In this episode we continue our journey by laying another foundation, this time covering the origin story of Ghislaine Maxwell, her famous family, her father’s tragic and mysterious death, and the turn of events that led her life to inevitably collide with Jeffrey Epstein.
We’ll be listening to my interview with Ghislaine’s brother, Ian, to recordings of Ghislaine herself, and will be able to obtain a better understanding of Maxwell before we move on to the story’s seedier developments.
Please remember to subscribe, share on social media, and feel free to message me with any questions.
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE TWO
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 Ghislain 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. 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 L.A. film producer.
“I was living and working in L.A. 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, Elizabeth Maxwell, née Maynard, 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 Elizabeth 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 birth name was Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hock. Throughout the war he went by numerous aliases, including Ivan de Maurya, 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 15, 1945. Living in Maison Lafitte, part of the affluent outer suburbs of north-western Paris, the children would soon fill the expanding family’s household, most of them delivered by Elizabeth’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 that we were originally nine children in this family,” Ian Maxwell, a rather friendly and likeable man of 68, told me. “There was an eldest brother, Michael, and there was a little girl, Karine, and they died young. Kareem died in 1957, age three, from leukemia, and Michael, who was the eldest son, was in a terrible car crash. That didn’t kill him but left him in a coma for eight years. And he never recovered and died.
“And so what that meant is that the little girl was exactly between me and my twin sisters. And so instead of having a natural bridge, the family in a sense split into two because the age gap between me and my twin sisters is six years. And therefore Kevin and I and Ghislaine were very close.
“As children and my four elder brothers and sisters were very close. And obviously, as we grew up in age, we became equally close. But in terms of our childhood, Kevin and I and Ghislaine were closest in age. I’m six years older than her or five and a bit and three years older than my brother.
“And so we spent quite a bit of time together, although we were educated separately. And so I’ve got pretty clear memories of childhood with Ghislaine. She was a funny little thing. She was very funny. That’s a key thing. Ghislaine’s always been quite funny. She had a very good sense of humor.
“And in terms of things that we did together, you know, we gathered about. She was in the same bedroom as Kevin and I for at least the first three years of our life. There’s one anecdote that sticks in my mind, is that we, 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 hole. 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 she’s held in the arms of my mother, my father’s next to her and some Worthy Oxford College head turns up and says, ‘and who is this adorable little thing?’, to which Ghislaine said, ‘piss off!’.
“It was a hell of a - my father didn’t know where to go. Anyway, so she’s always had a sense of humour. She always, even as a young child, loved animals. She had dogs and dogs. Then cat and some budgies, an hamster and the pony. My father was rich and could afford to give her these things. I thought she was perhaps a little spoiled because that’s what happens when you’re the youngest of the family. And also because the day of her birth, which was Christmas Day 1961, was only two days before my brother Michael’s car accident. This traumatised the whole family desperately. My parents didn’t know where to go. They were lost in grief. And Ghislaine was, in some sense, ignored, really, in the very early months of her life, even the first year or two.
“And there’s another story told about her that at one point, age, I think, some two and a half, three, something like this, she stood in front of our mother, legs apart, and said, Mommy, I exist. An amazing idea for a child. So there may have been some compensation on the part of my parents. They may have felt guilty about that.”
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 mum 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 Morrell. 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. During the war years, Headington Hill Hall had been transformed into a Red Cross rehabilitation centre for injured servicemen, and by 1959 it had been unoccupied for 15 years, so it was very dilapidated.
“My parents got permission to build new modern headquarters for Dad’s Pergamon Press on the site, so that went up at the same time. I remember that the house, when we first saw it, was frog green on the outside sills and window frames and pale yellow in all the rooms. There were giant radiators everywhere.
