Thinking back to the days when I knew Ghislaine Maxwell, two very contradictory impressions have endured. One, she smiled and laughed a lot. Two, her eyes gave away a deeper sadness.
I was a journalist at the Mirror Group at the time, mid-80s to 1991, when her father and our owner, Robert Maxwell, fell from his yacht, The Lady Ghislaine. It was an event that sparked almost as many conspiracy theories as the death of another man in her life, Jeffrey Epstein.
Was it suicide? Were they murdered? Who by? Where did all their money come from? Were they spies? Who for? Different generations, same questions, Ghislaine at the heart of both stories.
The name of the yacht underlined something known to all of us in Maxwellworld, that Ghislaine was his favourite child. Whilst his sons, Kevin and Ian, would regularly be on the receiving end of his wrath, Ghislaine seemed to escape it, and usually to bring an indulgent smile to his face.
One of the most bizarre episodes of my time at the Mirror followed a call to join him in his Mirror HQ penthouse flat for dinner, where he was hosting the Argentinian ambassador to the UK, a direct descendant of a former Argentinian dictator named Juan Manuel de Rosas, who died in Hampshire in 1877, and whose remains had lain there ever since.
The ambassador’s brother, also called de Rosas, was also a diplomat, at the time Argentina’s ambassador to France, and as the dinner unfolded, it became clear that I was being asked – nay, given that this was Maxwell, instructed – to take the de Rosas remains from Southampton to Paris, from where they would be flown home to Buenos Aires for a decent burial.
Thankfully, the Argentinian ambassador to London had already got the remains, so I didn’t need to become a grave-digger for the day, though I must confess I was struggling to work out how this was going to make the double-page spread in the Sunday Mirror that Captain Bob seemed to think it merited. His repeated booming observation that this could be the diplomatic breakthrough needed to transform Anglo-Argentine relations after the Falklands war struck me as somewhat fanciful.
Then, to add to the bizarreness, he told me that Ghislaine would be accompanying me on this “very, very important mission”. And so to a day trip that began with us collecting a dead man’s remains from one Argentinian ambassador, flying to Paris to hand them over to another, cobbling together an article that must have struck regular Sunday Mirror readers as odd in the extreme, and then having a nice time in Paris.
We had a late lunch in the sunshine. We went to a few shops so she could buy some clothes and the latest in French lingerie. We got the last plane back to London.
She was very good fun to be with. Given that she was the boss’s daughter, I probably minded my Ps and Qs more than I might otherwise have done, but I did get a sense of the weird family dynamics, the sense that Maxwell, Murdoch-like, Logan-Roy-in-Succession like, was always playing family members off against each other. She was a spoilt child in many ways, but vulnerable with it.
If you had said to me then that one day she would end up as the key figure in the case of the modern world’s most notorious child sex trafficker, I would have suggested you take a lie down. If, on the other hand, you had suggested she might end up attached to a powerful man, able to build and exploit connections wherever he found them, be a political player from outside politics, and a figure around whom fact would be stranger than fiction, then yes, I could well see how that might happen.
As I was saying to my National Prison Radio interviewers in Brixton jail last week, I am not sure I would be able to survive too long in prison. I love my freedom too much.
“You’d be surprised,” said Akim. “People adapt, and when you get to understand the rules, it’s amazing how they get by.”
Mmmm, not convinced. I am convinced, however, that Ghislaine Maxwell will not be finding prison easy. She is used to, and likes, luxury.
Suggested Reading
My diary from Brixton prison
Also, do female prisoners treat child sex offenders worse than others, as happens in men’s jails? Is notoriety, and her continuing presence in the world’s media, a plus or a minus in trying to get through the days of a long, long sentence stretching well into the future? I suspect the latter.
Whatever the answers to those questions, I am sure she will be desperate to get out of there. Her success or otherwise depends now on the extent of Donald Trump’s desperation to make sure that the full Epstein story is never told.
Oh to be a fly on the wall at the meeting in Florida’s Tallahassee jail of Ghislaine Maxwell and Todd Blanche, the Trump lawyer turned US deputy attorney general. Cue Maxwell’s lawyer saying he felt she should be pardoned, and Trump stating matter of factly that he does indeed have that power.
Pardoning a child sex trafficker? Or getting a child sex trafficker to address the issue of Trump’s relationship with Epstein in a way that helps the president and – coincidentally of course – secures her a reduced sentence?
The fact that these questions are even being raised, and Trump engaging with them, indicates just how amoral are the waters in which he swims. We keep thinking he can go no lower… then lower he goes.
The fact that Blanche went so quickly to Tallahassee as the Epstein waves lapped in, and spent so long with her, suggests she can drive a hard bargain here. And don’t forget, Trump has form.
Take Charles Kushner, convicted of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, jailed… now not just pardoned, but appointed to be US ambassador to Paris. Maybe Ghislaine should press to be made US ambassador to her home country, the UK. She and Kushner can become the de Rosas de nos jours.
Footnote: we managed to persuade Captain Bob that the remains story was only worth a single page. It was illustrated by a photo of me and the ambassador, in front of a painting of Juan Manuel de Rosas, urn in hand.
To this day, I don’t know what the whole thing was about, but to his death, Maxwell was convinced we had brought peace between Britain and Argentina. Fact, as I say, stranger than fiction.
Some journalists were braver than others when dealing with Maxwell. Sports editor Tony Smith had a difficult double – Maxwell owned not only the Mirror but also Oxford United football club. Smith was therefore under regular instruction to give disproportionate coverage to “the Us”.
He would occasionally mock up pages that were sent only to Maxwell, pretending to be leading the back page with the latest news from the Manor Ground, usually with plenty of Maxwell quotes about the great days ahead.
When abroad, Maxwell would call Smith periodically during matches, to be kept up to date with the latest score. “Winning 3-2, Mr Chairman, ” I heard him once reply to one of these calls.
“Excellent,” boomed Maxwell. “Put it on the back page.” “Absolutely, sir.”
“But they’re losing 2-0,” I pointed out. “Don’t worry,” replied Smith. “By the morning, he’ll have forgotten we spoke.”
