Maxwell’s alleged role in Epstein’s activities, and in particular her friendship with Prince Andrew, was dragged centre stage last November by the BBC’s Newsnight interview with the prince , and the Panorama interview , aired two weeks later, with one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims to have had sex with the prince at Epstein’s and Maxwell’s behest.

Last August, Epstein died in his cell in a New York prison, awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. He was a paedophile who, over a period of more than 30 years, had horrifically abused possibly dozens of girls and young women, at the same time peddling sexual favours to a range of wealthy and powerful men in order, it is alleged, to exercise control over their financial affairs.

Robert Maxwell was the central figure in his daughter’s life, a powerful, domineering man whom she feared and adored, and on whom, it seemed, her very life depended. Jeffrey Epstein was to become, in many ways, his replacement; a man for whom, it appears, she would do anything, no matter where that might lead. If for the first 30 years, until his death, her heart belonged to Daddy, for almost the next 30, it seems, it would belong to Epstein.

The account has the savour of something almost predestined: a woman tragically caught in the gyre between two powerful men, one who had shaped her past, the other who would determine her future.

On November 5, 1991, the body of Maxwell’s father, Robert, the plutocrat, British newspaper tycoon and – it would shortly transpire – arch embezzler, was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Tenerife, having fallen from his 55-metre luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. The following day, his distraught daughter arrived in Tenerife by private jet. Boarding the yacht, which had been named in her honour, Ghislaine went to her father’s quarters. Searching through his private papers, she found a reference to a New York financier who had been particularly helpful to him in squirrelling away misbegotten funds offshore. Shortly afterwards, Ghislaine flew to New York, to escape the shame of her father and make a new life for herself. One of the first people she reached out to was that financier. His name was Jeffrey Epstein.

There is an apocryphal, but tantalising, story that has long been doing the rounds of New York society about how Jeffrey Epstein first entered the life of Ghislaine Maxwell – or should that be vice versa?

Robert Maxwell, the arriviste, wanted his daughter to advance in the social circles in which he craved to be accepted himself. He dreamed that he might one day forge an alliance with the Kennedys by marrying off Ghislaine to John F. Kennedy jnr. The two would become friends, remaining so until Kennedy’s death in 1999 in a plane crash. But her great love was Count Gianfranco Cicogna, a businessman and sometime stunt pilot, variously described as “Italy’s Rockefeller” and “an old-fashioned smoocher”, who would also die in a plane crash, in 2012.

Educated at the elite Marlborough College school and Balliol College, Oxford, Ghislaine was her father’s favourite: bullied and adored, subjugated and praised. Nothing was too good for her, and nothing she did would ever be good enough.

Robert Maxwell lived a life of flamboyant luxury, to which his youngest daughter would grow dangerously accustomed. The family home was Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, a 53-room Italianate mansion. Ghislaine’s was an upbringing of cosseted wealth and entitlement. She would develop an early enthusiasm for private jets, helicopters and yachts – “Bob’s toys”, as her father’s extravagances were known. Robert was a man who relished his relationships with statesmen, prime ministers and presidents, and relished exercising power – not least over his own family. In her 1994 autobiography, A Mind of My Own, his widow Elisabeth wrote, “Everything was sacrificed on the altar of Bob’s genius, and in the end the children and I were to pay a heavy price.”

Her father had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in what was then Czechoslovakia, rising from abject poverty – he did not own a pair of shoes until he was four years old – to head up a business empire that included book publishing and London’s Daily Mirror newspaper. A titanic figure in British public life, he’d been a Labour Party MP and was alleged to have been a triple agent for MI6, Mossad and the KGB. He was buried in Israel, where the president, Chaim Herzog, delivered a eulogy.

How the daughter of a man who was once one of Britain’s wealthiest and most powerful public figures could have become embroiled in some of the most shocking sex crimes of modern times is a tangled story of wealth, privilege and corruption. Ghislaine was the youngest of nine Maxwell children (a daughter, Karine, died from leukaemia aged three in 1957; a son, Michael, died in 1969 following a car crash).

