Welcome to part four of The Life and Death of Jeff. In case you missed the first three episodes, you can read them below (all episodes will be released in a podcast for you to listen to very soon):

THE DEBUTANTE

It’s 1990 and Ghislaine Maxwell is finding her new life in New York more than agreeable. Her father, Robert Maxwell, is at this moment in time still alive. He has entrusted her with helping coordinate some his business affairs, most notably the newspapers The European and the struggling New York Daily News.

She is also managing her own small but successful company selling gift packages to corporates.

Making money is her main, though not sole, focus. Naturally, she’s also keen to find a partner to settle down with.

Already a firm fixture on the city’s vibrant, affluent social scene, she has managed to cultivate a circle of friends and potential suitors.

Among them, she briefly hoped, was John F Kennedy Jr., the rich, handsome, sought-after son of the much-loved President who’d tragically been gunned down three decades prior.

The following is Ghislaine’s recollection given during her July 2015 interview with U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche:

TODD BLANCHE: Did you ever meet JFK, Jr.?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: When was that?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I met him at Andrew Cuomo's wedding?

TODD BLANCHE: But would that have been before you met Mr. Epstein?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: Did you have any sort of professional or social relationship with John F. 16 Kennedy, Jr.?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I fancied him. I thought he was very attractive. I mean, we knew each other. I thought he was wonderful and fun and I enjoyed meeting him, but I -- we went out -- I want to say we had a dinner or two, but obviously I was very excited, but that was it.

Ghislaine, herself well-known as a young, beautiful and connected woman about town, had been described as ‘a sparkling debutante’. Other men followed, but the dates, though fun, were inevitably fruitless… until she met a man whom most people simply referred to as ‘Jeff’.

“YOU CAN SEE HIM. HE’S SAFE”

“I met Mr. Epstein in 1991,” Ghislaine told Blanche. “I had never heard of him or met him before. And no one in my family had ever either. I'd moved to America in 1990. I had been running my own company up until that time, which was a company called Maxwell's Corporate Gifts. And I had also been working for my father at the time. I had multiple jobs with him. In 1990 I was working with a new company of his, a new newspaper that he was launching, called The European. And I was in charge of launching a magazine to go with The European.”

“A girlfriend of mine, an American, told me -- I had broken up with my longterm -- I'd been engaged, getting my -- the very long-term boyfriend, and we'd broken up. And she said, as your girlfriends do, ‘I've got a guy for you to meet’. And I was like, ‘Who is it?’ And she goes, ‘He's been dating my sister. You'll love him. He's looking for a wife’. I'm edging towards thirty. I don't need to tell you guys, that's a very important moment for a girl to, like, think about important things. And sure, I'd be happy to meet him.”

“And so sometime in 1991, I met him at his offices on Madison Garden. And I think the most memorable thing I can think about is he was wearing a tie, which he didn't often do. It had a giant, seemed like a ketchup stain on it. And that was how we met. He just invited me to come and have tea, and I was like, ‘tea, that's English. Okay’. But what was unusual, was it was in his offices. So I went to his offices and we met. And I found him very engaging, and that was that.

“I was looking for real estate for my dad to buy some, and Epstein told me that he was also looking to move from his apartment and would I help him? And I said, ‘Sure, I'm looking already,’ so I could look for him. So that's how it started.

“And then, in 1991, my father passed away and I returned to New York after that, originally to come back and help with the family businesses, which was McMillan. And then the debacle of my father's passing hit the family. And we lost all our businesses and my family thought that it would be best if I stayed in America, because of the intensity of the press and the drama surrounding my father's death in England.

“So I stayed and Epstein said, ‘Well, you can keep helping me. You can help me find a house and we can decorate the house’. And it gave me something to do.

Ghislaine stated that, at this point, she and Jeffrey were ‘just friends’.

She was also clear in her answer when asked if Jeffrey had known her father before she met him.

“I know they never met,” she said, “because in 1991, before my father died, he asked me if I'd met anybody interesting or whatever, you know, because I was still trying not to be sucked back into the family business. And I told him that I had met Mr. Epstein. And the reason why I shared that I'd met Mr. Epstein, because I believed, at that time, that Epstein worked for Bear Stearns. And Bear Stearns was one of our banks. And I knew that my father was friendly with both Jimmy Cayne and with Ace Greenberg (Bear Stearns’ CEOs). But he called both Jimmy Cayne and Ace Greenberg to ask what sort of guy he was.

