Family values: how Ghislaine Maxwell fell under Jeffrey Epstein’s spell
What led Ghislaine Maxwell into a toxic compact with Jeffrey Epstein? Money, power… and father issues.
London, 1990. I have just arrived at a dinner in a newly opened Soho restaurant with people I barely know. I see a long table rammed with the deafening confidence of entitled rich young things. I sit down and immediately notice the atmosphere radiating around an attractive dark-haired girl. “Hi, I’m Ghislaine,” she says. But I already know who she is: the youngest and most favoured child of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, an Oxford graduate and the toast of social London.
As a naive 25-year-old who had just started working in the City, I watched more than I spoke that night. Which was fine because Ghislaine barely drew breath. She was loud and great fun; dressed in black shorts, sheer tights and a top hat, with a touch of gold, possibly a scarf. She looked naughty and sexy, but tomboyish too, markedly at odds with the Dianaesque taffeta femininity around us. She was intriguing, an anomaly. After that I became a keen Ghislaine-spotter.
As I write, the 58-year-old sits in one of New York’s most inhospitable jails, the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, following her alleged collusion in grooming vulnerable young girls for the late Jeffrey Epstein. Last month she was charged with four counts related to transporting minors for illegal sexual acts and two counts of perjury. She pleaded not guilty and offered to pay to stay at a luxury hotel in New York while she awaits trial, scheduled for July next year, but she was denied bail after prosecutors argued she was an extreme flight risk.
How did this privileged, educated, charismatic person become embroiled with a notorious sex offender? Initially, I suspect, hubris played a central role – a trait she inevitably picked up from her father, who drowned at sea in 1991 after plundering his companies’ pension funds. But there was also desperation, a dissonance of character, born out of the extreme and particular circumstances following her father’s downfall, which she simply never got over.
If a piece of the puzzle was missing when I first met her, it was firmly in place by the time we met again, in New York in 1992 at a party in a downtown loft, not long after her father’s death. The previous November he had fallen, or had been pushed, or had thrown himself off (it is not known for sure) Lady Ghislaine, his 55m superyacht, named after his adored daughter.
At this party Ghislaine looked unkempt, shell-shocked, vibrating with anger and bitterness. Talking to her was hard work. It was not clear whether she had met Epstein by this point, but she was quick to mention that she was living in some style on the Upper East Side. I remember thinking, But with what money?
After Robert Maxwell’s death it emerged he had siphoned off hundreds of millions of pounds from his Mirror Group pension funds to shore up corporate debts that ran into the billions. A clear conclusion as to where the entirety of that money ended up has never been reached. Epstein and his relationship with Ghislaine may hold the clue.
To get a sense of who Ghislaine really is, I speak to some of those who knew her best during her early years in London and Manhattan. I talk first to one of her oldest friends – the person who was with her when she first heard about her father’s drowning and who, at Ghislaine’s request, drove her straight to the Mirror Group offices so she could find out more about the circumstances of his death. On the way she sobbed uncontrollably in the back seat, hidden under a blanket, the friend tells me. She later flew out to where her father’s body had been found, where she declared to the media: “I think he was murdered.”
Her father was born Jan Ludvik Hoch in 1923 in a Czech village into such extreme poverty that he and his six siblings took turns wearing shoes. Unlike most of his family he survived the Holocaust, reinventing himself in England after the war as Robert Maxwell. He chased success voraciously, using contacts he made during the Allied occupation to go into business. In 1951 he acquired the US and British distribution rights for the German scientific publishing house Springer-Verlag. From there he built what would become a vast publishing empire, along the way being voted in as a Labour MP in 1964, and eventually buying Mirror Group Newspapers in 1984.
By the time Ghislaine – his ninth and youngest child with French-born wife Elisabeth – came of age, he was one of the great tycoons of his time and a well-known monster and bully. To a great extent Ghislaine’s visceral character was formed, her morals inculcated, according to the diktats of a world-class sociopath.
Little is known about her relationship with her mother and siblings. “All her energy went into impressing her father, but she never quite managed it,” says the close friend. “I went to her parents’ house once and I was shocked by how hard she tried to get him to love her, notice her, to recognise her by giving her a serious job, like her brothers. But all she got, along with all she materially desired, was charity projects, social stuff.”
Many I speak to point out the similarities between her father and Epstein: both were men who rose from nothing and who used Ghislaine for their own gain. Maxwell treated her like a show pony, more like a power wife than a daughter, using her to curry favour as an emissary with the great and the good, flying her to New York on Concorde to deliver letters on his behalf, and making her a director of his football club, Oxford United. Epstein similarly used her like a high-class servant. You could never characterise her as subservient – indeed, she acted with friends like she was Epstein’s boss, not the other way around – but ultimately she behaved with both men as if she was under their control.
