The hunt is on: Ghislaine Maxwell in Tenerife after the death of her father in 1991 Getty Images

Ghislaine Maxwell, the late Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged procurer-in-chief, still has links to a mews house she once owned in one of those quietly expensive streets in Belgravia.

It’s an enviable property, small but handily located and probably worth about £1.5 million. The oligarchs’ canteen, Pétrus, is close by and, should you need to pop out for a pint of milk, Harrods Food Hall is just a short stroll away.


When I rang the bell there was, alas, no answer. The house seemed to be locked up, the paintwork bleached by the heat of the summer sun. Still, it looked as though someone had been watering the window-boxes. While hiding in plain sight is often recommended for those on the run, it’s unlikely to have been Maxwell – a woman much wanted by the FBI, the world’s press and a posse of aggrieved young women; a woman who stands accused of grooming underage girls on behalf of Epstein and, in some cases, participating in the abuse he perpetrated.

Who is Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite at the centre of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal Features Who is Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite at the centre of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal

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But where is she? Not, it turns out, at the Massachusetts beach house fingered as a bolthole by MailOnline. Nor at the South of France mansion whose doorbell American reporters pressed to no avail. And not, I feel sure, at the Oxford apartment allegedly owned by Maxwell’s old friend, Tania Rotherwick, founder of the Wilderness festival, the first iteration of which Maxwell attended with a man – perhaps Epstein – who, Tatler was told, ‘picked up the tab.’

Live life to Maxwell: Photographed in Moschino for Tatler in 1990 John Bishop


And certainly not at the LA fast-food joint where, in August, Maxwell was pictured enjoying a burger and fries, just days after the apparent suicide of her erstwhile lover and friend, Jeffrey Epstein, in a high-security detention centre in Manhattan – photographs that would have constituted the first ‘sighting’ of the socialite in public since 2016. They were, in fact, swiftly discredited as crudely photoshopped fakes: metadata that appeared on the images was traced back to the trading company Meadowgate Media Investments – whose President, Leah Saffian, is a close friend of Maxwell. But anyone who knew Maxwell didn’t need to fall back on forensics. Because of all people, the 57-year-old Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell (of Headington School, Marlborough College and Balliol) would no more be photographed at a burger bar than the Duchess of Sussex would lunch at a branch of Subway.

And though Maxwell is still referred to as a ‘socialite’, she’s unlikely to be doing much in the way of socialising. She has not been charged with any offence and has denied all allegations – but her involvement with Epstein has turned her from social butterfly to social pariah.

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In the late Eighties, Nineties and early Noughties, Ghislaine Maxwell was a ubiquitous presence at high-end social events: her raven bob would often pop out of the pages of Tatler. You’d catch her in Bystander: skiing in Aspen, arm-in-arm with Naomi Campbell at parties, laughing at Plum Sykes’ 30th birthday bash in New York or at a charity auction with Jeremy Paxman, her elegant arm snaking around AA Gill’s shoulders. Her contacts book (of which more later) was world-class: it wasn’t a question of who she knew, but who she didn’t. When her father, the egregious publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, was alive, she ‘never, ever’ had, a friend remembers, ‘any cash. Lots of credit, of course, but no cash.’


Attending Tatler's 'Most Invited' party with AA Gill in 2003 Shutterstock

But she had a name, and a presence, and an allure that attracted: ‘She was a bit naughty,’ one young man around Eighties London recalled. ‘Mischievous and a bit spoilt. I remember her coming up to my flat in her tennis gear – that was sexy.’ And, said one girl friend, ‘She was really, really good fun. She was a laugh, a fun girl. We were all the same age, we hung out together, with people like Robert Hanson and Rupert Fairfax. There was nothing sinister in those days: she had a nice boyfriend, wasn’t into drugs any more than anyone else. Nice girl, and her father was a complete c**t. We’d go to Headington Hill Hall [the Maxwell mansion leased from Oxford Council] and have lunch; there’d be two Filipinos behind his chair, piling up the food for him.’

Ghislaine Maxwell was, perhaps, more calculating than that. As another of her friends told Tatler: ‘Ghislaine and her friends were very strategic. She was a fixture on the London social scene and she would hang out with a group of women who were all pursuing dazzling marriages. They wanted to marry money, instead of an aristo, which had become unfashionable by then.’ Perhaps, in due course, she wanted to marry Jeffrey Epstein’s money. She was certainly a beneficiary of his largesse, and of his private jet, known informally and rather loathsomely as the Lolita Express.