“And I just want to explain, briefly why my father would even do such a thing. I've had some interesting things that have happened in my life. And one of them was to be found on an IRA kidnap and murder list. And so I think after that event and several others, where I had stalkers and all that thing that one has, he was always quite protective of me. And so if I met somebody, he would try and verify that they weren't going to do anything 5 hideous.”

Robert Maxwell made the call to his associates at Bear Stearns to reassure himself before giving Ghislaine a nod of approval.

“At some point my father told me, “He's fine. You can see him. He’s safe’.”

As Jeffrey had requested, she found a house for him to rent in New York, a former Iranian embassy.

“And I didn't know that he had any money,” she continued to recall. “I want to say it was $12,000 a month, which to me seemed like a fortune. And I said, ‘I found this house, but I don't think you can afford it.’ He was like, ‘That's ridiculous. Of course I can afford it’. And he rented it.”

Ghislaine was initially uncertain of how Jeffrey was making his money - enough to live a luxurious lifestyle in America’s most expensive cities. But then one day he told her.

“He told me himself that he started a business where he looked for stolen money. So if somebody. So let's say you have El Chapo, oh God, I don't know where he comes from [Ghislaine was using El Chapo as a hypothetical scenario - there is no evidence that Epstein ever had dealings with him]. But anyway, we've got El Chapo. And El Chapo's laundering money or he's working with the Sinaloa Cartel and he steals money from the Sinaloa Cartel and he moves it to wherever. So he's got stolen money from the Sinaloa, goes to it. And the Sinaloa says to Epstein, ‘Can you track down my billion dollars that the other cartel stole from me?’ And Epstein will go and find the billion dollars and will take a portion of the money that was stolen, as a fee, and give back the remainder.”

Jeffrey is indeed documented as having made some of his money via this dubious method. One instance involved his former girlfriend, Anna Obregon, whose father had seen millions of dollars stolen from him. Epstein had somehow managed to ‘retrieve’ it - for a fee, of course. After that, whether it was a con or genuine enterprise, he got a taste for it and continued profiting from ‘lost money’.

But it wasn’t his main source of income. That came from helping handle the finances of wealthy clients and providing them with advice on how to exploit loopholes to pay less tax. Among them, Ghislaine confirmed, was Leon Black, Glenn Dubin (who would eventually marry Jeffrey’s longterm girlfriend Eva), Lynn Forester de Rothschild, and (most importantly) Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner.

Ghislaine surmised that the grand townhouse in New York, that the media have long claimed was purchased from Wexner for a mere dollar, was in fact given to Jeffrey to cover a fee for his services.

“So he had this house and I had moved into 10 foot by 10 foot apartment,” Ghislaine continued, “because all of our stuff had been either lost or frozen or whatever. So he [Epstein] became, in this moment, my lifeline.”

Ghislaine recounted how their relationship developed from friends/business associates, to the glimmer of something more. But it was far from being a fairytale.

“In 1992, I slept with him one time,” she said. “I was like, ‘whoa, that's it. We're going to be dating’, because that's how I thought. I felt if you slept with someone, that you were then dating them. That's the world I came from. But we didn't sleep together again for, I don't know, really a significant period of time. I don't know if it was a year. I don't -- that feels long, but maybe nine months.”

“Epstein told me that he had a heart condition which meant that he didn’t have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse.

“He liked other forms of sexual activities. He told me he had difficulty having an erection, and I believed him.”

Jeffrey’s claim that he suffered from erectile disfunction wasn’t a lie. Interviews I’ve conducted with his former sexual partners, and countless records I’ve scoured through, including emails sent by Jeffrey himself, confirm that he was almost completely impotent. With growing frustration, and amidst an ever-increasing and out-of-control sexual appetite, he searched for ways to cure his problem, but to no avail. Instead, he resorted to the ‘other forms of sexual activities’ that Ghislaine referred to - handjobs by prostitutes at local massage parlours and, predominantly, masturbation.

The 90s beginning to see computers and the internet available to households also provided another outlet. Pornography. Like most men, Jeffrey downloaded it, shared it with friends, and - having the financial means - even associated himself with porn stars and facilitated their careers (more on that in a future episode of this series).

But he compartmentalised his life. His day was filled with business deals and communicating with associates. His evenings filled with pornography and happy endings.

Read more

Let’s be honest; the Epstein Scandal, and particularly the way in which the media have reported it to you over the years, is a murky, confusing mess. The maelstrom of information and disinformation has naturally left most people scratching their heads in blithering bemusement.

