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Did Ghislaine Maxwell’s love for Jeffrey Epstein drive her to her downfall?

We never heard from Maxwell herself, and the big unanswered question that all the testimony raised remains: what did she really see in this monster?
We never heard from Maxwell herself, and the big unanswered question that all the testimony raised remains: what did she really see in this monster?

This article was originally published in December 2021, two days after Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five sex trafficking-related counts. 


A fellow journalist warned me as I attended a pre-trial hearing for the US government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, “You will be shocked when you see her.”

I was - but not in the way my colleague had anticipated. I had expected to see someone emaciated and dishevelled, given the reported abuse and horrific treatment she has been subject to inside the jail she’s been held for the past 18 months awaiting trial.

But Ghislaine Maxwell looked better that day – and every day since in that courtroom, than she looked back in the 2000s. Admittedly she was masked and one couldn’t see all her face, but her hair was now shoulder-length and wavy and dyed black. It was a much younger, much less severe look than the pixie cut she sported for 20 years when I would run into her occasionally at parties in Manhattan, where we both lived. She was casually dressed in a turtleneck and pants, and she was also slim; not border-line anorexic as she used to be in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when her then boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein ordered her, according to a source in the room “lose weight.”

We heard plenty of evidence in the ensuing weeks, as to how Epstein shabbily mistreated Maxwell (apart, of course, from wiring her $30 million dollars). He cheated on her. He had the Palm Beach butler Juan Alessi remove photographs of her when he had other women to stay; he had her assistant send flowers to another woman behind her back… and so on. And yet, according to photographs that were displayed, she stayed… and stayed… for over a decade.

It was exactly as I had always heard since I started reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2002 (and found myself covering her, too). I was told by multiple people: 'she was in love with him but he was not in love with her and she seemed to be in denial about that.”

The ghost of Epstein hung over Maxwell’s trial, complicating the picture that he himself had created. He was there in almost every sentence. He was in almost every photograph. It was his massage table that was produced in the room. His flight logs that were discussed. His homes, his island, his employees.

In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him - AFP
In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him - AFP

We never heard from Maxwell herself, and the big unanswered question that all the testimony raised remains: what did she really see in this monster that kept her moth-like to his flame for over a decade, helping him do unspeakable things to children?

Was it simply the money, as prosecutors alleged? $30 million (£23.7m) is a vast amount. And Maxwell had told people that after her father, Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991 she was quite suddenly a “leper.” She described her perfectly comfortable apartment as a “toilet.” So yes, she cared about money. A great deal.

Perhaps there was some deep-rooted psychological damage inflicted by her father, who I found, when reporting for Chasing Ghislaine, my podcast and docuseries, to be a sadistic, cruel man, including to his children.

Ghislaine was said to have been obsessed with her father, spending the months after his death watching old videos of him. And at times she herself was blatant about the connection between him and her boss/ boyfriend.

In the early 1990s, Epstein humiliated her by bouncing in to the office where she was working with another woman. A concerned onlooker gave her a hug and said, “You don’t have to do this.” She replied, yes, she did. “My father told me: you do whatever it takes to keep your man,” she said.

Whatever it took, according to the testimony in the courtroom, included satisfying Epstein’s criminal depravity. It meant participating in orgies, dazzling young girls, charming them, lulling them into a false sense of security around Epstein and normalising the horrific sex acts that then took place.

I was frankly astonished when I heard that Epstein and Maxwell shared a bedroom in Palm Beach, because a source told me how by the late 1990s Maxwell would worry aloud that she could never make weekend plans because she didn’t know which woman Epstein would want to accompany him there.

In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him. She was not a girlfriend. She was his “best friend” which, he claimed (falsely), meant more. “She’s the best at what I need,” he said too, and then, out of nowhere, the eeriest line of all: “She doesn’t find girls for me, by the way.”

Of course, it was all lies.

Maxwell most certainly did work for Epstein according to multiple witnesses who testified. She worked very, very hard, they said. She was in charge of all his properties: construction, decoration, staffing.

Interestingly, just like Epstein, she kept this on a need-to-know basis. I once asked her what she did. And she told me, “You could say that I’m a connector of people.” I wasn’t exactly illuminated. In hindsight, I suppose saying, “I’m a property manager for a rich guy I once dated” would have been plebian for a woman who’d been raised as an heiress.

I discovered in my reporting earlier this year that the only time she introduced Epstein to her brothers Kevin and Ian in late 1991, it was as “my boss.” For what it’s worth, her brothers didn’t like Epstein – and they didn’t meet him again.

Her sister Christine, however, reportedly had some inkling, around the early 1990s or so, of how miserable Epstein was making Ghislaine romantically, according to Christine’s nanny, Sydney Proctor.

Proctor emailed me in 2020 that she remembered a visit Ghislaine paid to her sister in California in the early 1990s: “Ghislaine and Christine were not close at all. Therefore, when Ghislaine showed up to the Oakland Hills home of her sister to lick her wounds after the break up, it was rather unexpected. She was in our house maybe 28 hours? She was much thinner than she had been in August of 1991, almost amorphous, no discernible female curves like boobs or hips left. She wore black leggings, an oversized grey cashmere sweater and black boots. She spent the majority of her visit staring at a jigsaw puzzle she started on our dining room table.”

Proctor continued: “When Ghislaine departed, Christine said that she had been there because she was feeling sorry for herself after her break up with that ‘arse,’ Jeffrey. Christine was livid on behalf of her sister because, to add insult to injury Jeffrey ‘made’ Ghislaine find his ‘girlfriends’.”

Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein? - PA Media
Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein? - PA Media

And yet, Proctor, wrote to me, it was after this that Maxwell went to work for Epstein as his “decorator.”

These past few weeks, we’ve seen picture after picture of the two of them sticking together through the years, arms flung around each other. Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein? It speaks to an inner insecurity that is ghastly. For a woman who had everything, the reality was, she also had nothing, because apparently she had no inner belief in herself.

The most startling and almost upsetting moment for me during the trial was when a document was shown on a screen purporting to be something the user “gmax” (which was her email handle) wrote on a computer in October 2002 about her relationship with Epstein.

It said: “Jeffrey and Ghislaine have been together, a couple for the last 11 years. They are, contrary to what many people think, rarely apart – I almost always see them together.

“Ghislaine is highly intelligent, and great company with a ready smile and an infectious laugh who always puts one at one’s ease, and always makes one feel welcome.

“Jeffrey and Ghislaine share many mutual interests and they have a lot of fun together. They both have keen searching and inquisitive minds. She grew up amongst scientists and in an academic and business environment.

“Jeffrey and Ghislaine complement each other really well and I cannot imagine one without the other. On top of being great partners, they are also the best of friends.”

It was written during the exact time period I was reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair - when he was busy telling me how unimportant Maxwell was to him. She was his “friend,” he said, putting a distance between them.

I wonder now if she, or one of her staff, was making talking points for me. It seems highly likely. Based on everything I’ve reported, the pitifulness is that those statements are complete fantasy, given the date. They were certainly not, in Epstein’s mind, a couple, at that point - nor were they “never apart.”

Whatever the intended purpose of the words, one presumes Maxwell never imagined they’d be turned against her in court.

But then again, one also presumes she never imagined that acting on her father’s maxim - “You do whatever it takes to keep your man” - would see her going to prison for the rest of her life.


Vicky Ward's podcast, Chasing Ghislaine, is available on Audible. Her series is on Discovery+