“It took Mum a good year of living by herself in the one habitable room while architects and contractors repaired and recreated the original plan of the house. Once complete, the house would serve as a magical playground for the Maxwell children. We spent hours and hours exploring the house and the cellars it had and old tunnels that we thought would lead all the way down to Oxford if we dared crawl through incredibly narrow places, Isabel said. For kids, it was a wonderful place to explore and play, that’s for sure. Every weekend our father would have a string of guests for meals, either from the constituency when he was in Parliament [Robert Maxwell became an elected Labour MP in 1964] or from science and business across the world. And often guests would stay over, and we would be expected to entertain them and be present at all the meals too, take them for walks, or visit Oxford or whatever they wanted, whatever was required.
“We learned a lot, and this developed our social skills for sure, as well as a knowledge about the world and different cultures. That was endlessly fascinating and important for understanding differences in the world too.”
As it had under previous tenants, many important people would be welcomed into Triple H’s walls while the Maxwells lived there. As Wired Magazine records, “Isabel might come home from school to find Sir Robert Robinson, the Nobel Laureate in Organic Chemistry at the dinner table, or Mrs Pandit Nehru, the wife of the Prime Minister of India, or Professor Murray Gelman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the quark. Politicians too, like former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Like her father, the dinner guests were of heroic stature. There was no place for dilly-dallying in a life of this scale. Over every mistake, every mishap, her father would demand, what did you learn from that, he made her think. Why did you say that, he would insist, pushing for clarity. He berated people for what he called mental laziness and for stumbling, vague conversation.
“My father had boundless confidence,” Isabel told me, “but over time his manner became authoritarian. He could dress you down pretty rotten. I can tell you that from the time our eldest brother was all but killed in a car accident, the night of December 27th, 1961, all our lives were shattered. The next two years from that time remain utterly like a grey fog. I remember going to school and babysitting our little sister Ghislaine from time to time, but everything was full of grief. We could barely go anywhere, and if our request was to be taken somewhere in a car, the answer would be no.
Ian has similar recollections of this melancholy period, when his father, often flying into Triple H in his helicopter, would arrive with a stern disposition, though never failing to treat his children, particularly Galen, with luxury, if not with physical affection.
“She was, I think she was quite protected by my father. And, you know, who was very aware that, you know, she was quite a young thing and a girl with it. And following the accent of our brother, all of my older brothers and sisters were kind of corralled.
“They couldn’t go anywhere from, you know, they had to be escorted everywhere. My parents were really just so worried I’m going to lose another child in some horrible way. So Guillaume was in some senses quite protected. She went to quite a few schools, boarding schools and day schools.
“But she grew up pretty independent, able to think for herself, do her own stuff. My father really lived for work. He was, I’m just a workaholic, it’s not quite the right word, but he didn’t have any small chat. This wasn’t a man interested in the minutiae, you know, because I meant what football team was winning or he was interested in work and in matters of consequence and of substance. And we were brought up in this way. We had lots of advantages because he could afford to give us those advantages, the most important of which was a damn good education. And he took the view, if I give you this education and I give you other things to make your life comfortable, you owe society something back for that. In other words, this wasn’t just a question of take, take, take. You’ve got to give something back. And he therefore taught us From very, very young, the responsibilities associated with having wealth and opportunity. And as a result of his professional life, which was both political and business, there wasn’t a Sunday in our childhood where we didn’t have some big shots for lunch. I mean, there won’t be much to you now, but these were some very serious scientists and maybe some Labour government figures from the 60s. And the children were expected To have something to say for themselves, know what was going on in the world, make speeches at the drop of a hat, entertain our father’s guests and so on. That was standard. And actually, it was exhausting because we would want to come home on a weekend from school and chill and just have a nice time. And he was not in the let’s have a nice time business. I’ve got here the deputy leader of the Labour Party. You’re going to sit with him and have a drink. So it was a bit - it was quite pressured.”
Repercussions awaited any of the Maxwell children who failed to meet their father’s high expectations.
“If we displeased him in some way, and that was very easy, we brought back bad results, we ummed and erred instead of giving a straight answer to a straight question, we didn’t have any programme to keep ourselves occupied, bang, you were in trouble. And, you know, sometimes it was serious.