So let me help remedy that by injecting some clarity and context into the chaos.

This is the third instalment of my series, The Life and Death of Jeff, running you through the entire scandal (including my exclusive interviews with key witnesses) in chronological order, from the very beginning. By the time you’ve finished reading it, you’ll be more educated on the scandal than the majority of the general public and practically every journalist. You’ll only be able to find the full truth here on my Substack (full access is just a few dollars/pounds a month to support my ongoing independent work).

In case you missed the first two parts of the series, you can read them below (they’ll be released as a podcast very soon):

Today, let’s take a deep dive into how Ghislaine met Jeffrey, what their relationship entailed, and the very first allegations made against them…

Accounts differ on when exactly the introduction of Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein was made, and by whom. According to Jeffrey’s former business partner, Steven Hoffenberg (who, along with Jeffrey, was arrested for fraud - read Epstein’s origin story above for more details), Robert Maxwell himself introduced his daughter to him in the late 1980s.

The Times claimed that the pair met in the 1990s at a New York party following Ghislaine’s difficult break-up with Count Gianfranco Cicogna Mozzoni, her first serious boyfriend.

Interviews conducted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche with Ghislaine in prison in July 2025, however, revealed the truth. She told investigators that she first met Jeffrey during a visit to his office on Madison Avenue in New York.

It was 1991, and Ghislaine was in the process of moving from London to New York. “A girlfriend of mine said, ‘I’ve got’—you know, as your girlfriends do—‘I’ve got a guy for you to meet. . . . You’ll love him. He’s looking for a wife,’” she told Blanche. “I’m edging towards thirty. I don’t need to tell you guys, that’s a very important moment for a girl to, like, think about important things.”

Jeffrey had led her to believe they might get married, she continued to recall. “Certainly by the mid to late nineties, I knew the marriage part was never going to happen,” she added. “But I did think that we might have a child, which is what I had really wanted.”

Their first encounter would lead Ghislaine on a completely different course in life: a brief romantic relationship with a multi-millionaire, a job managing his many properties, years of travelling the world - and, ultimately, a prison sentence.

“The first time I ever remember hearing about Jeffrey Epstein was Ghislaine inviting me to a party she was holding for her mother in New York,” her former friend Christopher Mason recalled. “And she explained that it was in the house of this guy she was dating, Jeffrey. The story Ghislaine told over and over again was that you didn’t have a chance of Jeffrey taking you on as a client if you had less than a billion dollars to invest. That was part of the mystique of the man that she was dating. She seemed deeply, genuinely in love with him.” 

 Euan Rellie recounted his first impression of Jeffrey on meeting him at one of Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s many social gatherings. “He was clearly talented, successful, well-dressed, handsome,” he said, “but he made extraordinarily little effort, frankly, as a host. It was an odd dichotomy between the two of them, with Ghislaine flitting around making everybody comfortable, getting drinks, champagne, whatever you wanted. Ghislaine kind of orchestrated the waiters bringing people snacks and so on.”

“She knew how to be a hostess in a grand old-fashioned way,” Petronella Wyatt remembers. “And I think somebody like Epstein, who was very much new money, was attracted to this because he probably saw her as upper-class, English accent, been to Oxford, wears designer clothes, has lots of well-known friends. Suddenly, they were together at all these smart parties, all the expensive parties, seemingly as a couple.” 

 “She would be quite touchy-feely with him,” said Euan Rellie. “She would touch his elbow, touch his shoulder, and they seemed intimate. We used to gossip about Jeffrey and Ghislaine to try to make sense of this slightly odd relationship. It was a rather strange mixture of facets.” 

“It wasn’t a normal relationship,” Petronella Wyatt concurred. “But it was obviously the kind of relationship she needed. She couldn’t feel secure without money, and he was a good catch for her financially. They became totally dependent on each other in a weird way.” 

 Lady Victoria Hervey, an outspoken defender of Prince Andrew, whom I’d later meet for the first time in a hotel restaurant near Hyde Park, recalled those early days of the relationship vividly. “She was definitely a flirtatious character, for sure,” she said in an interview with Netflix. “She exuded this mysterious air about her. And whenever you saw Ghislaine, it was Jeffrey this and Jeffrey that, and all she spoke about was him. You got this feeling like she was just so loyal to him.”   

 The relationship, at least in the sense of romance, doesn’t appear to have lingered past its early jet-setting, champagne-swigging honeymoon phase. Eventually it fizzled out, morphing into a burred mix of friendship, work, and the hint of something more.

