“Here’s the truth about my sister’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein” - Ian Maxwell spills the beans.
The media have often reported that Robert Maxwell may have introduced Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein - Her brother confirms it's nonsense.
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, Everything Epstein, 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:
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.