EPISODE THREE: “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, 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…

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.

Jeffrey and Ghislaine on their face date in the early 1990s.

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. 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.”

Jeffrey Epstein leased the former Iranian diplomatic townhouse at 34 East 69th Street in Manhattan from the U.S. State Department in the early 1990s. The property had been seized by the U.S. government following the 1979 Iranian revolution

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.

Jeffrey and 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.”

“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.” 

 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.

Jeffrey and Ana.

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.

Patricia Schmidt.

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).

Jeffrey and Eva.

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.