“Ghislaine was in love with Jeffrey,” said Euan. “She was so spellbound by him, and my impression was she would have done anything for him. But she also played this kind of hybrid role as social fixer, social secretary. And the notion was that they had dated some time in the late 90s but had stopped, and now they were best friends.” 

As Epstein accuser Rina Oh once told me, women were naive to ever think that Jeffrey was the type of man who would ever consider settling down (you can listen to one of my interviews with Rina below):

Before he’d met Ghislaine, he’d already worked his way through a throng of women, only getting into semi-relationships with a few of them.

One of the earliest was Lynne Greenburg.

Not long after Epstein left teaching and began his role at Bear Stearns, the firm’s chief executive officer, Alan Greenberg, invited him to dinner at his home and placed him beside his 20-year-old daughter, Lynne. Lynne later said she suspected the seating arrangement was deliberate. The two connected immediately and began a relationship.

But around the same time, Jeffrey was also rumoured to be dating Ana Obregon. Born in Madrid in 1955, she came from a wealthy Spanish family, her father being a successful real-estate developer and businessman. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ana became one of Spain’s best-known celebrities, appearing in films, television series, magazine covers, and later hosting major television programs and New Year’s Eve broadcasts.

The pair met through a mutual friend around 1982 while she was living partly in New York and studying acting while trying to build an international career. Jeffrey was then a young Wall Street figure who had recently left Bear Stearns and was beginning to establish himself as an independent financial consultant. Through Obregón and her family, he was introduced to wealthy Spanish families who had lost money in the collapse of Drysdale Government Securities. Several reports have suggested that helping recover some of those funds helped him establish his reputation and earn substantial fees during the early years of his financial career (he would later go on to be arrested for alleged fraud, before going on to steal millions of dollars from one of his famous clients, Leslie Wexner).

He also dated Patricia Schmidt, another employee at Bear Stearns.

But Patricia soon discovered she wasn’t the only romantic interest in his life - and that Lynne and Ana weren’t the only rival love interests. In 2025, the New York Times interviewed Schmidt and released some of her contemporary diary entries. In them, she described having sex with Jeffrey, but noted that he preferred to kiss and cuddle, adding that he was “like a little boy almost”.

You can read some of her contemporary diary entries below.

She also wrote that, on one night at around 1am, she arrived at Jeffrey’s apartment to find him speaking on the phone to another woman, Eva Andersson.

Eva was no mere fling. Evidence and witness recollections suggest Jeffrey was likely truly in love with her (though he continued to have sexual relationships with other women during their 11 year relationship).

Eva won Miss Sweden in 1980, finished as a runner-up in the Miss Universe competition, was signed by Ford Models, and became a successful international model before later attending medical school and becoming a physician. She ultimately earned an MD from UCLA and later founded the Dubin Breast Center in New York.

Their relationship began around 1981 and lasted until 1990, after which they remained close friends, with Jeffrey even being made the godfather of Andersson’s daughter (after leaving Jeffrey, she married billionaire hedge fund manager Glen Dubin).

Eva was still in Jeffrey’s life when Jeffrey met Ghislaine. So too, we now know, were a large number of other women - most of them yacht girls, models and prostitutes. In New York he would hire hookers from high-end escorting agencies, inviting some of them onto his island to participate in bacchanalian weekend trips filled with sun, jet-skiing, and massages with happy endings. At his property in Paris, and his home in West Palm, he’d also satisfy his out-of-control lust with a string of models and massage parlour girls.

It was clear that Ghislaine wouldn’t get what she wanted out of Jeffrey. He was never going to be the marrying type.

“I think she [Ghislaine] was too old for Jeffrey,” said Petronella Wyatt. “He really liked much younger girls. But there was this bond between them. And she needed money. She couldn’t feel secure without Epstein’s money. It felt like she was doing the job of a wife without having any intimate relationship with him anymore.”

Of their relationship, Ghislaine’s brother Ian told me: “Some journalists, without any evidence, have tried to claim my father met Epstein before he died, and that’s how the connection with Ghislaine was established. The BBC documentary, The House of Maxwell, surmised that somehow the pension funds were siphoned off and Epstein then laundered them. I mean, it’s just false, ludicrous, but I guess it makes for very good television. There’s been a lot of suggestion that somehow my father had introduced the two of them. I know that not to be the case. I don’t actually know who did introduce Ghislaine to Jeffrey, or precisely when that took place – I would say 1991 or early ’92. But by early ’93, we knew that she was in a new relationship. But I was too engaged in fighting the legal case, on my defence, and my marriage at the time was falling to bits. It was just not a good time for me, so I didn’t have much of a real insight into her relationship with Jeffrey, except that it existed. She seemed happy.” 