A close friend who requested anonymity says that despite her gregarious, friendly demeanour there is a toughness to her, a steely implacability. “She was needy like a labrador puppy. She wanted everyone to love her, always a little too much in your face, but ultimately she was focused on getting her way.” Friends say that money became her drug, the one thing that validated her existence; a need to interact with the powerful played a central role too, as did her sexual appetite.
Someone she met in London in 1990 remembers arranging to go to a party with Ghislaine, who insisted the younger woman drive her car even though she didn’t have a licence. “I was so nervous but somehow she convinced me,” the woman says. “It was a manual, so to help me as we set off she put her hand on top of mine – but it stayed there the entire journey. If one was that way inclined, it could have been erotic, a prelude to something. But every fibre of my being was clenched with fear. It was so weird. Coerced is too strong a word. She was more a bulldozer. If she could get someone like me to do something like that, which was illegal, with that natural skill set, she was capable of anything.”
The subject of Ghislaine’s sexuality came up oftenduring my conversations with Brits and Americans. “She was one of the boys,” says an American friend, “she spoke the language of men.” A New Yorker who knew her extremely well, who went to dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, puts it more bluntly: “She would not have been unique in being someone who lives well and possesses a sexual peccadillo of sharing women with her boyfriend. Underlying all of this was her libertarian sexual appetite.”
Another Manhattanite, who was at Oxford with Ghislaine, says: “At university whenever we went on a boys’ night out, she would be the only girl with us. Guys always loved hanging out with her. She was naughty, funny and very worldly. She was as comfortable at Buckingham Palace as she was at a hip-hop convention – a chameleon who fit in everywhere.”
It’s unclear how she first met Epstein. But there is a theory, a plausible one, that he knew her father. Is that why she decamped to New York so quickly? “My personal belief is that Epstein had been hiding money siphoned off by Robert Maxwell,” says the same New Yorker, who knew Epstein and his circumstances well before Ghislaine turned up in New York. “Jeffrey was always very mysterious, and for years the only client he had was the Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner. The point is, Jeffrey was never a money manager. What he did was structure offshore funds, not to manage them but to hide or recover money. I believe it was Jeffrey who laundered Maxwell’s money. I couldn’t work out at first how, the second Ghislaine landed in New York, she was all of a sudden – overnight really – very chummy with Jeffrey. Then he started spending on a different level, suddenly buying these extraordinary townhouses.”
My New York source is adamant that Epstein and Ghislaine were never in a romantic relationship, that it was a convenient front to dissimulate the real reason for their closeness – money. “I can’t tell you how many times I said to Ghislaine, ‘I hear Jeffrey’s bought a house in Palm Beach.’ She would say, ‘Darling, that’s my house.’ I could never figure out why Ghislaine always acted like a boss towards him. I believe they had a business arrangement from day one. For a start, he would never have been attracted to her. We know the kind of girls he liked. Also, why would she have been so interested in procuring girls for him? No girlfriend does that.” He remembers Ghislaine asking him about a beautiful Russian redhead he knew. “Ghislaine said to me, ‘That girl is very pretty, you should introduce her to Jeffrey.’ She was his wingwoman from day one.”
Christopher Mason, a New York Times contributor living in Manhattan who is known for the witty musical “roasts” he writes and performs, remembers being hired by Ghislaine to write a song for Epstein’s birthday. “Normally I speak to as many people who know the person as possible,” he says. “But this time I was only allowed to speak to Ghislaine.” He was told that one line had to include how Epstein had been the object of schoolgirl crushes at Dalton, the private Upper East Side school where – improbably – he had worked as a maths teacher from 1974 to 1976, while another should mention his 24-hour erections.
Ghislaine was, by all accounts, a complicated person: a seductive blend of charm and guile; a schemer, always working at full tilt, having traded one depraved master for another. Or as the friend who accompanied her to the Mirror Group says: “There was some kind of toxic control going on, a lifestyle she felt she deserved, and in exchange she made a Faustian pact with Epstein that ultimately compromised any morals she might have had. She had a choice to remain the Ghislaine we all knew and loved, or become the other, for money and power. She chose the latter.”
