Trussed up in chains, guilty five times over, Ghislaine Maxwell sat in the prison van as it crawled away from the courthouse in Manhattan in December 2021, facing the rest of her life in the bone pit. And she might have been forgiven for thinking: but what about the men?
Now Donald Trump’s delayed-action bomb has blown up the Epstein Sewer, covering hundreds of the not-so-great and the not-that-good men in a tsunami of their own shit, that question remains.
The big picture is hard to grasp while the great stink from Jeffrey Epstein makes people the world over sick with nausea. The Andrew formerly known as Prince playing creepy-crawlie with a female, more child than woman; Mandelson in his underpants, leaking the nation’s economic Crown Jewels to Epstein while he and his boyfriend cash in; Epstein advising someone how to get cosy with the killer in the Kremlin; photos of Donald Trump with very young women, time and again; Elon Musk and most of the world’s bond market begging to be invited to the parties. Most of the men who fell into Epstein’s sewer were not interested in fucking under-age girls. But some did.
And only one person gets locked up. A woman.
Of all the scum washed up in Epstein’s great sewer, it’s possible that Ghislaine Maxwell is the only one for whom it is right to feel a degree of pity. In 2019, Epstein, knowing that he was going to be sentenced to prison for a very long time for his industrial abuse of under-age girls, killed himself in prison.
There can be no doubt. The pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said that the broken hyoid bone – it sits behind the Adam’s Apple – indicated murder, not suicide, was wrong about that. It’s the other way around, especially in older men. The CCTV didn’t work in prison? Nothing works in prison.
Ghislaine vanished and a year later Global, which owns LBC, commissioned me to do a podcast, Hunting Ghislaine, which I turned into a book of the same name. Podcast and book tell the same story: that Epstein ruined Ghislaine’s life a second time. But long before she met Jeffrey, she was destroyed by the first monster in her life, her father, Robert Maxwell.
Eleanor Berry, the daughter of Lord Hartwell, the former owner of the Daily Telegraph, lived with the Maxwells after Cap’n Bob, who in her words, “looked like a beautiful big black bear”, had rescued her from her electric-shock treatment. Mad Eleanor, who was neither courtier nor family, was in an extraordinary position to describe life under Robert Maxwell.
In 1970, Ghislaine, then nine years old, who had been away staying with friends, returned home. Eleanor wrote: “Ghislaine was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes and a white T-shirt. She clambered onto her father’s knee and put her arms around his neck. She had large brown eyes and brown hair, taken back into a ponytail. She was very pretty. While she was on her father’s knee, I became agonisingly jealous of her.”
Later, Eleanor and Ghislaine were on their own. Eleanor explained that Ghislaine talked about her father giving her a hiding and how he showed her a row of objects in an empty room. “Daddy always allows me to choose what I prefer to be beaten with.”
Eleanor, who had something close to a photographic memory, noted the following punitive instruments arranged in a row on a table: “a riding crop, a ruler, a stick, a cane, which made a swishing noise on being brought down through the air”.
In Eleanor’s weird book, My Unique Relationship with Robert Maxwell: The Truth at Last, she added one more detail: that years after the death of Robert Maxwell, Eleanor was visiting Maxwell’s widow and Ghislaine’s mother Betty at her flat in London. Eleanor over-indulged on the G&Ts and Betty let her snooze on her sofa.
Eleanor wrote that she woke when the phone rang, but feigned sleep. She recalled hearing Betty comforting Ghislaine who was in New York. Although only getting Betty’s side of the conversation, Eleanor deduced that Ghislaine was clearly upset. Betty asked: “Are you seeing a psychiatrist about Daddy’s canings when you were little?” Then Betty realised that Eleanor was listening in: “Ghislaine! I’m afraid we can’t continue this conversation. Eleanor’s here! She was asleep. Now she’s woken up. She’s heard everything.”
The former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams described Eleanor Berry as a very eccentric woman. He told me: “Ghislaine’s behaviour is partly due to the fact that she had this very peculiar upbringing with this monster as her father. People need to connect the Ghislaine story with this nasty man.”
Like Epstein, Robert Maxwell killed himself. As his naked body bobbed around in the Atlantic, he left his youngest child a miserable legacy: shame, a bad name and a grim fact: that Ghislaine, like so many perpetrators of sexual abuse against children, had once been a victim too. His victim.
Nicola Glucksmann, then a TV producer, was invited to Headington Hill Hall in September 1991 for a stay-over dinner party. She knew who Ghislaine was but did not know her personally when she was invited as a plus-one by a mutual female friend who was visiting Britain. Nicola was struck by the drab, utilitarian outbuildings of Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press squatting in the grounds of Headington Hill Hall in a kind of mini-industrial estate. The house felt more like the abandoned set of a Carry On movie.
