ‘ realised I was going to dedicate the rest of my life to taking an involvement with and bringing an education around the ocean’. So far, so righteous. Yet a cynic might have wondered if Maxwell’s uplifting yarn accurately reflected the ups and downs of her real life story. For charity work and marine conservation aren’t exactly what she is famed for.
Instead, this scion of one of Britain’s most fabulously corrupt business dynasties is rather better known for attending glamorous parties, and her friendships with some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.
Based in Manhattan since the early 1990s, she describes herself as a ‘ business consultant’ in Companies House documents, and as a ‘social media marketing’ expert on Linked In, the business networking website.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s main activity, however, is networking. A gregarious woman, she is widely regarded as one of New York’s and London’s best-connected socialites.
‘ She has inherited her father’s slightly bombastic charisma, and is one of those people who successfully trades on the fact that she knows lots of other fancy people, including Clintons, Kennedys and various royals,’ says one acquaintance.
Lately, however, a shadow has been cast across this glamorous existence.
It stretches back to June 2008. That was when Jeffrey Epstein, Ms Maxwell’s billionaire ex-boyfriend, benefactor, and almost- constant associate for most of her adult life, was sent to prison for child sex offences in Florida.
Ever since, Ms Maxwell has been a central figure in a string of sensational lawsuits in which it has been alleged that she acted as a ‘madame’ for the wealthy paedophile, helping to recruit under-age girls to work as ‘ sex slaves’ at Epstein’s luxury properties in New York, Florida and the Caribbean.
In court papers, it has been claimed that Maxwell not only trafficked girls to provide ‘ erotic massages’ to Epstein and a host of his famous and influential friends, but that she also took part in the abuse.
One lawsuit accuses her, in graphic detail, of joining the paedophile financier in ‘ sexually assaulting, battering, exploiting and abusing’ a 15-year-old girl.
Ms Maxwell, it must be stressed, has always vigorously denied each and every allegation against her.
But the scandal has failed to go away. A week ago, it returned to the front pages when an American woman called Virginia Roberts said in court papers that Ms Maxwell had recruited her to Epstein’s harem in the late 1990s before, in 2001, flying her across the Atlantic to meet Prince Andrew.
Roberts, who was 17, then claims to have slept with Andrew three times.
Ms Maxwell has called her claims ‘obvious lies’, while the Prince has put out three statements to the same effect.
Intriguingly, the Prince — forced, amid public outrage, to discontinue his friendship with Epstein in 2011 — remains on friendly terms with Ghislaine.
Indeed, a photograph emerged this week of Ms Maxwell — wearing a blonde wig, midriff-baring top and gold trousers — with her arm draped around Prince Andrew’s shoulders at a Hookers & Pimps Halloween party in New York hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum in 2000.
What is more, in 2013, Andrew attended her birthday party at the Dorchester Hotel in London. The starry guest-list included Britain’s richest MP, Labour’s Shaun Woodward, and his Sainsbury’s heiress wife Camilla, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and former It-girl Tamara Beckwith.
Last year, Ghislaine maintained a near- constant presence among New York’s smart society, and was photographed socialising with actress Julianna Margulies, movie star Josh Lucas and Jimmy Choo entrepreneur Tamara Mellon.
All of which invites two questions. First: how, exactly, does this middleaged woman retain such stratospheric social cachet, untainted by not only her crooked family’s fall from grace but also one of the most tawdry sex scandals of modern times?
Second: how is she able to move in the circles of the international super- rich, inhabiting multimillion-pound homes in New York and London despite having no publicly discernible source of commensurate income?
Ms Maxwell’s curious story begins in 1980s London, where, after attending Marlborough College and then Oxford University, she started the Kit Kat Club, which purported to be an alternative to the old- school-tie network for high-powered women.
She then worked for her father’s newspaper, The European, and was made a director of Oxford United football club, which he owned.
This happy existence imploded in 1991, when Robert Maxwell drowned after falling off a yacht named Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter.
