‘Ghislaine must remain innocent until trial judge says she is guilty’
Ian Maxwell says his sister is being denied bail after being convicted by the court of public opinion
Ian Maxwell thumps the arm of his chair. “It makes me damn angry,” he says, in reference to his sister’s plight. Ghislaine Maxwell has already been incarcerated for 471 days, held in isolation in a tiny jail cell in Brooklyn, awaiting trial on sexual abuse and trafficking charges for alleged crimes committed between 20 and 27 years ago. She has already spent far longer in jail than Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier and her former boyfriend.
Ian Maxwell, the big brother of the Maxwell clan, finds it hard to believe his family continues to attract so much attention, since his father Robert Maxwell was declared to be unfit to run a publicly listed company 50 years ago by an official report of the Department of Trade and Industry.
“This is Succession in spades,” he says comparing it to the awardwinning drama series about a media mogul. On November 4 1991 Robert Maxwell fell overboard to his death from his yacht Lady Ghislaine as the Mirror group pension scandal engulfed him. “Bob Maxwell died 30 years ago and in the same month Ghislaine is facing her moment of truth,” says Ian. “This family has been somehow – the father mostly and now the children – in the news since 1971.”
He reels off the events that have shaped their lives, from Robert Maxwell’s demise to his own fraud trial with younger brother Kevin (they were both acquitted in 1996) and then, just as family members are getting on with their lives, “bang” he says, his sister is charged.
Ian Maxwell, 65 now and practically deaf when not using sophisticated hearing aids, is defiant, running a London-based campaign to ensure Ghislaine gets a fair hearing in New York.
“This is a family that sticks together,” he says, “Ghislaine has people who love her, people who trust her. This is a family that has been knocked down, gets up, gets knocked down again and then gets up. We are a family that fights for each other – and this is a big fight we are in – and we are hopeful justice will prevail, as it must.”
This week, just over a month before her criminal trial is due to start, Ghislaine Maxwell and her legal team were officially given the names of the women who accuse her of recruiting them as teenage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. The charges relate to alleged offences committed between 1994 and to 2004.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who has accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault and rape, is not among the complainants in the Maxwell trial. She has separately in civil proceedings accused Epstein and Maxwell of trafficking her to London and forcing her to have sex with the Queen’s son.
Ghislaine Maxwell settled a defamation claim brought by Ms Giuffre in 2017 after she accused her of lying and now Ms Giuffre is suing Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew has always denied the allegation.
At the same time as the legal team learnt the names of the accusers, the Metropolitan Police said it had re-examined Ms Giuffre’s claims and was not opening a full-blown investigation. “It’s an extraordinary situation,” says Ian Maxwell. “Neither the UK police nor, it would seem, the US authorities are using the allegations of Virginia Giuffre. They didn’t use them as far as I know in the arrest and prosecution of Epstein in 2008 and didn’t use them again in 2019 [when Epstein was arrested a second time]. They are not using Giuffre’s testimony in the prosecution of Ghislaine.
“If her claims are strong and true and there is back-up evidence to support them, why aren’t they using them? ”
Ian Maxwell cannot believe that Ms Giuffre would make up her claims. “The key thing about it, it seems to me, is she [Ms Giuffre] is at the centre of the whole allegation against Prince Andrew and the defamation case against Ghislaine. So I cannot believe anyone would be so evil as to tell lies about what may have happened that has resulted in my sister being in prison for nearly 500 days and has ruined the life of Prince Andrew.
“I cannot imagine someone would tell such lies. It is unconscionable.
“What seems evident is that she was deeply confused. She seems to me to be a very, very confused lady.”
But he is in no doubt of the seriousness of her claims. “Prince Andrew has effectively been cancelled as a result of these allegations,” he says.
The worry for Team Maxwell is that in the court of public opinion Ghislaine is already convicted. They are trying to turn the tanker around in the face of a high-profile FBI press conference, broadcast around the world, when Ghislaine was arrested at her secluded farmhouse in New Hampshire in July 2020.
Ian Maxwell insists his sister is wholly innocent and, that while she was close to Epstein for a number of years, they lived in separate homes and their lives were “compartmentalised”, so she was unaware, and certainly not involved in, his sexual abuse of scores of young women and teenage girls.
When Epstein was arrested in 2008 (he was subsequently jailed after a controversial plea bargain and served 388 days in prison), Ian Maxwell says his sister’s name “was never mentioned in all the police reports made against him”.
He adds: “The police officer who gathered these statements, Joe Recarey, has since sadly died, but his testimony is alive and he was asked these questions.
“Did he name her? No. Did her name feature in the grand jury? No.
“But here we are six weeks from trial and it just seems to me that some focus on some of the truths in this case need[s] to occur.
“This needs investigating because it hasn’t been given any real aeration. It hasn’t.
“All this has been in the public domain but it’s not the narrative. The narrative is ‘all women must be believed’. Epstein was a monster but Epstein is now dead, so Ghislaine is the monster, and [that] she’s a woman makes her doubly a monster.
“And [being] the daughter of Bob Maxwell makes her trebly a monster.”
Ian Maxwell recalls meeting Epstein only once, at a dinner in Florida in June 1996. He and his brother had flown to the States on being acquitted of fraud after an eight month trial at the Old Bailey.
“By then it was my sense their relationship was moving on. They didn’t live together. They never lived together. She had her place and he had his place. She didn’t have a key to his door.”
Ian Maxwell makes it clear he has “absolutely” no idea whether Ghislaine enjoys any of the sexual practices she is accused of indulging in. “Ghislaine is painted as some socialite flibbertigibbet. But it is impossible to have been a child of Bob Maxwell and Elisabeth Maxwell and be a flibbertigibbet. Ghislaine is a friend of presidents. She went to Oxford.”
Six weeks before her trial, Ghislaine languishes in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. Bail – despite an offer of nearly $30m surety – has been denied three times. It is an abuse of her human rights, says her brother, who insists that should she be found not guilty. Ghislaine will campaign for improved rights for those held in custody awaiting trial in the US. She is on suicide watch, a hangover from the failure of prison guards to prevent Epstein killing himself while in jail awaiting trial in August 2019.
“There is an obvious abuse of human rights,” says Ian.
“The right to the presumption of innocence, the right to due process, including the ability to defend yourself properly.”
The prosecution will spend two to four weeks outlining its case against Ghislaine before she is offered the opportunity to make her case to a jury that she hopes will not be swayed by the pre-trial publicity. In Britain, strict laws prevent cases being played out before trials; but politicised US court processes are very different. Ghislaine may, or may not, walk free. But, inevitably, she will spend her 60th birthday, which falls on Christmas Day, in prison.
The big question is: where will she will be for her 61st and beyond? The jury is out on that one.
‘This is a family that has been knocked down, gets up, gets knocked down again and then gets up’