According to many of the women who have spoken about what Epstein allegedly did to them, Maxwell was the financier's chief co-conspirator. Maxwell, 57, has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing. According to people familiar with the investigation, authorities have had trouble locating Maxwell, who is believed to be living abroad. Her five-storey Manhattan townhouse was sold in 2016 for $US15 million ($22 million) by a company that used the address of Epstein's New York office. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Her lawyers told a judge in 2017 that she was in London, but had no fixed address. Lawyers representing Epstein's alleged victims said they wouldn't expect Maxwell to return to the United States anytime soon for fear of being arrested. A qualified helicopter pilot and fluent in several languages, Maxwell, 57, was the youngest of Robert Maxwell's nine children - and his favourite. She grew up in a 53-room mansion on 5 hectares near Oxford and had a trust fund from her father that provided her with about $US100,000 a year, according to reports.

Loading It was the disgraced media mogul's mysterious death on a £15 million ($18 million) yacht, which he named Lady Ghislaine after his daughter, that would propel Maxwell to New York and into the arms of the now notorious Epstein. She had just turned 30 in 1991 when she fled the disgrace of the collapse of her father's empire and the exposure of his plundering of the Mirror Group Newspapers pension fund. She has been described on Companies House documents as a director, manager and business consultant. But primarily, she was a networker and, as a regular fixture on the New York social scene, she came into the orbit of Epstein. The pair briefly dated in the early '90s when Epstein took Maxwell, broken by her father's death, under his wing. "He saved her," one friend told a Vanity Fair writer. "She's never forgotten that - and never will."

The relationship fizzled out but the pair remained close. Epstein once described Maxwell as his "best friend" but scotched reports she was on his payroll. The exact nature of their relationship has come under the spotlight after they were implicated in a sordid sex-trafficking case. Court documents state that it is "an undisputed fact that multiple witnesses" have testified that Maxwell operated as Epstein's "procurer of underage girls" - a claim she has vehemently denied. Virginia Giuffre, who claims to have been Epstein's teenage "sex slave" alleged in court documents in 2017 that she was recruited by Maxwell to give Epstein massages. It is disputed whether she was 15, 16 or 17 at the time. Giuffre, formerly Roberts, says she was 16 and also claims to have had sex with the Duke of York when she was 17, an allegation strongly denied by Buckingham Palace. Giuffre married an Australian man and now lives in Queensland. Virginia Giuffre, who is now based in Queensland, pictured with Prince Andrew in 2001. Also pictured is Epstein's then personal assistant Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell is in the background of a photograph of the Duke standing with his arm around a teenage Giuffre's bare midriff. Giuffre alleges that Maxwell "had sex with underage girls virtually every day" and her and Epstein's lives revolved around sex. Maxwell is also alleged to have recruited Johanna Sjoberg, then 21, who claims she was groped by the Duke of York while staying at Epstein's New York mansion in 2001. Another woman, Maria Farmer, has alleged Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her before molesting her 15-year-old sister. In stark contrast to the way in which she has led much of her adult life, Maxwell has remained under the radar since the allegations began to surface.

Loading Martina Vandenberg, founder and president of the nonprofit Human Trafficking Legal Centre, said she was "thrilled" to hear the prosecutors' announcement that the investigation would continue, saying it would encourage more alleged victims to come forward. But Maxwell herself had long since slipped away. Although associates of Epstein said Maxwell never completely broke off relations with Epstein, she became far less of a presence at his various properties in recent years. Maxwell was a focus of the Epstein investigation from the start, according to the Palm Beach police officials who began the probe. The girls they interviewed repeatedly described Maxwell as the co-ordinator of Epstein's sex-trafficking operation. But detectives were never able to interview Maxwell. Attorneys for Maxwell did not return calls seeking comment. Throughout the years since Epstein was first accused of sexual abuse, Maxwell has insisted that she did nothing wrong and knew of no illegal acts. In a deposition she gave in Giuffre's defamation suit in 2016, Maxwell said that "Virginia is an absolute liar and everything she has said is a lie. Therefore, based on those lies I cannot speculate on what anybody else did or didn't do ... everything she said is false." The suit was settled out of court in 2017.