It soon emerged that his newspaper empire was built on the proceeds of epic criminality, which had seen him defraud its pension fund of almost half a billion pounds.
Vilified in the UK, where Robert Maxwell’s victims were angered by the plush lifestyle his family had enjoyed at their expense, Ghislaine relocated to New York, where she took up residence in a small apar tment, and set about re- inventing herself as a socialite. It was to prove an inspired move. ‘ Ghislaine has always been a prodigious networker,’ says one acquaintance. ‘People in New York didn’t care about the pensions scandal. And, of course, they are all suckers for an English accent.’
Maxwell, then 30, quickly met Epstein, a billionaire financier almost a decade her senior. Reportedly attracted by his resemblance to her father, she was soon being photographed as his guest at social functions.
‘He saved her,’ one friend told Vanity Fair. ‘When her father died, she was a wreck; inconsolable. And then Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that — and never will.’
Initial romance soon mellowed into close friendship, however, amid rumours that Epstein wanted to see other women.
Ghislaine duly became a fixer-cum-confidante, helping run Epstein’s households, travel and social calendar — a role she would continue for over a decade.
‘She has unbelievable contacts, and her thing is introducing people,’ a friend once said. ‘From a point where he knew no one of importance, she took him into circles in which the Clintons and Kennedys moved.’
In return, Epstein gave Maxwell a jet- set lifestyle far beyond anything she could afford from the reported £80,000-a-year trust fund set up for her by her crooked father.
She travelled in Epstein’s private jets (with everyone from Bill Clinton to Naomi Campbell), and spent time at his outrageously luxurious homes in Florida and his private island in the U. S. Virgin Islands.
Yet there was a dark side to Jeffrey Epstein, laid bare in a string of lawsuits, witness statements and depositions filed in Florida courts by the tycoon’s alleged victims.
Many mention Ghislaine by name — although it must again be stressed that she denies wrongdoing. In 2010, for example, a woman called ‘BB’
‘She has got her father’s bombastic
charisma’ Prince Andrew is still on friendly terms with her
claimed that during the years she was allegedly abused by epstein, Maxwell lived at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.
‘she maintained a wardrobe at epstein’s estate, in which she kept sexual toys and outfits,’ the lawsuit claimed, adding that Maxwell, ‘upon her own volition, actively and passively participated in sexual acts with minor girls she recruited’.
Meanwhile, a police ‘ incident report’ from 2006, filed as evidence in a different case, contains a detective’s account of an interview with Johanna sjoberg, a girl alleged to have worked for epstein and who also met Prince Andrew.
‘ sjoberg stated that she met epstein three years ago when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her . . . to work around epstein’s house. Maxwell told her they needed some girls to work at the house to answer phones and run errands,’ it says.
sjoberg, a pretty, 23-year-old student, was allegedly later asked by epstein to provide erotic massage.
In 2009, lawyers preparing a case against epstein meanwhile took a deposition from Alfredo Rodriguez, epstein’s former housekeeper. In it, he claimed that Ms Maxwell kept an office under the stairs in the Palm Beach property, saying her computer contained a list of girls who came to give massages there, along with their phone numbers.
Rodriguez further claimed that Maxwell kept nude pictures of some of these girls on the device. He believed these photos had been taken without the young women’s knowledge. ‘ I don’t think they knew they were being photographed,’ he said.
Then there are the extraordinary, but disputed, claims by Roberts, who alleges that she spent four years as epstein’s ‘ slave’ after being introduced to him at the age of 15 by Maxwell — whom she’d met while working at a local beauty spa.
On her first visit to epstein’s home, where she’d been offered work as a masseur, she was led into a bedroom, where epstein was lying naked on a table.
After she had rubbed his back for 40 minutes, the tycoon rolled over, exposing himself, she claims. A legal paper dating back to 2009 claims Ms Maxwell ‘ then took off her own shirt and left on her underwear’ and started rubbing the upper part of her body across epstein’s body, showing Roberts what she was supposed to do. ‘Maxwell then told [Roberts] to take off her own clothes . . . The encounter escalated.’
