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| “She is not a victim,” says Farmer, appalled. “She is a victimiser.” |
‘She was so dangerous’: where in the world is the notorious Ghislaine Maxwell?
In the
months since Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, his former partner has
disappeared. Will she ever return to face her accusers?
Emine Saner
@eminesaner
Thu 12 Dec
2019 06.00 GMT
Riding up
on a white horse, Ghislaine Maxwell made quite the impression. “She’s got the
whole equestrian attire. She’s so elegant,” recalls Maria Farmer. Farmer was 26
and trying to build a career as an artist when she was invited to stay at a
ranch in Ohio with Maxwell and run an art project.
It was the
mid-90s and this was the second time the two had met. Farmer had encountered
Maxwell and her friend Jeffrey Epstein at her New York Academy of Art graduate
show. She would go on to work for the pair for a year, at the front desk of
Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. She was perfectly placed to see who came to the
house – and says she witnessed young teenagers being brought through the doors
by Maxwell. Following an alleged sexual assault by Maxwell and Epstein, Farmer
went to the police. She was ignored.
More than
20 years on, her account – along with the testimonies of several other women,
including an allegation of abuse from her younger sister, Annie, who was 16 at
the time – has helped to create a picture of Epstein as a prolific sex
offender, who abused countless underage girls. It is a scandal that has drawn
in other powerful men, most notably Prince Andrew. One woman, Virginia Giuffre,
says she was trafficked by Epstein to have sex with Andrew on three occasions.
He has repeatedly denied the allegations, most recently in his disastrous TV
interview.
In July,
Epstein was charged with sex trafficking, and in August he killed himself in
his prison cell while awaiting trial. Since then, attention has turned to
Maxwell, 57, his right-hand woman. Yet Maxwell has seemingly vanished. “From
what we know, Ghislaine Maxwell was a principal enabler to Jeffrey Epstein when
he was alive,” says the lawyer Dan Kaiser. Kaiser is representing Jennifer
Araoz, one of the women who says she was raped by Epstein, and who is suing his
estate, Maxwell and three other “enablers”.
“She was integral in maintaining the sex
trafficking ring,” says Kaiser. “She provided important administrative services
in terms of the hiring of recruiters, and management of those employees, the
making of appointments and dates for interactions between Mr Epstein and the
underage girls that were providing sexual services to him. She also maintained
the ring by intimidating girls, by ensuring their silence.”
Kaiser
continues: “Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t have done what he did for as long as he
did it without the services of somebody like Ghislaine Maxwell. She is as
culpable, in my judgment, as Jeffrey Epstein himself.” Maxwell has always
denied the allegations and has never faced criminal charges. Her lawyer has not
responded to a request for comment.
It is
believed that Maxwell and Epstein met shortly after the death of her father,
the media tycoon Robert Maxwell. After his suspicious fall from the yacht he
had named after his daughter – the Lady Ghislaine – in 1991, a £460m black hole
was discovered in his companies’ pension fund. Maxwell was the youngest, and
said to be favourite, of his nine children. They were close, and she was
devastated by his death.
She had
moved to New York that year, after her father bought the New York Daily News.
In London, she had become something of a socialite and she set about becoming
the same in Manhattan. It is not known how Epstein and Maxwell met, but she is
thought to have been his girlfriend initially. In a 2003 Vanity Fair profile,
he described her as his “best friend”.
“She was
always the most interesting, the most vivacious, the most unusual person in any
room,” the journalist Vicky Ward wrote in that Vanity Fair profile. “Her
Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else’s I can think of.” Her British
accent – shaped by Marlborough College, then Oxford University – was considered
exotic by 90s New Yorkers. She seemed unusually accomplished, too. If what has
been said is true, she is a helicopter and submarine pilot and speaks four
languages.
The
journalist Conchita Sarnoff knew Maxwell and Epstein socially before the pair
began dating, and later helped to expose Epstein’s crimes. She says of Maxwell:
“She seemed in love when I first saw them together. I believe Jeffrey was
taking care of her. I feel Ghislaine clung to Jeffrey because she felt
protected by him.” She says Epstein, whom she describes as chilly, with limited
social skills, “seemed less in love but more enamoured”.