With her brother Ian Maxwell, meeting Princess Diana at the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984 Shutterstock

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Few of Maxwell’s one-time friends are now willing to eschew anonymity, but, many of their names appear in the so-called Little Black Book that came into the possession of the FBI when they raided one of Epstein’s houses. But it was not, it is now clear, Epstein’s address book, but Maxwell’s. Alongside private contact details for Donald and Melania Trump, Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, there’s a raft of old chums who are now heads of Oxford colleges, editors of national newspapers, leaders of Commonwealth countries – as well as the number of her London hairdresser, Denise, and that of her osteopath, Alan Coles, who abruptly cut me dead by text as soon as I mentioned Maxwell’s name. Of course, merely being in the address book is no evidence of a connection with Maxwell. It’s not clear how and why their names were collated, but it does seem that some on the list did know Ghislaine well.

At the raffishly charming Nags Head, close to Maxwell’s home, Kevin Moran has been the landlord for many years. His name, too, appears in the Black Book. He wasn’t at the pub when I called in, but he later answered the phone. I introduced myself, explaining that Tatler is a ‘Society magazine’.

‘What do you want?’ he barked. As soon as I mentioned Ghislaine’s name he slammed the phone down.

Mr Moran is not the only person who, it seems, would prefer to keep schtum about Ghislaine. Her family has not rushed to defend her, nor to reveal where she might be found. That’s not entirely surprising: her brothers, Kevin and Ian, have kept a low profile since they were charged with multimillion-pound fraud relating to their father’s business in the Nineties. They were acquitted but seldom give interviews. I decided to approach them both. Did they know where Ghislaine was? Had the FBI knocked on the door?

At the Asprey opening party with Sarah, Duchess of York, in 2003 Getty Images

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Kevin very politely wrote back: ‘I do not give interviews, on or off the record, in relation to my immediate or wider family other than in connection to, or as a result, of events or causes that involve me personally.’

No luck there then, so I took the morning train to Oxford, where Kevin’s eccentric ex-wife, Pandora Maxwell, now lives in a modest but flamboyantly decorated home in Jericho. She and Kevin, who was declared bankrupt with debts exceeding £400 million, separated in 2005.

As I approached, she appeared to be in the process of giving one of her seven children a driving lesson. She has in the past rather forthrightly described her former father-in-law as a ‘fat old fraudster’ but today she is disinclined to dump on her former sister-in-law, Ghislaine. ‘I am not talking to you. Bad luck. Absolutely not.’ And she slammed the door of her Nissan Micra, driving off at some speed. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing among those who wish to keep their own counsel, of course.

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Maxwell is also listed at an address near Salisbury; a substantial house in an obscure and horsey hamlet, but not very Ghislaine. I drove there and knocked on the door. The occupant, a man in his 40s, was guarded: even in this

corner of rural England, I had a sense that the Maxwell omertà had somehow been invoked.



‘I don’t want to talk about Ghislaine Maxwell,’ he said. ‘She is nothing to do with us.’ But then he explained that his wife, Catherine Vaughan-Edwards, was a trustee of the Terramar Project, the environmental charity set up by Maxwell, and that their home is used as its business address. She and Maxwell remain directors of the UK charity, though Maxwell closed down the US arm of Terramar shortly after Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking in July. Then he politely suggested I leave, insisting that ‘everything was in order with the Charity Commission.’ That, at least, is good to know.

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Back to London, then, to call on the mysterious Malcolm Grumbridge, a lawyer and long-time associate of the Maxwell family. He acts as legal advisor to the upmarket Hogarth Health Club in Chiswick, where he keeps an office. I was told he wasn’t in, so I emailed him. He told me that he didn’t discuss clients. Did that mean Ghislaine is a client? He promptly refused to confirm or deny whether Ghislaine or the Maxwell brothers were clients.

Ghislaine Maxwell, 1998

In the present climate, it is a tiresome process to find people who knew Maxwell and will talk about her. I approached dozens of them; many didn’t pick up the phone and dozens of letters, texts and emails went unanswered. One old friend, Susannah Constantine, did write back charmingly, but only to say: ‘I knew Ghislaine well, before I married in the Nineties, but have hardly seen her since then. She was a sweet, kind, loyal friend back then.’

Which is to Ghislaine’s credit, given her background. One of nine children, she was the late Robert Maxwell’s youngest and favourite daughter: the former Labour MP, publishing tycoon and serial fraudster named the yacht from which he met his death in 1991 after her. Yet he also bullied her, and she was desperate to seek his approval. (The perverse, co-dependent relationship they had is widely thought to have been the template for the one she later formed with Epstein. Both men were rich, powerful and wildly overbearing, and they each met their end in circumstances that have not yet been properly explained.)