Ghislaine was “charming, elegant, beautiful. Her mind was obviously very quick but I remember being aware that she didn’t seem to focus long on anyone, there was a sense of hyper-alertness, something a bit on edge. She was constantly assessing the room, as if anxious about missing something in another corner and, although she was very quick to laugh, any real conversation wasn’t welcomed, at least not with me.
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“After a perfectly nice meal, Ghislaine announced that she was in charge of games. She came out of the next room with blindfolds for the men, explaining that the women were to take off their tops and their bras and present themselves to the men, who were to identify the women from the size and feel of their breasts.”
Nicola and her friend made their excuses and left: “There was no joy in that game. If this betrayed how Ghislaine viewed her own body, and what she felt she had to do with it to entertain men, then it’s haunting. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman but where was her sense of her own worth?”
Nicola remains unsettled by the evening at Headington Hill Hall because of the shadows cast by Ghislaine’s tragedy: “There was something about her seeming to see sex as simply a currency that stayed with me.”
Epstein chose his pimp well. His empire of influence was built on using sex as a currency. Smart at maths, sussed and sassy, she was an insider trader in male lust and, boy, did it pay off. She made the horrible mistake of falling in love with him. After some years, he dropped her for the crime of being too old but she was paid handsomely, maybe some $30m, to find fresh children to serve his perversion, not greatly troubled by what she was doing because, for her, with her father, it was kind of normal. Together, Epstein and Ghislaine created a thing of evil and now it stinks to low heaven.
The big panorama is grim, grimmer by the hour: every voter in the west who thinks poorly of politicians, that they are only in it for themselves, that power is rotten through and through, now has much ammunition to fire. And that means the very idea of democratic power itself is being poisoned.
We need to clean out the sewer fast before gangrene sets in and the predator dictators in Moscow and Beijing make yet more kills. But there is precious little chance of that. What faith can the public have in a British government clear-up if the man in charge is the fool who hired Mandelson to be our man in Washington DC in the first place? Why does Keir Starmer pick 2026 as the year that he worked out that Mandelson was an ocean-going crook?
Why not 1998 like the rest of us? That’s when he first fell on his sword, after forgetting to declare a £373,000 “home loan” from fellow MP Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house. Or, say, 2001, when he resigned a second time following accusations of using his position to influence a passport application for an Indian oligarch.
Or 2005? That year had been difficult for Jeffrey Epstein, what with the Palm Beach Police Department raid on his house on El Brillo Way and their seizure of what evidence was left, including a phone-call log pointing to a string of schoolgirls arranging massages with his team.
The good news was that, for at least some part of the Christmas break, one of Ghislaine Maxwell’s best friends, Mandelson, was on hand in the Caribbean to cheer him up. Mandelson was captured in a photo trying on a white belt in an upmarket boutique on the island of St Barts, roughly 140 miles due east from Little St Jeffs, with Epstein looking on.
Or, say, 2007? Around this time a photograph pops up of Epstein celebrating his birthday in Paris by blowing out the candles on the cake along with his chum, “Petie”. Or what about 2008, when Mandelson was gallivanting on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht?
I could go on and I will.
What about 2017 when I tried to make a Newsnight film about the $500,000 Mandelson made from being a director of Sistema, a Russian conglomerate, whose boss was arrested for money-laundering? In one script draft, I included a clip of James Harding, the BBC head of news, laughing with Mandelson when he had interviewed him previously at the Times. The film opened like this:
Sweeney: “Back in the day Lord Mandelson of Foy was pretty hardcore when challenged about his habit of palling around with the filthy rich.”
Harding clip: “you hang out with Oleg Deripaska, Nat Rothschild?”
Mandelson: “Good for me!”
Harding and Mandelson laugh.
The BBC lacked enthusiasm for our story. Pretty much every reporter who had a go at Mandelson will have a version of this story, when their journalism was spiked by the great Svengali, of rumours, hard to pin down, that he might have gone over your head to the bosses. Our film never saw the light of day.
Or what about, say, November 2020? While Starmer says he had no proper insight into the true risk of appointing Mandelson as our ambassador to DC in 2024, here’s an extract from my podcast Hunting Ghislaine. I noted that there were 10 numbers for Mandelson and his minions in Epstein’s black book. Then I give him a ring:
Mandelson: “Hello.”
Sweeney: “Hi, Peter, it’s John Sweeney. I’m doing a podcast about Ghislaine Maxwell and I’ve got her black book, and I see that you’ve got lots of entries…”
Mandelson [oozing silicone oil]: “John, thank you very much, just talking to somebody on a Zoom. If you care to call back in half an hour, if that’s OK…”
Sweeney: “Sure, will do.”
I called him back, repeatedly. I got the answering machine, over and over again. Mandelson never called me back. The question to Starmer, his former consigliere, Morgan McSweeney (no relation of any kind, whatsoever) the Cabinet Office and MI5 is simple. Four years before Mandelson got the ambassador’s job, he refused to engage with an investigative reporter about his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein – why was that? Eh?