“If we lied to him and we discovered that I was belted and Guylain would have been smacked. Not that often, but that’s the way he was brought up. And that’s the way that the kind of stuff that we had to deal with. So it was pretty it was pretty heavy, I would say. But at the same time, he loved us. I was never an only dad of my father’s love, and nor was my sister. He had lost everything in his life as a young man. His parents were killed in the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were put in the gas chambers. So his entire family was wiped out. He had nothing, nothing. And he ended up having to fight his way across Europe, join the British Army, had a good war. But he built everything from scratch. So family meant a hell of a lot to him. In fact, it was the only thing that didn’t mean anything really to him. And he never let us forget it.
“And so I would say it was a good childhood. We had lots of presents, holidays, nice time. But it was... You were never in any doubt that life was more important than having a good time. One incident I remember, like, yesterday, and that is I’d gone on to university at Oxford. We lived in Oxford.
“That was where our family home was, and so it was down the road for me. And one Sunday afternoon, I guess Gilliam would have been 16, 17 years old. The telephone rings in my parents’ home. I was about to get the phone and I noticed that my father picked it up and the conversation went something like this: ‘Who are you? Jones. How old are you? Yes. You want to speak to my sister? To my daughter? You’re too old for my daughter.’ That was the end of that. She ended up going to spend quite a few months in Spain in her year off between She always had a lot of good friends, mostly girls, mostly a lot of very strong, close girlfriends whom she has remained friends with to this day.”
Ghislaine was sent to Marlborough College, where she threw herself into her A-levels before going on to earn a degree in modern history with languages from Balliol College, Oxford. It was during this time that Ghislaine met Prince Andrew. They’d first been introduced during her days at Oxford University in the 80s, with sources telling ITV that they grew so close that Buckingham Palace staff believed they dated. Their friendship grew stronger throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, their outings together on the New York and London social scenes regularly being splashed across front pages. Speaking to ITV, Paul Page, a former Royal Protection Officer, said that he first met Ghislaine in 2001 and that Buckingham Palace staff suspected that she and Andrew were involved in an intimate relationship.
“From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace, at will, we realised, suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew,” Page said. “A colleague of mine remembered her coming in four times in one day from the morning till the evening. She kept coming in and out, in and out. I got the sense that Prince Andrew and Ghislaine had probably been girlfriend and boyfriend in the past, Maxwell’s friend Euan Rellie later recalled. They had an easy warmth around each other.
Though her father was understandably keen to filter his daughter’s potential love interests, at least two suitors managed to make the cut. For a while, Ghislaine dated David Faber, the grandson of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Both met as undergraduates at Balliol in the early 1980s. Multiple accounts describe him as her first serious boyfriend.
They were regularly photographed together at fashionable London venues such as Annabelle’s and the Chelsea Arts Club. The relationship was short-lived, however, with Faber going on to marry television presenter Sally Gilbert in 1988 and becoming a Conservative MP.
Then there was another man who occupied a central place in Ghislaine’s world, Count Gianfranco Cicconia Mazzoni, the wealthy Italian aristocrat whose relationship with her lasted for several years. Two met in the late 1980s through the privileged social circles in which they both moved. At the time, Ghislaine was a prominent figure among London’s so-called Sloan set, a fixture at society events, exclusive clubs and charity functions. Siconia, meanwhile, was already well known in European high society as a member of one of Italy’s most distinguished families. Born into Italian nobility in 1962, Count Mazzoni inherited not only an aristocratic title, but also membership of a family whose influence extended deep into Italian business and finance. The Siconia family was closely connected to the Kiger Empire, the luxury hotel group that owned some of Europe’s most prestigious properties and served wealthy international travellers for decades. His family connections reached even further back. Ciccogna was a descendant of Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, one of the most influential Italian businessmen and politicians of the 20th century. Volpi helped shape modern Italian industry, played a major role in the development of Venice’s industrial port and accumulated enormous wealth through banking, infrastructure and hospitality ventures. By the time Gianfranco inherited his title following his father’s death, he belonged to a lineage that had long occupied the highest levels of European society. Educated in Britain, Siconia attended Millfield School, one of the country’s best known independent schools. He later studied economics and developed a reputation as an intelligent and highly accomplished businessman. Unlike many aristocrats who simply lived off inherited wealth, he pursued an active professional career. Among his early roles was a position at Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the world’s leading investment banks.