 Ian then placed his hands together and leaned forward in his chair.

Read more

This is the second part of my new series, The Life and Death of Jeff, where I take you on a chronological journey from the very beginning, right up to Epstein’s death, and beyond.

With exclusive interviews with key witnesses, and insight into the case that you won’t find anywhere else, by the end of reading it, I’m certain that you’ll be more clued-up on the scandal than 99% of the general public (and 100% of the media).

If you missed part one, you can read it below - Epstein’s curious, at times shocking origin story.

A year before I ever set foot in New York, I’d been on one of my regular visits to London. The person I’d planned to meet for lunch, Michael (not his real name), had been corresponding back and forth with me, mostly through email, for over a year. I’d first contacted him to get a better understanding of Ghislaine Maxwell, with whom he’d enjoyed a friendly relationship on London’s elite social scene. I wasn’t so much interested in the monster portrayed in the media. I wanted to learn about the human behind the headlines.

We met in a small Italian deli near Kensington Gardens, a vast park I fondly remember strolling through with my Bermondsey-born grandmother after begging her to show me the statue of Peter Pan. We sat, cramped at one of the small tables, businessmen and locals scurrying in and out around us as I unclipped my briefcase, removed some pre-written questions, a wad of printed sheets, and placed them on the table with a light thud.

“Oh,” he seemed surprised, moving his eyes from the paperwork to the clock above the counter, rightly guessing that the interview wouldn’t be as short as he’d envisaged or perhaps hoped. “I suppose we’d best get cracking”. Over the next couple of hours, he told me he had first met Ghislaine in 2010, the pair introduced by a mutual friend, an LA film producer.

“I was living and working in LA at the time,” he told me. “We’d meet up whenever she was over and would go for dinner or drinks. Then we met up a few times in New York. I went to a Christmas party one year, with some friends of hers in Chelsea, all nice people. Dame Vivian Duffield and others were there, and everyone was happy to see her. That’s the thing about Ghislaine, she has room presence. When she walks into a room, she lights it up. She’s witty, gregarious, she was always somebody who would befriend anyone, a politician and a supermodel all on the same night. She was lovely, warm and funny, very interesting to be with and always full of stories. Not precious or high maintenance in any way. The monster they depict her to be in the newspapers has no resemblance to the real Ghislaine at all.”

He told me he believes Jeffrey didn’t commit suicide. He surmised that he was murdered, though he had no idea who by. And, upon hearing the news that his former friend had, following Jeffrey’s death, suddenly become a named suspect, Michael said he was in a state of “shock and bewilderment”, immediately becoming fearful for her safety. So staunch in his belief of her innocence was he that he even wrote her a character reference in the hope it would be used by her attorneys when requesting bail. “I believed in her innocence then, and I still do now,” he said. “The evidence that was presented, and the witnesses themselves, don’t appear credible.”

Like most people I’ve interviewed, his focus quickly shifted to the most vocal of her accusers. “Virginia Giuffre’s a fabricator,” he said, frowns forming on his forehead. “A loudmouth. A hustler.”

He told me he’d been following my investigation closely. “You’re doing a brilliant job in getting to the truth. I think that you need to keep focusing on the victims,” he added, his fingers making inverted comma marks in the air. “Their credibility, or lack of, is ultimately what will exonerate Ghislaine.”

Though deploring any form of sexual abuse and believing the harrowing abuse stories of numerous victims of Epstein, I had highlighted major discrepancies and flat-out fabrications in some of the accusers’ claims. And I was incredibly keen to learn more about all the characters involved and to understand Ghislaine and her potential role as best as I could. Michael told me I would need to become educated on her background.  

In the following months and years to come, I would find myself frequently speaking to some of Maxwell’s siblings.

Ghislaine’s mother, Elisabeth Maxwell (nee Meynard), was of aristocratic stock. A Huguenot descendant whose distant lineage boasted French kings, her father, the mayor of a small French village, owned a profitable silk-weaving factory that supported his two daughters comfortably enough to send a nine-year-old Elisabeth to England, where she attended a convent in Birmingham before returning to her homeland in 1932 and studying law.