Giuffre is just one of a number of women who, in lawsuits against Epstein’s estate, have named Maxwell as the “madam” who led them to him. Their allegations put her at the centre of a far-reaching investigation into Epstein’s activities, one which threatens to pull in the politicians and businessmen with whom he was associated – as well as Prince Andrew. Maxwell has denied all the allegations against her.

In Britain, the Maxwell name was mud. Ghislaine fled to New York to make a new life for herself – in characteristic style choosing to fly by Concorde, outraging Mirror Group pensioners, it was reported, “who were facing an impoverished retirement”.

Ghislaine was devastated, and would never accept either of the conflicting theories that his death was an accident or suicide. Two days after his body was found, she stood on the deck of the Lady Ghislaine and told the assembled crowd of reporters and photographers, “I think he was murdered.”

In 1991, Robert Maxwell, intent on expanding his press empire, bought the ailing New York Daily News, and Ghislaine was despatched to the city as his emissary. It was her entrée to New York society. But just a few months later, Maxwell was dead – leaving a £460 million black hole in Mirror Group’s company pension scheme, and his wife and family to face the consequences.

Ghislaine, she remembers, was poised, clever, extremely chic, “very mindful of who you were, your status, your importance. I think it was more a way of advancing herself, making contacts that could be useful to her.” She had, Pasternak says, “this defended nature; there was always a side to her that you would never know. If what is said about her now being so shockingly disloyal to women is true, it’s a great betrayal.”

In the late 1980s she founded the Kit Kat Club, a salon held in a variety of locations, designed to bring together women from the arts, politics and society. The author Anna Pasternak, who had also been at Balliol, attended several meetings. “It was bright, wealthy and society women. Nowadays, it seems quite normal to be going to a meeting just for women, but 30 years ago it seemed exciting.”

What is a rich man’s daughter to do? At 21 Maxwell made Ghislaine a director of his football club, Oxford United, and set her up in a company supplying corporate gifts. But the description that most often accompanied the photographs of her at parties was that all-purpose noun, “socialite”.

Quite how Epstein had paid for all this was never clear. He boasted that he only dealt with clients with a portfolio of $1 billion or more. There were rumours he had been connected with the CIA and Mossad. A New York magazine profile in 2002 would describe him as a “Gatsby-esque” figure with “cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies – to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize-winning scientists across the country – and for financial markets around the world”. The same article quoted one Donald Trump, who described Epstein as a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

The mansion was just one part of a property portfolio that included a ranch in New Mexico, a private island in the US Virgin Islands called Little St James, and a $US2.5 million house in Palm Beach, Florida.

Three years later, Epstein upgraded once again, acquiring one of New York’s grandest private houses, occupying almost half a block on East 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. One of Epstein’s alleged victims would later describe a room in the house filled with screens to monitor the hidden cameras in bedrooms and bathrooms.

When Ghislaine Maxwell arrived in New York in 1991, Epstein was living in a one-bedroom apartment. But early in 1992 he moved into a grand town house on the Upper East Side that had once been occupied by the deputy consul general of Iran, paying $US15,000 a month in rent. According to one source, Ghislaine advised Epstein’s interior decorator, telling him “this is all mine”, leading the decorator to wonder whether the house was being paid for by “dirty money” of her father’s that Epstein had recovered.

The son of a New York parks department worker , who grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of Coney Island, Epstein was a college dropout. After working as a teacher at a private, co-educational school, he had taken a job at Bear Stearns on Wall Street, where he was a derivatives specialist. In 1982 he founded his own company, J. Epstein & Co.

A trust fund established in Liechtenstein yielded her an income of about £80,000 a year. She took a $US2000-a-month apartment on the fashionable Upper East Side and set to work cultivating her list of wealthy and well-connected acquaintances.

Maxwell became a permanent fixture on New York’s social round: openings, parties, dinners. She was vivacious, erudite, tactile and flirtatious – a flatterer. Nobody described her as “sweet”.

