At the end of January, when new documents desecreted started circulating among editorial offices and law firms – hundreds of pages of notes, e-mails, depositions, diary fragments – Ghislaine Maxwell’s name re-emerged with the force of a tide that never fully recedes. The files, published after years of court battles and reported by all the world’s major newspapers, do not change the substance of her conviction. But they do rekindle the question that has accompanied her figure for more than a decade: who was really the woman who, with a velvety British accent and a diplomatic salon naturalness, became the essential cog in the system of abuse orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein?
In the new documents, Maxwell appears against the light: not only as an already convicted defendant, but as a social junction, as a mediator, as a creature bred in power and plunged into its darker side. The “Epstein Files” do not just recount a crime: they recount an environment. And within that environment, Maxwell is a constant, almost choreographic presence.
The Beloved Daughter
To understand Maxwell one has to go back a long way, before Manhattan and private flights, before Caribbean islands and compromising photographs. One has to enter the house in Headington Hill Hall, Oxford: fifty-three rooms, thick carpets, telephones ringing at all hours of the day and night. His father, Robert Maxwell, was a man whose presence filled the room as naturally as others breathe. Labour MP, publishing magnate, Holocaust survivor reinvented tycoon, Maxwell father ruled family and business with a mixture of affection and terror.
Ghislaine, the youngest of nine children, was – according to many accounts – the favourite. Brilliant, multilingual, able to move among powerful adults with precocious confidence. She studied at Marlborough College and then Balliol College, England, where she cultivated the cosmopolitan air that would become her trademark. She was not only beautiful: she was competent in conversation, quick to absorb hierarchies, adept at understanding who really mattered around her.
When Robert Maxwell fell from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the Canary Islands in 1991, personal tragedy was intertwined with public scandal. In the following months it emerged that he had looted hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees’ pension funds. The empire crumbled. The surname Maxwell became synonymous with fraud. For Ghislaine it was a double loss: her father and the system that had protected her.
