Ghislaine Maxwell placed ads in newspapers looking for staff during 'school holidays'

Ghislaine Maxwell used local newspaper adverts to recruit people to work in Jeffrey Epstein’s Florida mansion “during school holidays”, it has emerged.

One listing in a newspaper in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1997 asked for a “person needed to answer telephones & do light cleaning work during school holidays”, according to the Daily Mail.

Interested applicants should call “Ms Maxwell”, it added.

The phone number on the advert reportedly matches a phone number the British socialite gave to American police when stopped for a driving offence around the same time.

It came as Ms Maxwell, the daughter of late British press baron Robert Maxwell, prepared to go on trial on Monday in New York on six counts of enticing minors and sex trafficking of children between 1994 and 2004. She denies all the accusations.

The Daily Mail report they have located three such newspaper adverts from 1997, which were posted in the Palm Beach Post and the Palm Beach Daily News.

The advert suggests that applicants will be fulfilling a personal assistant role. Many of those who say they were sexually abused by Epstein say they were recruited under the belief they would be working as personal assistants.

In 2016, Johanna Sjoberg claimed she was recruited by Ms Maxwell to provide “sexual massages” for Epstein, though she initially believed she was being hired to work as a personal assistant.

Ms Sjoberg claims Ms Maxwell told her that Epstein needed “three orgasms a day” and that it was her job to provide massages.

Ms Maxwell “didn’t want butlers because they're too stuffy. And so she just liked to hire girls to work at the house, answer phones, get drinks, do the job a butler would do," according to Ms Sjoberg.

She also claimed that Ms Maxwell asked where she could recruit people: ”She wanted to know if there was, like, a bulletin board or something that she could post, she was looking to hire someone.”

“I told her where she could go to - you know, to put up a listing. And then she asked if I knew anyone that would be interested in working for her.”

Ms Sjoberg has also claimed Prince Andrew groped her breast with a puppet of himself at Epstein’s New York home in 2001. The Duke of York denies the allegation.