Her Manhattan life was dizzying in its ambition. She went out every night, to every cocktail party and charity dinner, every restaurant. Everyone who knew her on the circuit remembers her single-minded assault on the rich and powerful, Bill Clinton among them. Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City, met her frequently. “She was very well connected and went around with a rarefied air,” she says. “She name-dropped this person and that person, so you always knew where you were in terms of status.”
Oddly, Ghislaine was rarely seen in public with Epstein. “That’s because he was a con artist who operated in this enormous house with its hidden caves – everything happened in that house,” says another Manhattan stalwart, who once attended a dinner in Epstein’s mansion. “For the men it was, like, ‘Come to my house and I’ll give you some candy.’ ” Ghislaine, on the other hand, entertained lavishly in her new townhouse. “It was very dark and she would have these parties, always dressed in a ridiculous sexy-at-home outfit. I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing here, she’s creepy’. ”
A British couple remember staying with Ghislaine for a few days in New York. They were shocked by how extravagant her life was and surprised by the size of her Manhattan townhouse. “My first thought was, ‘How did she afford this?’” says the wife. “I asked her about her work and she was adamant that she’d earned it all herself, that it was her money. I tried to get to the bottom of it, but she was quite vague.”
Prince Andrew, who denies any wrongdoing, attended a party Ghislaine threw while the couple were staying with her. Guests, including a two-time Oscar-winning actress, played games of virtual tennis on the huge movie screen in the basement. The next night they ate at a neighbourhood restaurant, where they were told Andrew would be joining them. “I remember seeing him sitting at a table at the far end with these three young [not underage] blonde girls when we walked in. He immediately got up, I imagined to join us, but instead he said goodbye and left with them in tow. It was all very strange.”
It’s easy to be so distracted by all the glamour in Ghislaine’s story – the planes, the boats, the big names – that in the retelling of it the human cost, the victims’ stories, are in danger of being not so much forgotten but obfuscated. Initially she introduced Epstein to girls she knew in Manhattan who worked at places such as the famous auction house Sotheby’s. Many went on trips to Epstein’s houses, and their names appear in flight logs. But they clearly proved less malleable and more recalcitrant than had been hoped.
Later, allegedly assisted by Ghislaine, Epstein went for much easier and more vulnerable prey; girls who had nothing to lose. Many were motherless and homeless, and they were handed out like hostess perks, chocolates on a pillow at the end of the night. Bushnell notes how easy it was to be distracted by Ghislaine’s hubris. “Whenever I saw Ghislaine, she was either leaving New York or on her way back from somewhere fabulous. It all sounded rather grand, but also so believable. She had the perfect backstory, so no one questioned it.”
The last time I saw Ghislaine was on holiday in 2012. I heard her shouting my name from across the street. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked. “Come to dinner on Akula.” The 60m superyacht she was staying on belonged to Jonathan Faiman, co-founder of the online supermarket Ocado, and his wife Kira (a couple about whom no suggestion of wrongdoing is made). There was a mildly uncomfortable atmosphere all evening: she had invited her friends, but the hosts knew none of us. It was typical Ghislaine.
It’s not clear when the corrosive relationship between her and Epstein ended. They were photographed together with the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein in the garden of Windsor Castle at Princess Beatrice’s 18th birthday party in 2006. Epstein served 13 months in a Miami jail in 2008, with time free on work release, after pleading guilty to two charges, including soliciting a minor for prostitution. And while I had heard Epstein’s name mentioned in connection to Ghislaine many times, by the late 2000s he seemed a distant memory – one she seemed desperate to shake, at least publicly. (Various sources tell me they were in touch until the end.)
During Ghislaine’s bail hearing, prosecutors dropped a bombshell: she was in a secret marriage. The rumour mill pointed to tech millionaire Scott Borgerson as the spouse. One New York source tells me she believes that if the marriage did happen, Ghislaine would have had her financial convenience in mind. This insider is in no doubt that the twin corrupters of money and power are behind her fall from grace. “Ghislaine has never forgotten her father was a billionaire, it really formed her character from a very young age. She was living among luxury and important men, and overnight she became a pariah and that’s something she never got over.”
Prosecutors say Ghislaine faces up to 35 years in prison if convicted. One old friend I spoke to posited what might happen next: “Epstein’s brother, Mark, will likely instruct that the $600 million trust left behind by his brother be used to pay the victims. The American legal system is notoriously flexible, so Ghislaine will get a plea deal, if she hasn’t struck one already. That means a large sentence, which will eventually be shortened, and in the process she will likely seek to exonerate Prince Andrew. She’ll spend a few years dressed in an orange overall … she will survive.”
The Sunday Times