“For Epstein,” says Thomas Volscho, an associate professor at the City University of New York who is writing a book about Epstein, Maxwell was “a conduit for him to socialise with people who were way beyond his social level”. She brought class, connections and a certain British polish – “which fork to use”, as Volscho puts it. Epstein would describe her as his “best friend”.

“She worshipped him,” says another friend. He tells the story of Maxwell arriving at a dinner party when her mobile phone – a rarity in those days – rang. “She said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Jeffrey, he’s got a cold. I’m sorry but I’ve got to go.’ She said, ‘He wants the best chicken soup in New York and I’ve got to track it down and get it to him immediately.’ It was imperative for her to satisfy his whims. Absolute devotion.”

Ghislaine Maxwell was 30 when she met Epstein . He was 38. She had designs on marrying him. He had no interest in that – his enthusiasm for younger women was well-known – but they developed a deeply symbiotic relationship, closer than many marriages, forged in a mixture of mutual interest, dependence and gratitude. Epstein provided her with financial security, and all the luxury and comforts that she’d become accustomed to as her father’s daughter. More than that, he was her saviour at a time when it seemed she had lost everything – and Maxwell would never forget it. As a friend put it, “She owed him everything.”

For Ghislaine, in Britain, being Robert Maxwell’s daughter would have occasioned a mixture of pity and social froideur; in New York, it was a cause of intrigue. “There was a definite frisson that she was the daughter of this swashbuckling, larger-than-life figure,” says Christopher Mason, a British author and television host living in New York, who was an old friend of hers. “There was this sense of how brave she was to be dealing with this awful thing of having been rather prosperous and suddenly having no money, and being in this perilous position.”

“She was a livewire, very bright, lots of naughty humour, and really fun to be around,” remembers Mason. “Her eyes would flash with excitement talking about the very powerful people she’d just been with five minutes ago, or was on her way to meet – presidents, heads of corporations – the kind of milieu her father had run in.”

Maxwell had no discernible occupation; she would variously describe herself in official documents as a “director”, “business consultant” and “entrepreneur”. She assumed the role of managing Epstein’s homes, his rich man’s toys, and to a large extent his life. As Euan Rellie, an investment banker who had attended dinner parties that Maxwell and Epstein hosted in New York, would put it, she “seemed to be half-ex-girlfriend, half-employee, half-best friend, and fixer”.

The “fixer” role inspired most curiosity. “There were whispers that Jeffrey had a soft spot for teenage girls and that Ghislaine was ever so obliging in finding them for him,” one friend says. But nobody appeared to see this as an obstacle to befriending them, or to their progress to the centre of New York’s social world. “It seems stupid to say it now,” the friend says, “but it just seemed naughty rather than the depravity we’ve learnt of since.”

In 2000, Ghislaine Maxwell moved into a new home: a grand, Beaux Arts-style townhouse at 116 East 65th Street, two blocks from Central Park and within walking distance of Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion. The five-storey residence had been purchased for $US4.95 million by an anonymous limited liability company with the same address as Epstein’s finance business.

Maxwell was an immaculate hostess. There is a story of one party at her home attended by a Rockefeller, a Kennedy and sundry New York luminaries. After the toast, the party retired to the library, where they were invited to admire Maxwell’s little jeu d’esprit: fake spines had been stuck on the books, with titles referring to her best friends. Guests scrambled to see where they stood in the pecking order.

Epstein’s infamous “black book” was as much Maxwell’s as his: a who’s who of London and New York power brokers and show business figures, including Alec Baldwin, Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger and Courtney Love, as well as Kennedys, Goldsmiths and Guggenheims, counts, lords and princesses. More than 130 names are listed under the heading “Massage Florida”. There are 16 phone numbers listed for the Duke of York.

In his Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, Prince Andrew talked of having known Maxwell since her university days, and of her introducing him to Epstein in 1999. The three became virtually inseparable. “Jeffrey’s only interest was in money and power, so for him it was a prestige thing of being pals with Randy Andy,” says a friend of Maxwell.

