This time last year, Ghislaine Maxwell was off the grid. The Oxford-educated socialite was lying low as the focus of a frenzied media hunt pivoted to her after the suicide of her erstwhile lover Jeffrey Epstein.
“For Ghislaine-watchers, the autumn of 2019 through to the summer of 2020 was a mystery,” says Mark Seal, the Vanity Fair special correspondent who followed her story. “She was said to be hiding in a submarine, lying low in Israel, in the FBI witness protection programme, in a luxurious villa in the south of France, sunning herself on the coast of Spain, or in some high-security doomsday bunker owned by rich and powerful friends – all seemingly possible, but all, thus far at least, wrong,” he adds.
In the summer of 2019, “she was photographed at an all-star women’s charity sports car rally from London to Monaco, after which she seemed to drop off the map”.
Today, everyone knows her whereabouts. As inmate 02879-509 at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, Brooklyn, she is facing charges over her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of female minors by financier Epstein.
“I think it’s over for her; her high-profile life, the parties, the glamour – it’s all over. And I’m sure every day, that settles upon her more heavily,” says the US attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents six of Epstein’s victims.
Since Epstein’s death in August 2019 while in custody on charges of sex trafficking minors, and since her own arrest on 2 July, the spotlight on Maxwell, 58, has been relentless.
The public’s appetite for news about the youngest child of the late press baron Robert Maxwell has been insatiable. Fascination has been fuelled by the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. Then there is the “she-devil” factor. Helena Kennedy, the former junior counsel to Myra Hindley, has argued that women accused of sexual crimes can garner greater public opprobrium than men.
Bloom does not discount this idea in the case of Maxwell, who is accused of enticing and recruiting minors for Epstein, and, in some cases, participating in their sexual abuse. “Women trust other women,” she says. Young girls are taught: “If you have a problem, go to a woman, find a woman, and ask her for help.”
Nine days after Epstein’s death, a photograph emerged of Maxwell at a burger joint in Los Angeles, although it was widely rumoured to have been faked or staged. So, it was a surprise when FBI agents arrested her at a $1m (£800,000) four-bedroom rural hideaway in Bradford, New Hampshire, a six-hour drive from New York City.
“Nobody would think that’s where she would be,” says Bloom. “It’s pickup trucks, cowboy boots, gravel and dirt. It’s not somewhere you would expect Maxwell to be.”
Here, says Seal, who covered her disappearance and subsequent arrest for Vanity Fair’s summer issues, “she is said to have lived a simple life – jogging and hiking on her 156-acre property”. In the pull-no-punches words of the FBI’s assistant director William F Sweeney Jr at the time, Maxwell had “slithered away to a gorgeous property” where she was “continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago”.
When her courtroom appearance did come, the Vanity Fair correspondent Dan Adler was one of a few selected journalists who managed to see it via video link. Others could only listen in on a teleconference line that was so jammed the court had to increase capacity from 500 to 1,000.
“A video projection of Maxwell in the courtroom is likely as close as any of us had gotten to her,” says Adler. “Fifty of us were sitting in a cavernous room in our masks trying to get some sort of read on her, but she barely moved her face throughout. It was a little strange but maybe a little fitting – craning our necks as a group to try to make something out about a subject that still remains in shadows.” Her only words were: “Not guilty, your honour,” when asked how she wished to plead.
Most people have only seen the court artist’s sketch of how she looked. “Gone was the glam,” says Seal. “Her party-picture smile was replaced with what seemed to be a grimace, and she wore a prison-issue brown top.”
She was unrecognisable compared with the person photographed on a throne inside Buckingham Palace alongside Kevin Spacey, at the door of a private jet with Bill Clinton, smiling next to Naomi Campbell or Donald Trump; or at the 18th birthday party of Princess Beatrice, Prince Andrew’s older daughter, standing next to Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
“The [court] arraignment had enough of the glitches that come with video conferences in general that the prosecutors’ claim that Maxwell is secretly married slipped by most initial reports,” recalls Adler. Prosecutors said she had declined to name her spouse. But one candidate is Scott Borgerson, 43, a boss of shipping tech firm CargoMetrics, although he has previously described their relationship as just friends. Media reports had her living at his house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, before she largely went to ground. The real estate agent who sold the Bradford property to a “couple with British accents” three months after Epstein’s death named them as Scott and Janet, or Jen, Marshall – the latter was said to be a journalist seeking privacy to work.
Maxwell became involved with Epstein following the mysterious death of her father, who, amid financial scandal, fell from his yacht off the Canary Islands in 1991. It seems she moved from the role of Epstein’s girlfriend to that of social gatekeeper and manager of his six mansions. Recently unsealed court documents, from depositions taken in 2016 during civil action for defamation against Maxwell by Andrew’s accuser, Virginia Giuffre, have shed little light on their relationship. In one, asked if she considered herself to be Epstein’s girlfriend, she replied: “That’s a tricky question. There were times when I would have liked to think of myself as his girlfriend.”
Last week Maxwell’s lawyers applied for her to be freed until her trial next July in a $28.5m bail package that would include armed guards to ensure she remained safe and did not flee her home in New York City. This follows a previous unsuccessful application in which her lawyer, Mark Cohen, told the judge: “Our client is not Jeffrey Epstein, is not the monster portrayed.”
On that occasion, however, prosecutors maintained she had wealth, three passports, and was a flight risk. She had at least one foreign bank account with more than $1m, they said, also maintaining that from 2007 until 2011 more than $20m was moved from accounts linked to Epstein to accounts linked to Maxwell. Some of these transfers were “in the millions of dollars” and “were then subsequently transferred” back to accounts associated with Epstein, they claimed.
Bradley Edwards, a US attorney who conducted a 12-year campaign to bring Epstein to justice, has said that without Maxwell, there would be no Epstein. This is an allegation the criminal trial will have to test in due course. For Epstein’s victims, that trial can’t come soon enough. “She’s been allowed for so many years to get away with saying: ‘I didn’t know anything. I didn’t do anything,’” says Bloom.
Prosecutors allege that between 1994 and 1997, Maxwell helped Epstein groom girls as young as 14. Four of the charges Maxwell faces relate to those years, when she was, according to the indictment, among Epstein’s closest associates and also in an “intimate relationship” with him. The other two charges are allegations of perjury in 2016.
From her arrest, to the charges laid against her, to the unsealing of the 2016 depositions, Maxwell’s story so far is “the story that never sleeps, each event unfolding like a chapter”, says Seal, who asks: “What will come next?”