Our system of justice rests on the presumption of innocence. Just because your name pops up in a black book or the files does not mean that you have done anything wrong, let alone criminal. The critical date was 2008, when Epstein was convicted of one specimen count of having sex with a minor.
The newspapers, properly worried about British libel laws, are currently assuring their readers that there is, of course, no suggestion that x or y or z has committed any “wrongdoing.” Well, I am not a fancy lawyer but taking money from a convicted nonce is wrong, full stop. And sending the nonce market-critical inside stuff is wrong, point, new para.
Mandelson has done both, which is why his collar is about to get felt by the Old Bill, sharpish.
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Likewise, in the States, how effective will an inquiry into the Epstein Sewer be at clearing the air if the man in charge of the machinery of power in DC is named in 5,300 documents?
Or course, Donald Trump, the great disruptor, is the man who blew up the sewer. In 2021, out of power, he called on president Joe Biden repeatedly to “release the files” not knowing or not caring that because the trial against Ghislaine Maxwell was due to start, there were strong legal grounds for not doing so. But the moment Trump got back in, the calls to release the files grew so strong, many from his own MAGA base, that he got hoist by his own five-year-old petard.
Trump is in trouble and, at the midterms this November, the Republicans are going to be massacred, so much so that I believe there will be more than 67 Democratic Senators. They are very likely to put an acting president on trial.
Trump, the son of a KKK-supporting property developer who was in bed with the Mob and the grandson of a brothel-keeper, will fight dirty to stay in power and out of prison. He would rather unleash a blood-red tide than face the consequences of his crimes. And only the west’s enemies will benefit from this.
Was Epstein working for the Russians from the get-go? That’s what my pal Christopher Steele has been told by his American sources and one has to listen to the former head of MI6’s Russia House. His confidential dossier on Trump is becoming more and more true by the day.
But I spoke to another former MI6 officer who told me something slightly different: “I suspect that Epstein was a brilliant opportunist, who would pick up one gobbet of information here, then flog it three times over, once to someone like Mandelson in London, twice to Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv and thrice to former FSB officer Sergei Belyakov in Moscow. That’s not quite being Moscow’s Man.”
Garry Kasparov has noted that the Russians, like the dog that does not bark in the night, do not go bow-wow in the Epstein Sewer. Kasparov suggests that it is because they are the hunters, not the hunted. I agree with that and note that the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, made exactly that point when challenging Starmer about his folly in hiring Mandelson. His ambassador had previously been tipping off an American financier – but had he been tipping off the Russians too?
The answer to that is: “Да, конечно”.
Making Mandelson our ambassador to DC was a mistake so bad you cannot recover from it. I bumped into Kemi Badenoch at Sky News’s studio in Westminster the other day and she and her gang were almost floating on air with contempt for the prime minister. I haven’t seen Tories so cocky for years.
But Kemi is not the worst. Nigel Farage’s Reform is still topping the polls. His evil shone through at Dulwich when he sang “Gas ’Em All” but the public can put that down to a youthful misdemeanour. Compared to New Labour’s great corruptee, Farage can pass himself off as the anti-machine man he is not. Farage is part of the Fascist International and the thought of him in No 10 fills me with dread. And there are a ton of Labour backbenchers who fear the same thing.
There is a fresh surge of shit coming down the sewer and the folk in No 10 don’t quite get it. James Lyons, the former Starmer spin doctor, explained on Newsnight that the “Humble Address” announced in the Commons means that the communications – WhatsApp messages – between Starmer, his cabinet and Mandelson will be published. Those will doubtless expose the prime minister’s Trump-whispering for the semi-cynical game it has been. I fear that Starmer lacks the political elasticity to get out of the jam he got into.
Starmer is set to be the first big victim of the Epstein Sewer and that is a kind of tragedy. I was great friends with the late Paul Vickers who had been Starmer’s flatmate when they lived above a brothel near the Arse. I know through Paul that Starmer is a thoroughly decent man but also thoroughly unworldly. Once a thief stole into their flat and nicked the telly. Keir was inside the flat, working on a brief for the McLibel Two, and was so hyper-focused he had no idea what happened until far too late.
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The same happened with the thief Mandelson. Starmer lacks political nous. When he feared that he might end up making a hash of power, he turned to Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson for counsel and they planted Morgan McSweeney as their spy in No 10. Naturally, when Trump 2.0 was a reality, Mandelson got the gig in DC.
Starmer has now got it – Mandelson is a crook, but it’s far, far too late. That’s why I am certain that Keir Starmer should resign because his attempts to clean up are broken-backed and without it Farage will be measuring the curtains at No 10.
And Ghislaine? Trump knows that he is in trouble and helping her might add to his woes, so she is likely to spend the rest of her life in jail. That she might be joined by some of the men she used to pal around with on Epstein’s island may be a comfort for her. But a bleak one.
John Sweeney’s book, Hunting Ghislaine: Epstein, the Prince and the Presidents: a Gripping Expose of Corruption and Child Abuse, is published by Headline.