Colleagues and acquaintances described him as sophisticated, cosmopolitan and ambitious. Over time, he built a career that ranged across finance, telecommunications and international business. Yet wealth and status were only part of his appeal. Those who knew Siconia frequently remarked upon his charm. He spoke multiple languages, travelled extensively and cultivated a range of interests that included skiing, aviation, scuba diving and motorsport. He projected the image of a modern European aristocrat, equally comfortable at a business meeting in London, a ski resort in the Alps or a society gathering in Venice. He seemed the perfect match for Ghislaine, whose own background and business acumen and attributes were respected and indeed accepted by Sikonya’s circle.
Their relationship quickly became serious. Friends and observers later described Sikonya as Ghislaine’s first love. The couple were frequently seen together at society events in London and on the wider European social circuit. For several years, they appeared to be one of the most glamorous young couples in elite international society.
For years there had been speculation that Robert Maxwell hoped Ghislaine would marry into aristocratic or political circles. A union with an Italian count from a wealthy and influential family would certainly have satisfied those aspirations. Accounts from friends suggest that Ghislaine herself viewed the relationship as serious, with it being reported that she hoped to marry Chikonya and become a contessa. Whether an engagement was ever formally discussed remains unclear, but the relationship endured for approximately four years and was widely regarded as more than a mere casual romance. But a future together, one that would have seen Ghislaine’s life projected onto a completely different path than the one she later found herself on, wasn’t to be. And their relationship ultimately fizzled out and ended in either 1990 or 1991. The precise reason for the breakup has never been publicly established. Neither Maxwell nor Seconia appears to have discussed it in detail. However, multiple accounts agree that for Ghislaine, the separation was painful.
Timing also made the situation particularly significant. The relationship ended just as her father’s business empire was collapsing. Meanwhile, Sikonya moved on and continued building his career. He became particularly prominent in South Africa, where he established business interests and earned recognition within the aviation community. Flying became one of his greatest passions.
But, long after his relationship with Ghislaine had ended, that passion ultimately led to his death. On June 30th, 2012, Sikogna was participating in the Clarksdorp Air Show in South Africa. He was flying an Aero L-39 Albatross, a high-performance, Czech-built military jet trainer that had become popular among experienced civilian pilots.
During a formation display with fellow pilot Charles Urban, something went terribly wrong. Witnesses reported seeing Seconia’s aircraft fall out of formation while flying at low altitude. The jet appeared to tilt before entering a steep dive. Seconds later, it slammed into the ground in front of thousands of spectators and exploded in a fireball. The impact was catastrophic.
Seconia was killed instantly. He was just 49 years old. Throughout her early life, Ghislaine would form a close bond with her father to the extent of being trusted to get involved in some of his many business affairs.
But Robert Maxwell’s illustrious career couldn’t and wouldn’t last forever.
“Father had had an interest in the press since the war,” Ian said. “He was the Allied press officer in Berlin during the working for the control commission. After the war, this was the administrative administration that Britain set up to run Germany, the occupied part of Germany, that it was responsible for post-war.
“My father was in charge of press relations, so he had an early exposure to the press. And then he met some of Germany’s publishers and then learned very quickly about the importance of science and then of science publishing and made his way in the world. And then he had a number of cracks at buying newspapers in Britain, News of the World, Sun, losing on each occasion to Rupert Murdoch. And... Eventually, he gets the mirror in 1984. But during the whole of our childhood, he was an MP from 1964 to 1970. And there was this brilliant period of his life, really up until about 1968, I would say.