The bullying took many forms: the writer Eleanor Berry recalled a conversation with the nine-year-old Ghislaine, who was expecting ‘a prearranged hiding’ from her father. ‘Daddy has a series of things lined up in a row,’ she reportedly told Berry. ‘There’s a riding crop with a swish to it, another straight riding crop and a few shoehorns. He always asks me to choose which one I want.’

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My brush with Ghislaine Maxwell Features My brush with Ghislaine Maxwell

More conventionally, a Marlborough contemporary of Maxwell’s told me what happened at her 21st birthday party at Headington Hill Hall: ‘We were all having fun and it was getting a bit out of hand, there was a lot of drinking and drugs. And Robert Maxwell simply closed it down. He’d had enough. Ghislaine was incredibly upset, as you can imagine. But she was in awe of her father and just had to accept it – just as she had to accept her father never letting her bring boyfriends home.’ She was though, the schoolfriend went on, ‘a great laugh at that age – one of my friends had a fairly serious relationship with her and she was very flirtatious and sexy. She was definitely up for it.’

Which may explain another contemporary’s observation: ‘I used to go up to Headington Hill Hall for parties. It was interesting: her brothers were very protective of her, almost Arab about it. “You watch out what you do with our sister.” Wonder what they think now.’

Andrew Yates, who was also at school with her, is now Deputy Features Editor at the Daily Mail and was surprised to discover his name in the Little Black Book, with his school nickname, ‘Piggy’, alongside. (Based, he tells me,

on his build, which was mildly rotund at the time.) ‘I last saw her,’ he told me, ‘about 10, maybe 15 years ago, in Foxtrot Oscar [the now closed Chelsea restaurant that was for many years the ultimate Hooray Henry hangout and a favourite of both Prince William and of the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster]. She was, as I remember from school, very good fun, very jolly. I always liked her. I think I gave her my details that day at the restaurant and that’s probably how they ended up in her address book.’

Flirtatious indeed: I understand from a mutual friend that after school she travelled to Israel and visited a kibbutz; she was immediately ostracised by the other girls for making a rather-too-obvious beeline for the Adonis-like lifeguard at the kibbutz pool. Very quickly she got her way, as she would with much in her life.

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Robert and Ghislaine Maxwell Shutterstock

Ghislaine, to some schoolfriends’ surprise – ‘she was fun but she was never exceptionally bright’ – won a place at Oxford, attending Balliol College, to which her father had made a large endowment in 1965. (There is still a fellowship awarded in his name.) She graduated in 1985 and, soon after, joined the family firm. Peter Jay, a one-time British Ambassador to Washington and former son-in-law of Prime Minister James Callaghan, had been hired by Maxwell as his Chief of Staff. He lasted three years and, during that time, witnessed Maxwell at his most erratic, bombastic and impossible.

I asked Jay what Ghislaine actually did at the company. He smiled. ‘Her job was being the boss’s daughter. She was the apple of his eye. She was full of energy and life and so on and she was beginning to make her way in the world. She didn’t have a vast array of business skills. But, in the things that she did, and the way she handled her father, she was competent, and there was nothing wrong with her brain. Kevin and Ian were just sons. But she was her father’s daughter – and she had some skills. Getting what she wanted. Dealing with rich old men. She was a young woman of the Eighties making her way.’

But she was making her way in her father’s oversized shadow – ‘all she ever talked about was him,’ one acquaintance from the Eighties recalls. She was, it has been reported, devastated by her father’s death in 1991 and shocked to discover his villainy – he had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from the Daily Mirror pension fund, impoverishing many of his employees. She was distraught, too, at the speculation about his death. Had he been murdered? Or had he killed himself on the Lady Ghislaine? Bereft and – by her standards – broke, she fled to the relatively reduced circumstances of a modest Upper East Side apartment in New York. Lord Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister and campaign mastermind, knew her through her father, and, in turn, through Ghislaine was introduced to Epstein.



‘I think she had a very tough time when she arrived in New York,’ he told me. ‘Someone told me she had nothing and literally had to remake herself from scratch.’ Through Ghislaine, he met Epstein, and was later photographed with him on holiday in St Barths, in 2005.

Very soon after getting to New York, she met Epstein. Art dealer Stuart Pivar, an associate of Epstein’s, has said that Ghislaine ‘arrived a wreck from what happened to her on account of her father. And the last thing that should’ve happened to someone like that is to fall into the care of the likes of Jeffrey. He moulded her into being complicit with his aberrations.’

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A billionaire like Epstein, however, offered her plenty of opportunities. Another acquaintance, well-versed in the louche ways of High Society, suggested that, ‘She didn’t have money – so she moved in with Epstein, having a fabulous time, private planes, being a helicopter pilot, all that. He was working class, a fraud, while she had an entrée: she knew all the upper-class English coming through New York and reeled them in. She was very much on the scene; she knew how to give a dinner party.’

