In Ghislaine Maxwell’s 63 years of life, only two men have ever mattered. Both of them died in mysterious circumstances. Robert Maxwell was a self-made multi-millionaire, Labour MP, and media proprietor, one of very few rivals to Rupert Murdoch fighting for control of media in the UK and America.
In November 1991, seemingly at the height of his powers, having recently purchased the New York Daily News, Maxwell took a trip on the yacht he had named after his youngest daughter, the Lady Ghislaine, and never made landfall. His naked body was found near the boat, off the Canary Islands.
Soon afterwards, the truth about his empire emerged – Maxwell had been nearly broke, his creditors were closing in, and he had drained the pension funds of his employees. Most of Maxwell’s family insisted his death was an accident. Only his youngest daughter, Ghislaine, publicly said otherwise. She insisted he had been murdered.
Ghislaine had, very obviously, been her father’s favourite: he had three older daughters, and no yacht, nor anything else, was named for them. Even at 30, she referred to him endlessly as “daddy”, worked for his companies, and borrowed his cars and drivers. His death left her utterly bereft.
Into that void entered Jeffrey Epstein, whom she dated for a few years in the 1990s before he “promoted” her to be his “friend”. Their lives thereafter remained intimately intertwined: she had rooms at all of his properties, ran his homes and affairs with minute detail, and served as Epstein’s gateway into the world of the ultra-rich elite into which she was born.
As we now know, she performed additional services for Epstein, too: procuring and trafficking dozens, if not hundreds, of girls and women for Epstein and certain of his friends to abuse. Epstein was first convicted in 2008, but escaped largely unscathed. When prosecutors closed in on him again in 2019, Epstein was detained. Soon after, he was found dead in a prison cell.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Ghislaine was one of the children left behind to answer impossible questions after the death of her father, of whose financial affairs they evidently knew almost nothing. Today, with Epstein – now America’s most notorious paedophile – dead, she is the only living person who might have answers as to the extent of his crimes, and who else was involved.
This time is different: if anyone knows anything, it is Ghislaine Maxwell, as she is the very heart of the Epstein story. The question is what might she say, to whom, and will any of it be the truth?
Tragedy has followed Ghislaine since almost the moment of her birth, according to John Preston’s biography of her father, Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell. Days after she was born, Robert Maxwell’s eldest child, Michael, was in a car accident, which left him comatose and unresponsive.
The shock and grief of those events provoked equally strong reactions in the already stern Robert Maxwell, who sought to control the lives of his children even further, to protect them, while growing more distant from them at the same time. So starved of attention was Ghislaine in her early years, according to Preston’s interviews with her family, that when she was three, she tugged on her mother’s clothes for attention and said “Mummy, I exist”. As often happens, Maxwell Sr then overcompensated, showering attention on his youngest daughter until she was his clear favourite, and he was the dominant force in her life.
Ghislaine grew up rich and cosseted. Her father was both an immigrant to Britain and a Jew, but inveigled his way into both British and American high society as if doing so was easy – meaning his daughter was the consummate insider. She met and socialised with Prince Andrew while she was at university, and Donald Trump had partied with her father on the yacht that bore her name, before the two men competed for ownership of the New York Daily News tabloid. From her birth, she had been an insider, and she had been rich.
After her father’s death, Ghislaine was no longer rich: he died owing millions and having stolen millions more. Not only was he dead, he was discredited, and it’s not clear which hurt this daddy’s girl more. One staffer recalled to Preston that the last thing she said after the family gathered on their father’s yacht after his death was a simple instruction to the crew: “Shred everything on this boat.”
It is not hard to see what Ghislaine and Jeffrey might have seen in one another when they got together shortly after Robert’s death. Epstein came from a relatively modest background but had an innate skill for befriending the ultra-rich – alongside an obvious need for anyone close to him to be unconstrained by moral norms. Ghislaine offered him access to her ultra-rich friends while having obvious reasons to need him, perhaps to the point of dependency, and through her father had a connection with notoriety.
