Who is the real Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein enabler or pawn?
Associated PressNEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell spent the first half of her life with her father, a rags-to-riches billionaire who looted his companies’ pension funds before dying a mysterious death. So neglected was Ghislaine that at the age of 3 she stood in front of her mother and said, “Mummy, I exist!” “I was devastated,’’ Elisabeth Maxwell wrote in “A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell.’’ “And from that day on, we all made a great effort with her, fussing over her so much that she became spoiled, the only one of my children I can truly say that about.’’ While studying history at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s, Ghislaine Maxwell began building contacts of her own, including Prince Andrew, who would later invite her and Epstein to Windsor Castle and Sandringham, Queen Elizabeth II’s country estate. Ian Maxwell said his sister’s relationship with Epstein developed after the family advised her to remain in the U.S. because the Maxwell name was “in the dirt” at home. But clearly to then say, ‘Well, you know, he dies, then she moves along to the next rich man.’ I just don’t buy that.” In sworn testimony for an earlier civil case, Ghislaine Maxwell acknowledged that she had a romantic relationship with Epstein but said she later became his employee, tasked with things like hiring staff for his six homes. Ghislaine Maxwell has remained mostly silent about the Epstein allegations over nearly two decades, but in a 2016 deposition in a civil case, she said she learned about the allegations against him “like everybody else, like the rest of the world, when it was announced in the papers.’’ She said she never saw Epstein getting massages from anyone under 18 and that no one ever complained to her that Epstein demanded sex.