Flight logs show that in February 1999 Prince Andrew and Maxwell flew with Epstein on his private jet from St Thomas, the airport closest to Little St James, to Palm Beach, Florida. In July, Epstein and Maxwell visited Andrew at the Balmoral royal estate in Scotland. In February 2000, Andrew joined Epstein and Maxwell at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. In June, Epstein and Maxwell visited Windsor Castle for an event that marked four royal birthdays, including Andrew’s 40th; the Prince also took the pair to Ascot. In December, they were his guests at a shooting weekend at Sandringham. And a month later, Andrew joined Maxwell and Epstein on a holiday in Thailand.

In March 2001, it is alleged, after an evening at Tramp nightclub, Prince Andrew, Epstein and Maxwell went back to Maxwell’s mews house in Belgravia, London. With them was a young girl named Virginia Roberts.

Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein (at rear) and Ghislaine Maxwell (at far right) in 2000. Credit:Getty Images

What did Maxwell see in Epstein? The simple answer might be an opportunity to further her own interests, but it is surely more complicated than that. Epstein entered her life when she was at her most vulnerable. He was the guarantor of a way of life that had been snatched from her by her father’s death – in a sense, he became the father she had lost.

What then persuaded her to cross the line into a world – according to the allegations levelled against her – that was altogether darker and more compromising? “I think she just got in too deep,” says one former friend. “But I don’t know how much she would have struggled to get out. It was anything to please the man who had come to her rescue.”

Extraordinary wealth can often create an illusion of invulnerability, a sense of being unaccountable. But for Epstein – and Maxwell – that was about to change. In March 2005, the stepmother of a 14-year-old girl in Florida told the Palm Beach police that her stepdaughter had been molested by Epstein at his home after he had paid her $US300 to give him an “erotic massage”.

The FBI opened an investigation into Epstein, and by 2007 they had identified more than 30 people who had been abused by him – vulnerable young girls whom he believed he could exploit with impunity.

In June 2008, after secretly negotiating a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, Epstein pleaded guilty to the relatively minor charges of solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The deal, which was brokered without the knowledge of Epstein’s victims, meant that four women subsequently named as Epstein’s alleged accomplices – Nadia Marcinkova, who would later be described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave”, Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross and Lesley Groff – were not charged.

Epstein served time in the Palm Beach County Jail. He was given his own wing and, under an arrangement unique for a sex offender, a work-release allowance, enabling him to leave the jail for 12 hours a day. He opened an office in Palm Beach to visit. During “lunch hours” he would often be driven to his residence, where, it is said, he would entertain young women flown in from New York.

A visitor log shows that he was visited in prison by Marcinkova and Kellen, but there is no mention of Maxwell. Nor was she named in the case, although her name was written on message pads, flight manifests and other documents found by the police in Epstein’s home. She would, however, become publicly associated with Epstein’s crimes.

In 2007, another young woman, Johanna Sjoberg, came forward, alleging that in 2001, when she was a student at Palm Beach Atlantic College, Maxwell had approached her on campus and recruited her to work for Epstein as a masseuse. He then induced her “to perform demeaning sexual services”. Sjoberg described being with Maxwell and Epstein at his home in New York for Easter in 2001, where she met Prince Andrew and another girl called Virginia.

The “Virginia” was Virginia Roberts.

Prince Andrew pictured with Virginia Roberts in 2001 at the Belgravia townhouse of Ghislaine Maxwell (at right).

In July 2009 Epstein was released from jail after just 13 months. Under New York law, he was classified as a level-three sex offender – the highest category of risk because of his likelihood to reoffend.

If Maxwell was waiting to greet him, there were no paparazzi to record the moment. In a city where the only social crime is poverty, her alleged association with his criminal activities was tactfully ignored. The invitations flowed in unabated. In July 2010 she was a guest at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, reportedly accompanying a friend of the couple, Ted Waitt, the billionaire co-founder of personal computing company Gateway. Maxwell, it was reported, had been dating Waitt for some time, but he eventually broke it off, uneasy about her relationship with Epstein. (A spokesperson for Chelsea Clinton said she and her husband were not aware of the allegations against Maxwell until 2015.)