Following the liberation of Paris, whilst working as a translator, she was introduced to Czechoslovakian-born British Army Captain Robert Maxwell.

Robert wasn’t in fact named Robert at all. His birthname was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Throughout the war he went by numerous aliases, including Ivan du Maurier, before settling upon Ian Robert Maxwell in 1948 (for some reason, everyone dropped his first name, Ian, altogether, referring to him only as ‘Robert’ or, more often, ‘Bob’).

Awarded the Military Cross for bravely storming a Nazi machine gun nest, Maxwell, an Orthodox Jew, had returned from the war to discover that many of his relatives had been murdered in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The pair married on March 15th, 1945. Living in Maisons-Laffitte, part of the affluent outer suburbs of northwestern Paris, the children would soon fill the expanding family’s household, most of them delivered by Elisabeth’s sister Yvonne, an obstetrician described to me by one of the Maxwell siblings as “an extraordinary woman, and one of the very rare women to become and obstetrician after the war and, even rarer, to own her own clinic”.

Ghislaine was born on a crisp Christmas Day morning in 1961. 

“It’s important that you understand we were originally nine in this family,” Ian Maxwell, a rather friendly and likeable man of 68 told me. “There was our eldest brother, Michael, and there was a little girl, Karine; and they died young. Karine died in 1957 at only three from leukemia, and Michael was in a terrible car crash that didn’t kill him but left him in a coma for seven years. He never recovered and sadly died. Karine was born between me and my twin sisters, and so instead of having a natural bridge, the family, in a sense, split into two because of the age gap. So Kevin and I and Ghislaine were very close as children, and my four elder brothers and sisters were very close. Then, obviously, as we grew up, we all became equally close, and we spent quite a bit of time together.”

 “I’ve got pretty clear memories of childhood with Ghislaine,” he continued. “She was a funny little thing, very funny, good sense of humour. She was in the same bedroom as Kevin and I for at least the first three years of our lives, and we have so many stories to tell. One particular occasion that sticks in my mind is that Kevin and I quickly understood that the way to shock our parents was to use swear words, which generally got a cuff around the ear, and so we thought if we could avoid cuffing, we would teach these words to Ghislaine, because she was too small to be cuffed. And one day, while Ghislaine was held in the arms of my mother, my father next to her, the head of an Oxford college came in and said: ‘And who is this adorable little thing?’, to which Ghislaine looked back at him and casually replied, ‘Piss off!’”

 “As a young child, she loved animals. She had dogs and cats, some budgies, a hamster, and a pony. My father was rich and could afford to give her these things.” 

By now, a publishing company founded by Robert Maxwell, Pergamon Press, was booming. The boy from humble beginnings, from a two-room wooden shack with earthen floors and a pit latrine, where he and his siblings would share one pair of shoes during winter, had done good; so good, in fact, that he moved the family to the company’s leased headquarters, Headington Hill Hall, a grand Italianate mansion in east Oxford. Boasting more than 50 rooms, the new family home, described by Robert as “the best council house in the country,” had hosted countless high society parties throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Attending an all-night May Day Ball there in 1878, Oscar Wilde had arrived in flamboyant style, gaudily dressed as Prince Rupert.  

 “I was very young when we moved to Headington Hill Hall, or ‘Triple H’, as we called it,” Isabel Maxwell, the entrepreneurial, warm and spirited sister of Ghislaine, told me. “We moved into it during Easter of 1961. Our mom had been fixing it up for all of the past year as it was, in our mother’s own words, from her book A Mind of My Own, ‘a Victorian mansion built in 1858 for the brewer James Morell. It was in 15 acres of wooded parkland with a magnificent view over the dreaming spires of Oxford. It was owned by Oxford City Council, who were looking for a tenant to take over this white elephant.’ 

Read more

Welcome to episode one of my new series, The Life and Death of Jeff.

By the time you’ve finished reading this series (or listening - I’ll soon be releasing all episodes in a podcast), you’ll without doubt know more about the Epstein scandal than 99% of the general public and 100% of the media.

As well as trying my best over the years to look past the Epstein case clickbait and get to the truth, I’ve been keen to understand the humans behind the headlines - from accusers to the accused - investigating and interviewing my way through America and beyond so that we can finally get a glimpse at the real characters in the scandal, not just their media-invented one-dimensional caricatures.

Feel free to order a paperback, hardback, or ebook version of my book, Naked Lies, which covers my 6-year investigation into the case and includes all of my exclusive interviews.