So too says the author Jonathan Foreman, who knew her in New York and whose name is to be found in the Little Black Book. The son of the film director Carl Foreman and brother of the historian Amanda Foreman, he ‘met her a few times, at dinner parties she hosted. She was charming, very bright. Her guests were often very well known; I remember Robert Kennedy Junior was there one night.’

But Maxwell wasn’t just Epstein’s social fixer. In 1994, the writer Christopher Mason was, the New York Times reported, ‘selected to perform a ribald song at Mr Epstein’s birthday party that referred to the couple’s sexual relationship.’ Ghislaine was, added Mason, ‘fantastically entertaining’ and ‘saucy’ – the paper said that she talked openly about sex. In fact, said another acquaintance who saw her often at parties, she was ‘obsessed by sex. She’s Sphinx-like, mysterious. The last time I saw her, five, 10 years ago, I said what are you up to? And she said “I’m selling this product – stainless-steel mini dumb-bells – that you put up your fanny. For exercising your vaginal muscles, exercise your pelvic floor, learn the Singapore Grip. I’m giving seminars in LA and they all turn up and I tell them, this is how you keep your man.”’

With Naomi Campbell, Donald Trump and Melania Knauss in 2002 Getty Images

She was, though, also Epstein’s sidekick: in 1993, Yoga Journal ran an advert for a yoga instructor for ‘a private individual’. The telephone number given was for Epstein’s office; the person to be asked for was ‘Miss Maxwell’.

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Later, she was to source masseuses by the score for her friend/lover/boss.

But she did indeed also bring in social connections. She befriended Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, who in turn introduced both Maxwell and Epstein to Prince Andrew. In due course, the Prince visited Epstein’s island in the Bahamas and attended several of Ghislaine’s dinners. Andrew repaid the hospitality by inviting Epstein to Balmoral, and both Maxwell and Epstein to the 2000 ‘Dance of the Decades’ at Windsor Castle, a ball marking the birthdays of Princess Margaret, who turned 70; Princess Anne, who was 50; Prince Andrew, 40; and Prince William who was 18. And as a bumper bonus, Andrew invited Epstein and Maxwell to a shoot at Sandringham in December 2000.

Key to all this social success was the ‘charming’ Ghislaine, as New York-dwelling British investment banker Euan Rellie described her. Epstein was grateful; in 2000, Maxwell moved into a vast townhouse on East 65th St; it seems that Epstein’s firm bought it. There she gave the dinner parties so many enjoyed.

There were rumours of Epstein’s involvement with young girls, but he wasn’t actually charged with procurement until 2008; he served 13 months in jail and wasn’t arrested again until July this year. Maxwell and Epstein were rarely seen in public after his conviction, though Ghislaine still figured in New York social life, attending Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, going to Arianna Huffington’s book launches, being photographed beside Michael Bloomberg at a Tamara Mellon book launch: ‘I didn’t get the feeling she was being shunned,’ Jay McInerney told the New York Times.

But she did become officially embroiled in the scandal in 2015 when a civil lawsuit accused her of trafficking. Maxwell has never been charged – and denies all allegations – but three of Epstein’s victims say that she was an active participant in his crimes. In court documents unsealed this summer, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who is at the centre of the scandal, says she was recruited as Epstein’s masseuse by Maxwell when she was 15 – and ordered by Maxwell to give him oral sex and join in threesomes. Post 2015, she faded away from New York life. Her house was sold and in 2017 her US lawyers claimed that she was in London, though they didn’t, they said, know her address.

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Euan Rellie thought he knew Ghislaine well: now he thinks that perhaps he never really knew her at all. He and his wife, the author and entrepreneur Lucy Sykes, socialised regularly with her. ‘I’m not easily shocked,’ said Rellie, ‘but I have been by some of the revelations in the past couple of weeks. Ghislaine was a really likeable person. She was somewhere between a good acquaintance and a friend. At that point, I went to quite a lot of parties and she was always there. She was at the epicentre of the social scene in New York. She knew everybody. It wasn’t just teenage girls who Epstein was interested in cultivating. Every single interesting, pretty, new girl to arrive in New York, would end up going for tea with Ghislaine then being introduced to Jeffrey. She was the acceptable face of a rather mysterious billionaire who I personally found very creepy and leery. Like Weinstein.’

Likeable, charming, amusing: shut your mind to the depravities she’s accused of, and Ghislaine would be the ideal guest. But how to reach her? Who knows if anyone – her brothers, her lawyers, the dwindling handful of friends who have stuck by her – really knows where she is. One thing seems certain – she won’t be dropping into the Nags Head for a while.

This article appeared in the November 2019 issue of Tatler


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