Meanwhile, Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement had been made public, and many of his accusers now filed civil lawsuits against him, claiming they were molested when they were underage. Epstein began a long process of settling the cases out of court.

One of those lawsuits was filed in a Florida court by Virginia Roberts. In her deposition, filed under the pseudonym Jane Doe 102, Roberts would give the first detailed account of what she would allege to be Maxwell’s role as procurer and sex abuser, setting in train a string of lawsuits in which she would emerge as Maxwell’s principal nemesis.

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Roberts claimed that in the summer of 1998 Maxwell had “recruited” her as a masseuse for Epstein when she was 15 and working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. On her first visit to Epstein’s home, she was shown into a spa room where Epstein was lying naked on a massage table. Maxwell “then took off her own shirt and left on her underwear and started rubbing her breasts against [Epstein’s] body, impliedly showing [Roberts] what she was expected to do”. The encounter escalated, it was alleged, with Epstein and Maxwell “sexually assaulting, battering, exploiting and abusing” Roberts “in various ways”. Afterwards, according to Roberts’s testimony, Epstein paid her “hundreds of dollars” and he and Maxwell “giddily” told Roberts she had “lots of potential” and to return the next day.

It was the beginning of an arrangement, Roberts alleged, that was to last for two years, in which she would be joined by Maxwell and countless young women for sexual trysts, and be “sexually exploited” by Epstein.

These and subsequent allegations by Roberts have appeared in a number of court depositions. A US judge warned that statements made in these cases did not reflect the court’s findings, and that legal filings could be untrue. But Roberts has been consistent in her allegations through a number of cases.

The case against Epstein was settled out of court. But for Maxwell, the storm clouds were gathering.

In March 2011, The Mail on Sunday in the UK ran an interview with Roberts, in which she described her alleged encounter with Prince Andrew at Maxwell’s London home, where after a night out at Tramp nightclub, she had asked Epstein to take a photograph of her and the prince (“I wanted something to show my mum”). Maxwell and Epstein then left Roberts alone with Andrew. In her interview with Panorama she would claim that they had sex.

“In the morning,” Roberts told The Mail on Sunday, “Ghislaine said, ‘You did well. He had fun’,” and Epstein paid her about $US15,000 – “amazing money, more than I’d ever made on a trip with him before.”

Roberts claimed to have met Andrew for a second time at Epstein’s home in New York –where Johanna Sjoberg says she was also present – and for a third and final time on Little St James. (Roberts was never under the British legal age of consent when she allegedly met the prince. She was 17 during the first two encounters and 18 at the third.)

A few days after the story appeared, Maxwell issued a press statement claiming that Roberts’s allegations against her were “abhorrent and entirely untrue”, and serving notice that she intended to take legal action against certain British newspapers. No actions materialised. But another was looming.

On January 1, 2015, Roberts filed an application to join two other women who were alleged victims of Epstein in a joint action arguing that federal prosecutors had violated a victims’ rights statute by failing to consult them over Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, in which she made further allegations against Maxwell.

Maxwell issued a second press release, stating that Roberts’s allegations were “obvious lies” and had been “shown to be untrue”.

“My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy. Their lives revolved around sex.” Virginia Roberts

In September 2015, Roberts responded by filing suit against Maxwell for defamation. Documents relating to this case would be unsealed in August 2019, the day before Epstein’s death. In her deposition, Roberts alleged that Maxwell was “Epstein’s primary manager” of he recruitment and training of girls whom Epstein paid for sexual services, and had participated in sexual abuse. As Epstein’s “sex slave”, she had been forced to have sex with “many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders”.

“My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy,” she claimed. “Their whole entire lives revolved around sex.”