Court records allege that the pair’s systemic abuse of young women began in the earliest days of their relationship. One of the first dates to 1994, in which Annie Farmer – who was 16 at the time – alleged she had been first lured to an Epstein property in New Mexico, and then sexually assaulted there. Farmer, who settled her case and accepted compensation, said Maxwell had been an “important part of the grooming process”.
Maxwell is alleged to have played the role of recruiter and groomer to many more women, including Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent of Epstein’s victims, who died by suicide earlier this year. Giuffre alleged she was recruited into Epstein’s service by Maxwell aged 15, when she was working as a masseuse at Mar-a-Lago – Donald Trump’s Floridian summer house.
The level of detail with which Maxwell ran Epstein’s affairs occasionally emerges in filings from court cases over the last two decades. One particularly telling document is the “household manual” prepared for staff at Epstein’s Palm Beach property, which recounts in agonising detail how every room must be prepared, including exactly what toiletries must be in each bathroom, which papers laid out for Ghislaine and for Epstein, and how staff should address each.
Some of the instructions are particularly uncomfortable given what we now know. “Try to anticipate the needs of Mr Epstein, Ms Maxwell and their guests,” it notes. “Make guests feel pampered and welcome.” Later it suggests: “Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except to answer a question directed at you. Respect their privacy.”
That privacy was clearly a concern, and if anyone was threatening it, staff were told to take it to Maxwell, not Epstein. “NEVER disclose Mr Epstein or Ms Maxwell’s activities or whereabouts to anyone,” it said. “Advise Ms Maxwell of any strange telephone calls or enquiries. Advise Ms Maxwell of any unusual behaviour, such as strangers lurking around the vicinity of the property.”
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Why Ghislaine Maxwell deserves nothing
In a strange way, Ghislaine Maxwell is even more at the heart of the story around Epstein’s abuse and procurement of women than Epstein himself. She was not directly accused of raping girls and women, but she coordinated every other element around it.
She was Epstein’s gateway to British royalty and America’s elite. She knew Donald Trump and Prince Andrew before Epstein did. She procured many of the women and girls who Epstein victimised, and she controlled every detail of Epstein’s lavish life.
That makes Ghislaine Maxwell the very stuff of which conspiracies and conspiracy theories are constructed. If anyone could name names – if only what she said could be trusted – it would be her. She is alive and she is in federal custody, and so in theory at least we could have all the answers at any moment. That almost never happens.
Ghislaine is also the very antithesis of conspiracy theories. Anyone suggesting Epstein was murdered as some part of an elaborate conspiracy and cover-up – which until recently included multiple senior Trump officials who now say it was definitely a suicide – has to explain why Maxwell, who would know as much if not more, is still alive six years later. Her existence simultaneously confirms and confounds conspiracy theories.
Today, she has been moved to a minimum-security prison, despite only being a few years into her 20-year sentence and not due for a parole hearing until 2037 – obvious and explicit special treatment for the woman at the heart of a scandal that has sown division between Donald Trump and some of his most loyal supporters. There is much speculation that a deal will be done, perhaps even to pardon her, if she gives the right answers about who was, and who wasn’t, complicit in her crimes.
There are few reasons to trust whatever she might say. The attorney Trump’s White House sent to speak with Ghislaine was deputy attorney general Todd Blanche – the lawyer who unsuccessfully defended Trump during his 2024 criminal trial in New York over falsifying business records.
Trump was described by Epstein as his best friend for more than 10 years. He is known to have partied with Epstein in the company of girls and young women, on at least one occasion when the two men were alone. Trump spoke publicly about how fond both he and his friend were of young women, before Epstein’s downfall.
Ghislaine, the woman who ordered her father’s staff to shred his documents less than 24 hours after his death, is actively seeking a pardon from Trump, and she’s negotiating directly with his personal lawyer. If something comes out of that process, is it more likely to be the whole truth, or an agreed narrative that suits the president?
Tragedy may have stalked Ghislaine Maxwell, but she created much more of it through her own efforts – buying her continued place among the ultra-rich through the human suffering of the women and girls she trafficked. Now, as the world demands answers, the girl who was once so starved of attention has it in droves.