“Pergamon had been taken, that was a scientific publishing business, had been taken public. He was a very, very wealthy man, multimillionaire. He was a Labour MP. He was somebody who was a coming man. And then he made a disastrous, absolutely disastrous sale of the bulk of his shares to an American financier, which then caused the whole of that takeover to be scrutinized, the very first public company takeover by the then new takeover mergers panel. He was excoriated. And a famous judgment was passed on him that he was a man not fit and proper to be steward of a public company which dogged him to the end of his life.”
The business headache Ian was referring to took place in 1969, before his father’s acquisition of the Daily Mirror. In that year, Saul Steinberg, head of Lisco Data Processing Corporation, was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable.
But at the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969, and dealing in Pergamon shares was suspended on the London Stock Exchange. Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October of that year. Steinberg purchased Pergamon. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry was conducted, resulting in a widely published report that, much to Robert’s embarrassment, concluded, We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company. It was also concluded that Maxwell had contrived to inflate Pergamon’s share price through transactions between his private family companies. However, at the same time, the United States Congress was investigating Liasco’s takeover practices. Judge Thane Forbes was critical of the inquiry that had damned Ian’s father and launched what was perceived to be a public smear campaign fuelled by the press.
“Life was not so rosy anymore,” Ian said. “I remember my parents were thinking they should take me out of school because the press was so bad. So if you like, the good press, bad press, it goes back a long way in my life, certainly to 1970. And my father was always very, not quite easy come, easy go, but he had a clear understanding that if you’ve got to go ahead in the world, the press is on your side. Choose to fight them. It was a famous phrase when he was running a newspaper and somebody wanted to have a pop at him. He said, ‘be careful what you’re doing, taking on a newspaper owner, because I buy ink by the barrel and I will have the last word’. And he often did. But it meant that we were quite scarred by some of this negative publicity. And it was very, very bad. And then he went on to have a very, he had a really a renaissance of his business life and went on to achieve some very great things, including the purchase of the Mirror and purchase of Macmillan in the United States and football clubs and certainly bought lots of things. But he was quite protective of us, notwithstanding all of that. And I knew from the word go that I didn’t really want to be in this limelight. I didn’t seek anything. I know Ghislaine didn’t either, and we felt really kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, and it’s not for us, and so on. So, I mean, I was a bit ambivalent about it, although I thought my father was on the rough end of a lot of attacks, and some of which I think were anti-Semitic, looking back on it, which were very unpleasant. But eventually, he had one saying, which was, you know, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And so he had an astonishing hide of a rhinoceros and he would ride that out. And, you know, if you’re young and easily influenced, it’s not so obvious how you ride it out and you take these things to heart. He may have done, but he didn’t show it.”
But Maxwell was far from beaten. In 1974, with Pergamon largely failing under Steinberg’s ownership, he borrowed funds and bought the company back. The judge’s initial assessment and the subsequent smears, however, had a profound impact. Leaving education in the 1980s, Galen had exploded onto London’s vibrant social scene, her father’s connections helping her rise as somewhat of an it girl. She founded the Kit Kat Club, a women’s club inspired by the 18th century politician-filled club of the same name. She was also made a director of Oxford United FC, owned at the time by her father. As father and daughter grew closer, she was given a position at Robert’s publication, The European, until after Robert purchased the New York Daily News in January 1991, he sent her to America to act as his emissary, the pair arriving in New York in May. She would continue to fly back and forth between America and England, sometimes for work, other times to catch up with family. Years earlier, in 1986, she had attended the naming in her honour of her father’s new multi-million pound yacht, aboard which she would continue, when she could, to spend a large portion of her time indulging in the vessel’s ample facilities, not least of all its jacuzzi, sauna and well-stocked gym. Aboard his boat, along with other family members, friends and associates, Robert would take many voyages, including his last. After purchasing the struggling New York Daily News, further adding to his debts, Maxwell was forced to sell a 49% stake in the Mirror Group.
Meanwhile, other cracks were forming beneath the surface of the Maxwell Empire. A BBC Panorama documentary on his business dealings had revealed allegations of financial irregularities. The Mirror’s finance director, Lawrence Guest, was chasing him about the disappearance of millions from the company’s pension funds. Maxwell assured him the money would be restored. But the pressure must have been overwhelming.