Tom Bower,
who authored a biography of Robert Maxwell, wrote in a piece for the Times in
August that Maxwell “worshipped rich, domineering men”. In Epstein, a
financier, she would have found someone who could restore the extravagant
lifestyle she desired – after the death of her father, her finances were
reduced. She and Epstein seemed mutually dependent – she on the financier’s
money, he on her contacts and social ease.
Her social
standing was such that it would probably be easier to list the influential
people to whom Maxwell was not connected. She was close to Bill Clinton and
attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding; she donated to Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign. There are photographs of Maxwell with Arianna
Huffington, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg. She knew Donald Trump and members
of the Kennedy family. She was connected to the British royal family through
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. Maxwell and Epstein – who loaned Ferguson
money to pay off debts – were guests of Andrew at events, including some at
Windsor castle, Balmoral and Sandringham.
Prince
Andrew, in his recent Newsnight interview, said guests at the parties and
dinners in Epstein’s New York mansion included “academics, politicians, people
from the United Nations”. But we know now that it was not just influential
friends Maxwell cultivated. One of her friends, Euan Rellie, told Tatler:
“Every single interesting, pretty, new girl to arrive in New York would end up
going for tea with Ghislaine, then being introduced to Jeffrey. She was the
acceptable face of a rather mysterious billionaire.”
To New York
society, Maxwell legitimised Epstein. As the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy put
it in Broken, her podcast about the Epstein case, if you’re a teenage girl and
a man approaches you in a car “you know to keep on walking. But if it’s another
woman, and she sounds all fancy and well-educated, you’re probably going to get
in the car.”
Virginia
Giuffre on Panorama. Giuffre claims she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and
forced to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was a teenager, allegations that
Andrew has repeatedly denied.
“Ghislaine
was key in making me feel safe,” Farmer says. “I trusted her because she is a
woman. She would make us trust her, she would make us really care about her. My
sister even said that she would feel so special if Ghislaine paid attention to
her because she had that way about her, you know, the popular girl in school, she
was one of those. She knew everybody.” Her voice cracks. “She was so
dangerous.” Farmer says Maxwell would do anything to get what she wants, “and
all of it for her is about power and money”.
She was
charming initially, says Farmer. “Everyone [was] like: ‘This woman is so
intelligent and interesting.’ She had a really great personality when you first
met her.” But it didn’t take long for her to become verbally abusive towards
the staff, she says. “I was one of the staff. I would have to go to Jeffrey and
say: ‘Ghislaine’s verbally abusing me again.’ Then he would scream at her. It
was all like ‘good cop, bad cop’, and they loved playing that game with
everybody.”
Once, she
says, Ivana Trump visited. “Quite often, with people like Ivana – powerful
[people] – Ghislaine would say ‘Hop in the car, you can go on a ride with us’
and it was supposed to be my special little treat.” Then, as soon as they were
back at the mansion, Maxwell would switch and shout at her, she says. She also
says she could be threatening. “They had video cameras everywhere [in the
house], and Ghislaine liked to intimidate by talking about the cameras. She’d
say: ‘They’re watching you.’”
Farmer
alleges that Maxwell would bring in a steady stream of young girls to the
mansion, often saying she was casting for Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie
company owned by Leslie Wexner, a close friend of Epstein. “It was really weird
to me. I’m like [the] ‘models are so young’, and she said: ‘Yeah, but they need
these models for Victoria’s Secret. They go as young as 13 now in modelling.’”
Farmer alleges Maxwell would recruit teenagers from schools on the Upper East
Side and in Central Park.
“Ghislaine
controlled the girls,” said Sarah Ransome, who claims she was abused by
Epstein, in a recent Panorama interview. “She would be the one getting all the
girls in check. She knew what Jeffrey liked … this was very much a joint
effort.” In the same documentary, Giuffre recalls travelling back to Maxwell’s
house in London after a night at a club with Prince Andrew: “In the car,
Ghislaine tells me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey.”
