The book that damns Maxwell ...and she was even reading it herself as FBI agents closed in on her hideaway

Written by a lawyer who’s been pursuing Epstein for a decade, here we reveal the allegations that must have made her squirm

THE dramatic arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell last week would have been a proud moment for Bradley Edwards, the US lawyer who has devoted his life to securing justice for young women abused by Jeffrey Epstein. In his gripping book, Relentless Pursuit, stories from which we summarised earlier this year, Edwards revealed the appalling scale of Epstein’s crimes. Now, as Maxwell faces up to 35 years in jail and contemplates helping the FBI, we reveal the book’s shocking claims about Maxwell’s involvement in Epstein’s years of abuse…

WITH her high society connections, Ghislaine Maxwell had everything financier Jeffrey Epstein needed at the height of their relationship. And in material terms, he had everything she could possibly want, and more. This strange, intense pair were inseparable for almost two decades, sleeping in the same bed and travelling together on private planes all over the world.

Maxwell was the one woman who, by all appearances, Epstein treated as his equal. Sometimes she even referred to him privately as her husband.

And as Bradley Edwards, an American lawyer who made it his life’s mission to bring Epstein to justice, was to discover, Maxwell was seemingly complicit in her paedophile exlover’s appalling crimes.

She has always vehemently and repeatedly denied all of the allegations that have been made against her. But victim after victim has claimed that she was a pivotal figure in Epstein’s sordid ‘sex cult’. Her apparent role in life, it was claimed, was to please Epstein and help secure, and instruct, a steady supply of girls and young women for the paedophile to abuse.

Witnesses described how Maxwell so adored Epstein that she would seemingly do anything for him, including bringing him other girls. She was powerfully persuasive in making them like Epstein, with the mysterious financier’s supposed brilliance, and his powerful friends, central to her pitch.

Mr Edwards first came across Maxwell’s name in 2008 when he was preparing to represent a group of victims who claimed they had been abused at Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

Mr Edwards was passed a set of old-style telephone message pads that had been gathered by Palm Beach detectives who had first investigated the disturbing allegations. Handwritten messages revealed the names of everybody who had phoned Epstein’s home over a period of months in 2005.

Aside from messages from Epstein’s famous friends, including Donald Trump and the magician David Copperfield, there were many from girls.

The need for a constant flow of girls was clear from these messages: at least three girls a day were scheduled to go to Epstein’s house, sometimes with little time between appointments. Most of the confiscated messages were taken by the butler, who, in 2005, was a man named Alfredo Rodriguez.

But someone called Ghislaine Maxwell also took messages and it soon became clear to Mr Edwards that she was a key figure in Epstein’s life.

Juan Alessi, Epstein’s former housekeeper at Palm Beach, told the lawyer how Maxwell arrived at the property after Epstein split from his girlfriend Eva in 1991.

Maxwell, he said, was deeply controlling and introduced a handbook for staff, explaining they would now be following the rules of a Royal household, including a requirement never to look the master, Jeffrey Epstein, in the eye. Juan said that when Eva had been in charge, there had been no other women around the house.

This changed as soon as Maxwell took over. Female visitors arrived who were referred to as ‘masseuses,’ but who did not look professional and appeared too young.

After the novice ‘masseuses’ performed massages, Juan would go upstairs to clean up the massage room and find used sex toys.

Maxwell, he claimed, loved to take nude photographs of girls, which she stored in an album on her desk.

As Mr Edwards’s investigations continued, he discovered that Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Epstein’s crimes was not simply confined to Florida: she was allegedly helping him groom young girls across the US. The lawyer’s most coveted witness was a talented performer whom he called Kat. She was important because she was the earliest child victim Mr Edwards knew about. She was also allegedly groomed by Epstein and Maxwell before the pair started what became their alleged modus operandi of using ‘massages’ as a pretext for sex acts.

Kat not only confirmed Epstein’s predatory sexual behaviour, but also provided an insight, she claims, into Maxwell’s intricate role.

She explained that Epstein and Maxwell had recruited her in 1994 when she was only 13, while she was sitting alone on a bench outside her summer camp in Michigan – the same camp Epstein had attended 27 summers earlier. He gave money to the camp from 1990 to 2003 and occasionally visited the area.

Kat was an enormously talented singer, and Epstein promised to make her a star. He and Maxwell made Kat feel indebted to them by paying for her singing lessons, her private school education and the

New York City apartment where she and her mother lived.

As part of their alleged grooming process, Kat claims Maxwell and Epstein would talk about sex with her frequently. Epstein, she said, referred to himself as her ‘godfather’ and went out of his way to impress her with his money and his connections. By the time Kat was 14, Epstein was regularly molesting her and Maxwell was continuing to remind her of all the things Epstein was doing for her career. When she was 17, Epstein raped her, taking her virginity.

Epstein’s hold over Kat lasted for a long period: she still occasionally spent time with him and Maxwell in her 20s, despite the years of abuse she had suffered.

After learning how expansive Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation had become, Mr Edwards hired a team of investigators to find individuals who he had identified as victims and who were now more mature and likely to co-operate. They had a long list of women who

As soon as Maxwell took over, there were young girls around