My sister Ghislaine is not a monstrous pimp: Ian Maxwell
Ian Maxwell says Jeffrey Epstein ruined his youngest sibling’s life and she is paying for the US authorities’ failure to prosecute him.
Family reunions aren’t easy to arrange when there are seven siblings scattered across two continents. So when the Maxwell children got together two summers ago, the mood was celebratory. It was the first time they had all been in a room together in almost a decade, and it felt as though there was another figure present as well. They met on June 10, 2019, which would have been Robert Maxwell’s 96th birthday had he not slipped into the Atlantic nearly 30 years earlier.
One person stands out in the photograph they took that day in London. Most of the Maxwell children – Anne, now 73, Philip, 71, twins Christine and Isabel, 70, Ian, 64, and Kevin, 62 have aged, the gloss of their childhood at Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, faded long ago. Only Ghislaine, 59, suntanned and sophisticated, retains an aura of the world created by their father, Cap’n Bob. What none of them realised then was that the family were about to plunge once more into a scandal. A month after that gathering, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking underage girls, after a sweetheart deal he negotiated 12 years earlier fell apart. A month after that, Epstein was found dead in his cell. Immediately the spotlight shifted onto Ghislaine, his former partner.
“That was when her world exploded,” Ian Maxwell says. His youngest sister is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, New York, charged with crimes including grooming underage girls and perjury. Once more the Maxwells face opprobrium and once more the family are locking arms to defend their own. Since Ghislaine’s arrest in July her siblings have been working behind the scenes to try to have her released on bail. Now, with less than four months until her trial, and two rejected bail applications – a third is under consideration – they are speaking out. Their sister has been in solitary confinement in a 6ft by 9ft cell for six months, she is considered a suicide risk (unduly, they claim) and she is woken up every 15 minutes.
“She is not able to properly prepare the defence,” her brother says. The family fear that the presumption of her innocence has been lost in a tide of rumour.
“The Ghislaine that we know has been buried in this caricature, this monstrous creature that has been invented as an abuser and a pimp,” Ian says. It is true that in all the coverage of this story, Ghislaine herself remains an enigma. Her black book of contacts contains celebrities, politicians and journalists, but not one has defended her. Ian is trying to correct this, but the more he talks about “Spratt”, the nickname Maxwell gave his youngest child, the more bewildering a figure she becomes.
To understand his sister, Ian says, you have to realise that she was born into a tragedy. Maxwell’s sixth child, Karine, died from leukaemia at the age of three, devastating the parents and disrupting the family’s balance of four boys and four girls. “So when my parents had another little girl, it was really magic – it allowed the four boys and four girls to be recreated,” Ian says. Ghislaine was born on Christmas Day 1961, but 48 hours later Maxwell’s eldest child, Michael, who was 15, was involved in a car accident that put him in a coma until his death eight years later.
“Ghislaine had to establish herself very early on,” Ian says. His mother, Betty, would recount how, at three years old, Ghislaine stood in front of her and said: “Mummy, I exist.”
Maxwell was a bully and none of the children escaped his rage. “You didn’t want to be too close to home because it was quite tense,” Ian says. “Mealtimes were always pretty tough. We had to stand up and account for what we’d done that day, that week, that year.”
The most outlandish suggestion about Maxwell’s relationship with Ghislaine comes from Eleanor Berry, the youngest daughter of Lord Hartwell, former owner of The Daily Telegraph. Berry, an eccentric family friend, said Maxwell doted on his daughter but took a sadistic pleasure in beating her, allowing Ghislaine to choose what implement he used. Ian finds this story “utterly implausible … We were all physically punished, girls and boys; the girls were smacked and the boys belted, mostly for poor grades, laziness and lack of application at school.”
His sister had a talent for managing their father’s moods and became increasingly useful to him as she got older.
“Ghislaine is very charming,” Ian says. “She has a very good sense of humour and that was important because Dad responded well to humour. It was my own way of dealing with him: I would make a fool of myself and that would disarm him reasonably quickly.”
She became a useful companion in Maxwell’s later years. There are photographs of them together at football matches, or of Ghislaine perching on his knee at charity fundraisers, which have fuelled rumours of a special bond. That, and the Lady Ghislaine.
“It was all a big mystery,” Ian says of the day their father took them to a boatyard near Amsterdam. “Ghislaine was given this bottle, she crashed it against the side, the wrap fell off and there it was: the Lady Ghislaine. She was stunned. We all were stunned.”