In November 1991, while back home, London analysts were busy predicting the breakup of his business empire under the pressure of multi-billion pound debts. Robert flew to Gibraltar before boarding his 164 foot yacht and sailing away from a financial scandal that was just days away from being made public.
It appeared to be the perfect break, one spent in his typical flamboyant and extravagant fashion, stopping off to play roulette at a local casino, whining and dining and swimming in the cool waters of the Canary Islands. And while bonfires were being lit in the UK for Guy Fawkes’ night, he headed back on board his boat and went to bed, reportedly stirring in the early hours of the morning. The last time he was seen alive was 4.25am. At around 9am, as the boat arrived at Los Cristianos, a crew member strolled down the corridor and tapped on Robert’s door to try to wake him. There was no reply.
A call was made to his cabin at around 11am, but Robert didn’t answer. At around 1pm, the alarm was raised by a satellite telex via Norway. Panicking, the Lady Ghislaine’s captain then notified the Spanish authorities of Robert’s mysterious disappearance, sparking an air and sea search. Soon after, a fisherman peered over the bow of his small boat and spotted Maxwell’s naked body bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. A helicopter quickly joined them, winching Robert from the water.
Elizabeth and her son Philip immediately flew out to Gando Air Base in Gran Canaria, where they had the grim task of identifying his body. At a hastily improvised midnight press conference at Reina Sofia Airport in the south of Tenerife, the island’s civil governor, Angel Delgado, said the Lady Ghislaine left Santa Cruz in the north of the island at 10pm on Monday and put into Puerto de los Cristianos at 9am. But, he said, Robert’s body was found 19 to 20 miles from Gando on the other side of the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria - more than 100 miles from the obvious route between the points of departure and arrival.
Ghislaaine flew to Tenerife, where an inquiry was set to be held.
On Sunday, November 10th, she and her family attended a funeral put on for her father in Jerusalem, where Robert was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives.
Alongside Israeli intelligence figures, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir were in attendance, the latter of whom delivered a warm eulogy. It was said that Robert, with a sense of there being no way out of his vast financial woes, rose from his bed, headed up on deck and threw himself into the ocean.
But although a verdict of death by accidental drowning was recorded, Ghislaine wasn’t having it, later commenting in 1997, “He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered.”
Following his death, Robert’s empire quickly began to unravel. He was found to have fraudulently appropriated the pension assets of Mirror Group newspaper to support its share price. Pension funds in excess of £400 million were said to be missing, with around 32,000 people affected.
Kevin, the heir to the Mirror Group, became Britain’s biggest bankrupt after he was left with Maxwell’s $764 million in debt. And while still grieving over their immeasurable loss, both he and his brother Ian found themselves in a courtroom, accused of taking part in the fraud.
“Following my father’s death and the explosion of our business, and then Kevin and I, my younger brother, were arrested and charged with conspiracies as a fraud. We had a long, long fight to get to trial. It lasted three or four years of preparation and so on.
“And then an eight-month trial and we were exonerated at the end of it. During that entire time, all of our family were highly supportive and remained so and are so to this day. We don’t know any other way than to support each other. When you’ve had an alpha male like Bob Maxwell is your father. In some senses, there’s an old Arabic proverb that says, ‘I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousins, my brother and I and our cousins against the world’. So it’s another way of saying blood is thicker than water. So yes, we have remained close at all times.
“And we don’t need to be living in the same country or even the same town to remain close. We were broadly aware of the important things going on in each other’s lives, if not the detail. We know you’re going out with X or you’re living in Y or you’re doing X or Z or whatever it is. That’s fine. So long as you’re not hearing anything bad, it’s probably good. I guess the period 91 to 96, Kevin and I were knocked out. We were on trial for our lives. The passports were taken, couldn’t travel anywhere, and it was a very dark time.