Giving evidence, Maxwell acknowledged that “a very small part” of her role in Epstein’s life had been to find “adult professional massage therapists” for him. She admitted to knowing Roberts, but said she did not know how often Roberts had visited Epstein. “What I can say is that I barely would remember her, if not for all of this rubbish.” Asked if Epstein had sexually abused minors, she replied: “I can only testify to what I know. I know that Virginia is a liar and I know what she testified is a lie. I can only categorically deny everything she has said.”

Like Roberts’s earlier suit against Epstein, the defamation suit was settled out of court, in 2017. But Roberts’s action was just one of a number in which Maxwell would come to be implicated, as more of Epstein’s alleged victims emerged with lawyers in tow.

After Epstein’s release from prison, it seems that he and Maxwell saw each other less – if at all. There are no photographs of them together, no accounts of their meetings. Maxwell had other boyfriends; “nice, normal, prosperous, good-looking guys”, as one friend puts it.

In her years as Epstein’s “best friend and fixer”, Maxwell had not been noted for her philanthropic activities, nor for her interest in the environment, but in 2012 she announced the launch of The TerraMar Project, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ocean conservation. Maxwell was listed as president, and her Upper East Side home as the office address. That was later changed to an address in Massachusetts, where Maxwell had moved. In 2015, her Upper East Side town house was put on the market for $US18.995 million.

In a 2015 interview with Spear’s, a magazine for “high-net-worth individuals”, Maxwell talked of her lifelong love of the oceans, her licences to pilot submarines and other submersibles, and her experience of marine expeditions. She also discussed her father’s death: “It was a very hard time and also a sad time, but wallowing in self-pity was not an option for me. I miss my dad. I was very close to him.” In a comment that seemed curiously prophetic of her relationship with Epstein, she remarked, “Nobody wants their family to be on the front pages ... every day in such horrible circumstances.”

Christopher Mason remembers her talking with “feverish passion” about The TerraMar Project. Not only was it benefiting the ocean, it was also benefiting her reputation. “It was a more respectable calling card than being the mysterious Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer and best friend. Being a committed global citizen has a better ring to it.”

In 2014, The TerraMar Project was included by the National Geographic Society in a round-up of organisations successfully “building critical mass for good communications on ocean issues”. Maxwell addressed a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, and gave a TEDx talk – at which she appeared intensely ill-at-ease.

But quite what the organisation achieved is something of a mystery. According to tax filings from 2013 to 2017, the organisation received $US196,000 in public support and made no grants. Maxwell herself loaned it hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover “general expenses”. At the end of 2017, it was showing net liabilities of $US550,000.

On July 6, 2019, following an investigation into whether he had violated his status as a registered sex offender by not disclosing certain overseas travel, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in New York after flying back from Paris on his private jet, on charges of trafficking minors. Less than a week later, The TerraMar Project closed down for good.

On August 10 last year, Epstein’s dead body was found in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York City. Suddenly, the woman who for more than three decades had been a ubiquitous fixture on the New York and London social scenes was nowhere to be found. Massachusetts; a burger joint in Los Angeles, where she was seen in a bizarre, apparently staged photograph; Brazil – the search for Maxwell moved from one corner of the world to the next.

In June she had been in London, setting off on a car rally to Monaco – and meeting Prince Andrew. In his BBC TV interview with Emily Maitlis, Andrew would deny that they had spoken about Epstein. “No, actually, funnily enough, no, not at all, there wasn’t anything to discuss about him because he wasn’t in the news, you know, it was just ... we had moved on.”

But for Maxwell, “moving on” will not be so easy. With Epstein’s death it seemed her life had come full circle. It is just over 28 years since Robert Maxwell died in the Atlantic Ocean – 28 years since Ghislaine declared, “I think he was murdered.” Epstein’s death has been ruled a suicide, but in the air of conspiracy around his association with the rich and powerful, speculation persists that he, too, was murdered.

The two most important men in her life, evading justice, their deaths shrouded in mystery, both leaving behind a multitude of questions. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, only one person can answer them. And, at the time of going to press, Ghislaine Maxwell was still nowhere to be found.

Edited version of a story first published in The Telegraph Magazine, London.

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