Back in New York, I glanced back at the tall prison where Epstein breathed his last. Though now closed following a damning report into its numerous failings, a solitary blue-shirted guard sat inside his shack in front of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Lower Manhattan. In a taxi driven by a silent driver, I headed further downtown, passing early rising tourists busy snapping photographs of courtroom steps where their favourite films, including The Godfather, were shot, and on to the leafy suburbs straddling Central Park.

With the yellow cab rolling to a gradual halt, I paid the fare and stepped out onto East 71st Street, Upper East Side. I’d gone there to see Number Nine, a brooding French neo-classical townhouse shaded by an equidistant row of Callery pear trees. Opulent, 15-foot-high oak doors stood framed by carved limestone angels, crowned by a pan-like bearded figure that scowled down at me menacingly. The gouges beside the door’s brass plates made by FBI agents have long since been smoothed down. A few steps away, rain-beaten, flop-cornered A4 notices pasted beside iron bars informed neighbours and passers-by of ongoing renovation work.

Described by former Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward as “the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses… almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-story neighbours,” and seeming “more like an institution than a house,” the decadent Herbert N. Straus House was completed in 1932, reportedly the largest private residence in Manhattan. Straus, the sixth son of the co-owners of R. H. Macy & Co., in fact never spent a single night within its walls.

The cost of property taxes was too much to shoulder, even for such a renowned retail heir. Thus it remained unfinished when, in 1944, it was donated to the Archdiocese of New York, its 21,000 square feet, nine-floor interior converted into a hospital and, in the 1960s, a school. That was until 1989, when billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, a man now firmly ingrained in Epstein scandal lore, snapped it up for a not-so-modest $13.2 million. Wexner, the former CEO of lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret, was quick to have the building remodelled, transforming it into a mansion fit for the setting of a gothic novel, plastered with paintings and grand fireplaces.

Surprisingly, I was accidentally given a brief glimpse inside when the front doors suddenly creaked open and two workers carried out a large bubble-wrapped mirror and headed towards a white van parked nearby. My eyes fixed fleetingly on the marbled foyer, dimly lit by a large chandelier. It’s all was able to see. The two men briskly returned, their hands now empty, hard hats sitting loosely on their heads. One of them, a burly, stubble-chinned chap, scanned me up and down with a suspicious glare. Shuffling back inside, the doors swiftly closed behind them. They remained closed for the remainder of my visit.

The present owners are understandably keen to maintain their privacy. Understandable, that is, owing to the identity of the previous homeowner. In 1995, when his life was approaching the peak of its ominous wealth and success, a 42-year-old Jeffrey Epstein proudly strolled into Number Nine and claimed it as his own. Although ownership was initially registered through a trust connected to both Wexner and himself, this was officially changed in 2011 to a trust controlled solely by Jeffrey, as Wexner had long since married and moved to Ohio.

Standing alone outside its façade, I was left to imagine the rest of its sprawling interior, eventually extended to more than 50,000 square feet – though I can rely on the accounts of others, including Vicky Ward, who visited Jeffrey at the house when writing her 2003 profile piece titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” Upon entering the house, “you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu,” she recounted. “This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.”

Adorning the entrance hall walls were rows of individually framed prosthetic eyeballs manufactured for injured English soldiers during the First World. They were accompanied by a “twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior”. A nearby room, described then simply as the “leather room,” came dressed in cordovan-coloured fabric and leopard-print chairs, a large “oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin” draping down from one of its walls. Though Jeffrey, a teetotaller who abstained even from smoking tobacco, was neither a fan nor partaker of drugs, his taste in furnishings, particularly art, seemed intentionally to present itself as an unsubtle nod to a free, almost Bacchanalian mindset.

Beneath a flight of stairs, tucked away from prying eyes, a bathroom lined in lead came accompanied with closed-circuit televisions and a phone, both concealed in a cabinet under the sink, and both the source of much speculation, now connected to claims, including from Jeffrey’s own brother, that Jeffrey had intentionally gathered “dirt” on some of the house’s most prominent visitors, not least of all, allegedly, Donald Trump and the Clintons.

To this day, Jeffrey’s acquisition of the property and the precise means behind his sultan-style wealth remain shrouded in mystery. He hadn’t always lived in such luxury. Far from it, in fact.