But a growing number of women have said that Maxwell was the prime organiser of Epstein's three-times daily "massages," and that she acted as recruiter and paymaster for the girls who came to Epstein's Palm Beach mansion. Giuffre said Maxwell recruited her when she was working at Trump's Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago. As Giuffre recalled it in her lawsuit, Maxwell told her, "I know somebody. We can train you. We can get you educated. You know, we can help you along the way if you pass the interview. If the guy likes you, then, you know, it will work out for you. You'll travel. You'll make good money." But at her first meeting with Epstein, Giuffre said in a deposition, Maxwell "instructed me to take off my clothes and to give oral sex to Jeffrey Epstein." In an interview with the Miami Herald last year, Giuffre said, "The training started immediately. It was everything down to how to give a blow job, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants. A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself, and being a woman, it kind of surprises you that a woman could actually let stuff like that happen. But not only let it happen but to groom you into doing it."

Giuffre also said that Maxwell ordered her to have sex with Prince Andrew, New Mexico's former Democratic governor Bill Richardson and former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine. "My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy," Giuffre said in the deposition. "Their whole entire lives revolved around sex." Spokesmen for Richardson and Mitchell vigorously denied Giuffre's allegations and said they never had any contact with her. A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said, "Any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue." Asked in a deposition about Maxwell's role in procuring girls for him, Epstein said only, "Fifth," referring to his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Johanna Sjoberg, a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University when she said Maxwell hired her as an assistant, said in a 2015 deposition that was released on Friday that it was Maxwell's job to ensure that three girls a day were made available to Epstein for his sexual pleasure.

Loading "He needed to have three orgasms a day," Sjoberg said. "It was biological, like eating." In another document released on Friday, Rinaldo Rizzo, the houseman for one of Epstein's closest friends testified that a 15-year-old Swedish girl tearfully told him that Maxwell and Epstein had threatened her with physical harm and confiscated her passport to assure that she stayed on Epstein's private island in the Caribbean. Yet another woman has claimed that Maxwell not only recruited girls for Epstein, but took part in the sexual abuse of girls. Maria Farmer said in an affidavit earlier this year that she met Maxwell and Epstein at an art show when she was a graduate student in Manhattan in 1995. The next summer, Farmer said, both Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her at the Ohio estate of Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands, owner of Victoria's Secret, and Epstein's only publicly known financial client. Farmer also said that Maxwell took part in the sexual abuse of her 15-year-old sister on a massage table at Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. In court documents, former employees at the Epstein mansion in Palm Beach described Maxwell as the house manager, the person who oversaw the staff, handled finances and served as social coordinator, often doing the glad-handing while the more reserved Epstein stayed in the background at parties and dinners.

Loading In 1993, an ad in Yoga Journal offered a "full time position" for an "Iyengar Yoga Instructor" to "teach a private individual." "The job includes fantastic perks such as extensive travel," the ad said, and it advised interested parties to call "Miss Maxwell" at a phone number that was Epstein's office number. In a deposition in 2016, Maxwell agreed that her work at the Epstein houses "included hiring many people, ... all sorts of people." She said that "a very small part of my job was from time to time to find adult professional massage therapists for Jeffrey. As far as I'm concerned, everyone who came to his house was an adult professional person." Through her years with Epstein, Maxwell maintained a very public life at the pinnacle of society. She was a friend of John Kennedy jnr in New York in the 1990s and a guest at Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010. She had a long relationship with an Italian count. She attended fashion shows and top-dollar benefit balls in New York and London and went to the Vanity Fair party at the Oscars, where she was photographed in 2014 with Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur. In 2000, she obtained her townhouse on Manhattan's East 65th Street; it was purchased for her for $US5 million by an anonymous corporation located at the same address as Epstein's finance office.

Maxwell served on boards of charities and founded a non-profit organisation that sought to conserve the world's oceans. The organisation announced last month that it was ceasing operations. Describing herself as "unemployed," Maxwell donated the maximum permissible, $US2300, to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2007. After Epstein's conviction on sexual abuse charges in 2008, Maxwell appeared to distance herself from him. Euan Rellie, an investment banker who has known her for years, told New York magazine: "Ghislaine was funny and didn't take herself too seriously. "But she seemed like a woman who didn't have any real job, didn't have any real boyfriend, had lost her dad. A woman adrift who was clinging on to whatever she could find."

The Washington Post; Telegraph, London