FBI investigate Ghislaine Maxwell over Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes

Elusive socialite Ghislaine Maxwell at the centre of an FBI investigation into “people who facilitated” Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes.

The one-time socialite and former girlfriend of the late financier, Ghislaine Maxwell, pictured right, is at the centre of an investigation into “people who facilitated” the alleged crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, according to Reuters Picture: Getty

Ghislaine Maxwell is the principal focus of an FBI investigation into associates of Jeffrey Epstein, it was claimed yesterday.

The one-time socialite and former girlfriend of the late financier is at the centre of an investigation into “people who facilitated” the alleged crimes of Epstein, according to Reuters, citing anonymous law enforcement sources.

Epstein, 66, was charged with the sex trafficking of minors in July and was found dead in his prison cell in New York the following month. He was judged to have committed suicide.

A hotline set up by the FBI as part of an investigation into potential co-conspirators resulted in calls from many women who provided investigators with leads, the agency reported.

Investigators were not seeking to interview Prince Andrew, Reuters said. The Duke of York, who was friends with Epstein, has denied allegations that he slept with a woman who was “lent” to him when she was 17.

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Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution charges involving a minor in 2008. Under a plea deal prosecutors in Florida agreed not to pursue criminal charges “against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein”.

Ms Maxwell was accused in civil proceedings of acting as Epstein’s “madam” and of “recruiting, maintaining . . . and trafficking girls for Epstein”.

She has strongly denied the allegations, saying that she managed Epstein’s properties and occasionally helped him to find “adult professional massage therapists”. The case was settled out of court in 2017.

After Epstein’s death, civil lawsuits filed by several women who say they were abused by the billionaire also accused Ms Maxwell of recruiting them. Jennifer Araoz alleged that Ms Maxwell and three other members of his staff “conspired with each other to make possible and otherwise facilitate the sexual abuse and rape of [the] plaintiff” in 2002, when she was 15.

Ms Maxwell, 58, is said to have met Epstein in the early 1990s after she arrived in New York following the death in 1991 of her father, the disgraced press baron Robert Maxwell.

The Times