It is
alleged that Maxwell was not only an enabler for Epstein’s abuse, but took part
in it. In her Panorama interview, Giuffre, then known as Virginia Roberts,
recounted how Maxwell and Epstein abused her at his Palm Beach house after
Maxwell had recruited her from her job working as a spa attendant at Donald
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. In 1996, Farmer says Maxwell and Epstein sexually
assaulted her. She went to the police as well as more than one FBI agent, none
of whom took action. She also spoke to Ward in 2002 for a Vanity Fair profile –
Ward has since said that the then-editor Graydon Carter cut out the entire part
about Farmer and her sister after being pressured by Epstein. A spokeswoman for
the magazine has said: “Epstein denied the charges at the time and since the
claims were unsubstantiated and no criminal investigation had been initiated,
we decided not to include them in what was a financial story.”
Maxwell and
Epstein’s relationship seems to have been complex. Sarnoff says Maxwell once
told her she wanted very much to marry Epstein. “Maxwell is very clever,”
Sarnoff says. “In spite of her personal insecurities, as a result of her
father’s death and financial challenges, I believe she nevertheless knew
exactly what she was doing when she agreed to solicit girls on his behalf.
However, I don’t think that phase of their relationship began until she understood
Epstein would not marry her.”
Farmer says
Maxwell told her they were married. In another interview, this time with the
Miami Herald, which has doggedly investigated Epstein, Giuffre alleges Maxwell
had asked her to have a child with Epstein and hand the baby over for Maxwell
and Epstein to raise; she would be paid an allowance of $200,000 a month.
Ransome,
who says she was kept for six months on Epstein’s private island and claims she
was raped several times a day, said: “They were never like a couple. Jeffrey
and Ghislaine were best friends, or like brother and sister. Never holding
hands or kissing. And she wasn’t his employee.”
When
Maxwell found that Farmer had spoken out, she made threatening calls – Farmer
says she has been in hiding “for many years”. “Ghislaine kept threatening my
life. She found out where I was living, and she would send messages to me or I
would get a call and I would have to move again. Most of her threats were
veiled, like: ‘You better look over your shoulder because there’s someone
coming for you.’ She told me she was going to burn all my paintings, my career
was burned.”
In 2015,
Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation, after Maxwell said she was lying about the
allegations she had made. The case was settled out of court and Maxwell began
retreating from public view.
She was no
longer seen in public with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting an
underage girl for prostitution. For this, he was given an 18-month prison
sentence, in a sweetheart plea deal that saw an investigation into his abuse of
more than 30 underage girls (for which he could have been given a life
sentence) shut down. He served just 13 months, much of it on day release.
Four years
after this Paola Tholstrup, a model who had been friendly with Maxwell in the
90s met her at a funeral. “She hadn’t changed exactly, but she was hyper, and
talking very fast,” says Tholstrup. “All she seemed to want to talk about was
the ocean and the charity she was involved in.” Those who knew Maxwell say the
charity helped her rebrand herself after allegations against her were being
reported.
In August,
Maxwell was photographed in a burger restaurant in Los Angeles. She has not
been seen since, although there have been press reports suggesting that she is
preparing to do her own TV interview.
Kaiser says
he has not been able to serve Maxwell with legal papers “because she’s off
hiding somewhere”. Does he have any idea where she is?
“No, I wish
I did. We’ve looked various places so far to no avail. We thought we had a lead
in some compound in Colorado, a very good friend of hers, a wealthy family – we
thought she might be there, but we’re not sure. I expect the FBI knows exactly
where she is. They may be building a case. I don’t believe they’ve given up on
pursuing some of [Epstein’s] enablers and I have to believe that would include
Maxwell.”
Sarnoff
thinks Maxwell is in a country that does not have an extradition treaty with
the US.
There have
been attempts to portray Maxwell as another of Epstein’s victims – someone who
was in thrall to this rich, powerful man, just as she was to her father. The
journalist Mark Edmonds, who has been writing about Maxwell, said recently she
was “possibly a victim, too … It was a tricky relationship.”
“She is not
a victim,” says Farmer, appalled. “She is a victimiser.”
Additional
reporting by Lucy Osborne
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