“Ghislaine was getting on with her own life, mostly up until then had been in London. She had a lot of friends and knocked around in town. But then somewhere towards the end of 1990, she goes to America. My father had a lot of business over there. She started to help with various... some specific tasks, mostly to do with the newspapers over there. And then the business blows up. And Kevin and I said to her, ‘stay in America. Don’t come home because this is not a place for a Maxwell to be happy right now’. England just turned on us big time, which I get, but there was no reason why I should turn on my sister. So we said ‘stay in America, get on with your life, do whatever you’re doing. And, you know, we’ll just fight our battle the best we know how’.”
That said, life, at least financially, took a downward spiral for most of the Maxwells following the death of their father, particularly, her mother said, for Ghislaine. “Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” Elizabeth, better known as Betty, told Vanity Fair in the weeks following her husband’s death. “The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”
“I’m in great financial difficulty,” she added. “My husband’s will is impounded. I haven’t salted away anything because I never for a minute believed that he’d leave me destitute.”
Ghislaine denied claims that a secret fortune had been hidden away.
By 1992, she had moved to an apartment of an Iranian friend overlooking Central Park. By now she was working at a real estate office on Madison Avenue, began eating out and partying with celebrities and quickly rose to wider prominence as a New York City socialite. Of the Maxwell’s troubles and her own, she told Vanity Fair, “I’m surviving, just, but I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.”
And she was right.
As their father had during the early years of his business career, the Maxwell’s bounced back. They carved out their own way in the world, including Christine going into publishing and producing a spelling dictionary to teach people how to spell, and Isabel embarking on a successful career in television and film production. The twins later joined forces and created the early online search engine Magellan.
“I met Ghislaine in November 1989,” Christopher Mason, one of her former friends, said in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein, Filthy Rich. “At the time she was visiting New York from London, I was going to a nightclub and having dinner with some friends who had been at Oxford with her. She was the life of every party, knew absolutely everyone, was extremely popular, had a vivacious personality. I remember she told a lot of very funny, dirty jokes.
“That night I went home and wrote in my diary, ‘Met Ghislaine Maxwell, hilarious sense of humour, incredibly good fun, she’s a real live wire, and I hope I get to see her again’. Striking up a friendship, Mason recalled visiting her apartment on the Upper East Side.
“She was suddenly out of money,” he said. “Robert Maxwell had left his family in the lurch. It was as if she was bravely weathering this challenge, the mysterious death of her beloved father.”
Another friend, Ewan Relly, also first met her in New York.
“We had a fair number of friends in common, a couple of people I knew had dated her, and she was a connector. She was gregarious and quite glamorous, and a bit raunchy and quite wild. Her father had set her up in this life which allowed her to be at the fulcrum of New York society. She was like the sparkling debutante.”
Another former associate backed up Ghislaine’s alleged raunchy side, as have others whom I’ve interviewed.
Nicola Glucksmann claims that during a party at Headington Hill Hall in 1991, Ghislaine encouraged guests to get involved in a harmless, but certainly raunchy, game whereby the women in attendance removed their tops and bras and the men were blindfolded and felt their bare breasts before trying to guess who each pair belonged to.
“I’m extremely sad that my father is no longer here, Ghislaine said during a 1991 interview, sitting on a bench in Central Park. “But I don’t feel in any way smaller or lesser than what I was before. The future’s the future. You just get on and do whatever you can do.
“If I have a wish for myself, it’s to do something positive with my life.”
Living her new life in America, her wealth and social standing rose rapidly.
Already she had been introduced to a rich local financier, a man who could provide her with the money and lifestyle she was accustomed to, whose circle of contacts would nestle neatly into her own, yet who would ultimately lead to her life being turned entirely upside down.
He had dark, greying hair and Ted Danson-like features.
He had unimaginable wealth and mansions and apartments across the world.
And his name was Jeffrey Epstein.
Thanks for listening to episode two of The Life and Death of Jeff. In the next episode, I’ll continue the story with an exclusive interview with Ian Maxwell, who will talk about how his sister really met Jeff, and will be following the murky journey of Epstein’s rise to riches, serious allegations, and ultimately, a prison cell.
In the meantime, have a fantastic week.