Although Epstein had lived in several extravagant homes, including a former Iranian government building on 34 East 69th Street and a mansion outside Columbus, Ohio, close to Wexner’s own residence, he came from humble beginnings. And though we might never fully ascertain what his early life was like (his brother, Mark, told me that he might write a book about it himself one day), a skeletal biography can be gleaned from personal, financial, and business records.

Born in Brooklyn on January 20, 1953, his parents, Pauline “Paula” Stolofsky and Seymour George Epstein, married when Paula was in the late stages of pregnancy. She was a school aide and homemaker, and Seymour a groundskeeper and gardener for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the pair brought home a modest income, just enough to raise Jeffrey and his future younger brother in working-to-middle-class, relative comfort in an apartment nestled in the middle of a three-story house in Sea Gate, a private gated community in salt-sprayed Coney Island, a pebble’s throw away from the area’s iconic lighthouse.

Sea Gate has had a significant Jewish presence for almost 100 years, with Epstein’s parents, both practising Jews, regular visitors to Kneses Israel, the neighbourhood’s oldest synagogue situated just across the street. Like many of the local townsfolk, Jeffrey was the child of European immigrants. And, like most of his neighbours who had harrowing tales of extended family members being brutally murdered during the Holocaust, Seymour and Paula had their own, often unspeakable family history that was steeped in persecution. Faith was the cornerstone of the Epstein family life.

By all accounts, the Epstein’s were doting parents, with neighbours later describing them as “the most gentle people, the most simple people in the world”. Both affectionately gave their two children nicknames within the walls of their small family home: “Bear” for Jeffrey, “Puggie” for Mark. “He was a little nerdy boy,” a former neighbour who grew up on the same block recalled, detailing how she and Jeffrey would play punchball in front of his house and in the schoolyard. “He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling,” she added. “There was absolutely no indication at that time of the vile, disturbed man that he was to become.”

Encouraged to learn the piano from five-years-old, Jeffrey was regarded by friends, most of whom lived in the same vibrant neighbourhood, as a talented budding musician. Both boys attended public schools, then a junior high school where Jeffrey, a model student, earned extra pocket money by helping fellow students in their studies, before heading off to Lafayette High School in Gravesend. “Pictures of Jeffrey in high school don’t feature the smug smile seen in photos from the past 20 years; his features are softer and calmer,” The Forward newspaper, formerly known as The Jewish Daily, reported.

Consisting predominantly of Italians, Jews and African-Americans, Jewish students often faced anti-Semitism at the school and in South Brooklyn in general. ”There was a lot of volatility at Lafayette,” one graduate told The Forward. “It was a blue-collar area that was, at one time, 90 percent Italian. Then a small number of Jews moved in, and there was anti-Semitism. The Italians didn’t want the Jews to be there.”  One classmate, Beverly Donatelli, said that she and a curly-haired Jeffrey were sweethearts for a time, but that Jeffrey was notably shy.

His shyness didn’t last long. Letters to Jeffrey, and contemporary photographs, detail that, from a late teen onwards, he was popular, often got into mischief with his friends, and had countless sexual encounters, one-night stands, and more serious relationships. He graduated from Lafayette in 1969 shortly after his 16th birthday, skipping two grades due to his evidently advanced intellect, far excelling his peers. Of particular interest to him was mathematics, a subject at which he was abnormally adept. Numbers and equations seemed to play like tunes before him, as though lifted from his many collected music sheets.  

Advanced math classes at the private Cooper Union college, and enrollment at New York University soon followed, where the teenager studied mathematical physiology. Strangely, however, he left in the summer of 1974 without receiving a degree. Even stranger was his subsequent hiring, devoid of any qualifications, as a physics and mathematics teacher for teens at Dalton School, a prestigious, private and progressive establishment on the Upper East Side. “I’m teaching a bunch of little brats next year,” Jeffrey had sarcastically scribbled in his yearbook.  

The school’s eccentric headmaster, Donald Barr, had made several unconventional staff recruitments in the run-up to the new term, the appointment of 21-year-old Ralph Lauren-lookalike Jeffrey onto the faculty rumoured to be one of them. Just one year prior, Barr wrote and published Space Relations, a heavily criticised science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. Described by Kirkus Reviews as “a coruscatingly literate tale for grown-ups,” and derided by reporter Becky Ferreira as “highly unsettling” due to its depiction of the rape of enslaved teenage girls. The book would, understandably, be scrutinised further in the months and years after Jeffrey’s death, with parallels drawn between the book’s plot and the grim accusations made against him.

Read more