Maxwell’s death in 1991, after he fell from the Lady Ghislaine near the Canary Islands, was a turning point for all of them. Ian recalls the conflicting emotions he felt when he heard the news: the “dichotomy of feeling free of this dramatic alpha male in my life and terribly scared of what might happen without his protective presence in my life”.
Ghislaine and Philip flew to the Canaries with their mother to identify the body. Kevin Lomax, a Daily Mirror photographer who was with them, has told how devastated Ghislaine was. “I have never sat down, to this day, and said to any of my brothers and sisters, ‘Let’s think back to those times – how did you feel about it?’” Ian says. By way of explanation he tells me a story about the time he took an afternoon off work to go to a funeral. His father was furious. “He said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead, for God’s sake.’ At the time I was terribly shocked by the callousness, but it is a way of cauterising immediate feelings,” Ian says. “We have all just got on and coped.”
While Kevin and Ian remained in London dealing with bankruptcy and court cases, Ghislaine resumed her life in New York. The Maxwell children have differing views on their father’s legacy. "I’m nearer the positive than the negative end of that scale,” Ian says. How does Ghislaine feel? “I think she would be with me.” Nor does she believe that his death was accidental. “Ghislaine is very clear that she believes that he was murdered. She is the only member of the family to my knowledge who holds that position.”
It didn’t take long for her to find Epstein. The first picture of the two together was taken three weeks after Maxwell’s funeral. Ian says a romantic relationship between them began “some time in the early 1990s” and it was “effectively over by the turn of the century”. He met Epstein only once, in New York around 1996. “Ghislaine would probably have introduced me,” he says. “He was cold.”
Ian cannot talk about the case directly but it is clear that the family believe that Ghislaine was manipulated by Epstein. “One important point is that they never lived together. He had his place; she had her place. If she was going to see him, she had to ask. This enabled him to lead his life, the life he wanted. This was a man who was highly compartmentalised.”
Did the family have concerns about the relationship? “At the time? No,” he says.
Didn’t he worry about her later on? “I was entirely satisfied that the man who she then went on to spend time with really provided her with love and affection she needed after Epstein,” Ian says.
He is referring to a seven-year relationship that Ghislaine went on to have with Ted Waitt, an American billionaire and philanthropist.
How does Ghislaine feel about Epstein now? “I know she wishes that she had never met him. He has ruined her life.”
Ian talks about his sister’s love of the sea, her ocean charity, Terramar, and her dog, a Hungarian vizsla called Nemo that she showed in competitions.
Her 2016 marriage to the tech chief Scott Borgerson, 43, became public knowledge only during a bail application last year. When did the family first find out about Scott? “At the same time you did: when it was in the papers,” he says.
My jaw drops. At that family reunion no one knew that their sister was in a relationship, let alone married. “I think Ghislaine has just determined with him, obviously, that they want to keep a very low level of public knowledge about their lives,” Ian replies. Borgerson has supported her bail application but has not spoken publicly. Then there is her apparent disappearance in the year after Epstein’s death. Ian says the idea that she was hiding from police “is simply a lie”. It was the press she was hiding from, he insists.
Did he know where she was? “Of course,” he replies. Only this turns out not to be quite true. For seven months she had been in the New Hampshire house where she was arrested, but her family had no idea, passing messages back and forth to her through lawyers instead.
The prosecution has benefited from the illusion that Maxwell is a flight risk, Ian says, when the authorities never tried to find her. Whatever the truth, there is reason to believe that building a case against Maxwell was not straightforward. Not only did it take a year to charge her, but the most well-known claims- including from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says Maxwell recruited her – do not form part of the criminal case. She is charged instead with helping to transport and groom three unnamed women for exploitation when they were under age between 1994 and 1997 as well as two charges of perjury.
The last time Ian spoke to Ghislaine was about a month before she was arrested, having passed a message through lawyers. “I said, ‘It’s a pity that I can’t call you’, and she said, ‘Ian, I don’t want you to be in a situation where someone is going to put pressure on you. I am going to take the pressure so that none of you have to. Not Scott, not Kev – I am going to deal with it.’”
Self-sufficiency was a lesson that was drummed into all the Maxwell children. “Father has said it to me on many, many occasions: there’s nothing you can do that can bring me back – get on with your life. And that is a driver of Ghislaine’s life too: get on with your life. Dad has gone,” Ian says, as though he spoke to the old man just a moment ago.