Before the fall
As she languishes in a US cell, our photos reveal the life of unbridled hedonism she enjoyed for decades
FROM graceful Oxford ingenue to New York party queen, Ghislaine Maxwell lived a life of glamour that is hard to reconcile with the charges now facing her.
Growing up as the indulged daughter of millionaire publishing baron Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine was a leading figure in the hedonistic social scene of 1980s London.
She used her father’s credit card and her personal charm to create a matchless network of friends and contacts that would go on to include Prince Andrew and the late financier and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
These previously unpublished images taken by photographer Dafydd Jones show her starring at a succession of society events – the Chelsea Arts Ball in 1985, the Boisdale Ball in 1986 – where she was known as charismatic, expensively turned out and, as she was fond of making clear, impeccably connected.
Following the sensational 1991 death and disgrace of Robert Maxwell, who was found to have stolen millions from the Mirror Group pension scheme, his youngest daughter decamped to New York.
And there, armed with her contacts book and the cash of her new friend Epstein, Maxwell set about rebuilding a stellar social life, as happy to spend thousands on a hairdo as she was to capitalise on her ‘Mary Poppins’ English accent.
By the late 1990s she had made it on to the guest list for Anna Wintour’s exclusive Met Gala Ball, joining guests such as Liv Tyler and Stella McCartney on the red carpet, and flashing her legs in a denim creation for one year’s Rock Style theme.
When Dafydd Jones last saw Maxwell, she was dripping in jewels at the Miami Art fair, the epitome of a wealthy New Yorker.
‘She seemed to have prospered,’ he says. That life now must seem a world away from a jail cell in New England.