Roberts claims to have subsequently joined a harem paid $ 200 a time to provide erotic massages to epstein and his friends — including, she alleges, Prince Andrew — in exclusive locations around the world.
‘Jeffrey loved the latex outfits Ghislaine had for us girls,’ reads a 2011 court filing. ‘He had bondage outfits, he had all different kinds of outfits, but his favourite was the schoolgirl. Ghislaine would take me to dress up to surprise Jeffrey … that would include wearing a tiny little skirt with nothing underneath.’
Regarding Roberts’ claims, Ms Maxwell’s spokesman said this week: ‘each time the story is retold it changes, with new salacious details about public figures … the claims are obvious lies and should be treated as such.’
It was also claimed in court papers unearthed this week that Ms Maxwell, to dodge questions about these allegations, lied to lawyers that she had to return to the UK — and had no plans to return to the U.s. — because her elderly mother was ‘deathly ill’.
However, Ms Maxwell then popped up at Bill Clinton’s daughter’s wedding in America the following month.
Despite the scandal, Maxwell certainly owes plenty to her relationship with the convicted paedophile. Take, for example, her magnificent home in a sixstorey house on New york’s east 65th street.
The property was purchased in 2010 by Darren Indyke, a local attorney with long- standing links to epstein. It was promptly split into apartments, one of which is now Ms Maxwell’s residence. It is unclear from public records who actually owns it. Consider also a correspondence address that Maxwell gives to Companies House. It’s a tiny office in a business centre next to a dive school in st Thomas, U. s. Virgin Islands. several epstein firms are also registered to the same location. Unpicking the rest of Maxwell’s financial interests is tricky. Her London home, where Prince Andrew was photographed with Virginia Roberts and Ms Maxwell, is a £ 3.7 million mews property
‘Ghislaine would dress me up as a schoolgirl for him’
in Belgravia. Land Registry documents list her as the owner ‘care of M.C. Grumbridge, of the Hogarth Group’, a company which runs health clubs in West London. Grumbridge, in turn, is Malcolm Grumbridge, a lawyer often described as a Maxwell family associate.
Then there is Ellmax, a company she set up in 2012. Its registered UK address is a cottage in Wiltshire occupied by Catherine Vaughan Edwards, another old friend. Its U.S. base is Maxwell’s New York flat, via one ‘Dana Burns’, which appears to be an alias that Ghislaine uses.
In the UK, she also has a directorship of Jemma Kidd Make Up Limited, a beauty firm run by the socialite and sister of supermodel Jodie, which went into administration in 2012 with debts of £ 2 million.
Fellow directors are Jack Kidd, Jemma’s polo-player brother, Arthur Mornington, the Duke of Wellington’s son and Jemma’s husband, Grace Fodor, a stylist and star of the BBC show Be Your Own Boss, and Mark Crocker, the stepson of the late racehorse breeder Lord Oaksey, who is married to Samantha Cameron’s personal assistant Isabel Spearman.
Finally comes the charity Terramar, which boasts two other directors: Vaughan Edwards and Lucy Clive, an ‘art director’ who is also the girlfriend of Ghislaine’s brother, Kevin Maxwell.
Founded in August 2013, it hasn’t yet filed accounts with either Companies House or the Charities Commission.
On the personal front, Maxwell has had just one reported boyfriend in recent years: computer billionaire Ted Waitt, with whom she stepped out briefly in 2011.
Instead, in public at least, she claims to now be devoted to philanthropy — a calling that she doubtless hopes will help rehabilitate her battered personal image.
Back at the tech conference, Maxwell ended her recent speech by saying that she has finally found her mission in life with Terramar, adding: ‘I have discovered that it doesn’t matter what age you are, so long as you follow your passion.’
The audience nodded approvingly — seemingly oblivious to one fact: that, for a woman accused of cynically aiding a powerful man to prey on vulnerable girls less than half his age, it was, at best, a deeply unfortunate turn of phrase.