“To understand Ghislaine, you have to start with the Father.”

                  Robert Maxwell biographer, Tom Bower 

Despite becoming infamous as a “British socialite,” Ghislaine Maxwell was born on Christmas Day 1961, in Maisons-Lafitte, France, as were her other eight siblings, because her mother, Elisabeth, was French, and wanted her children to have that nationality (and valuable passport) as well as their UK citizenship. Since Elisabeth’s sister, Yvonne, was a gynecologist who practised in Maisons-Lafitte, there was yet another reason to for Elisabeth Maxwell to give birth to the last of her nine children in that affluent western suburb of Paris.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert, was not a natural born Englishman either, and in order to understand Ghislaine, it is essential to understand her father; an impoverished immigrant who became a British newspaper magnate and who always felt like an outsider. Or as Maxwell’s former chief of staff, Peter Jay, who had once been the UK ambassador to the United States, described him: “I always used to think of him as like a great prehistoric animal. Uncivilized, and gross, and dangerous, and clumsy, and very un-housetrained.”

Ghislaine was “the animal’s” favorite offspring, and he would describe her to his Daily Mirror editor at the time, Roy Greenslade, as the child “most like me”.

Ghislaine reveled in being a “Daddy’s girl,” a coveted position that would inform her entire life and the choices she would eventually make in the men who would take Daddy’s place. But growing up, her father was a shapeshifter, and his story, like Ghislaine’s, is filled with drama, mystery and corruption. While his ended in disgrace and a mysterious death, she is gambling on a happy ending. But her current position, sitting in a Brooklyn jail cell, awaiting sentencing after her conviction on sex charges against minors, awaiting a decision on a retrial and pondering whether to sing the secrets of elites to the Feds, her future is far from bright. Her predicament invites the question as to whether “Daddy’s girl” will end up delivering fresh shame to the Maxwell family name.

Robert Maxwell did not start life as an Englishman but instead as a boy whose epic beginnings had landed him on the shores of England in May 1940, having been evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk with his fellow Czech soldiers in retreat from the advancing Nazis.

In fact, Maxwell had been in retreat from the Nazis for two years, after fleeing his desperately poor town (and family) in 1938, at the age of fifteen, at his mother’s urging. If anyone was going to make something of themselves, it was her eldest son, who was not yet known to the world as Robert. He was born June 10, 1923, to an Orthodox Jewish family in the village of Slatinske Doly in what would become the easternmost province of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia (today, Solotvyno, Ukraine), and his name, at birth, was Abraham Leib Hoch.

The family name, Hoch, had been given to them by a German-speaking census taker in the early 20th century who understood neither Yiddish nor Hebrew (the languages of the village) and couldn’t understand the family’s real surname. So, he called them “Hoch,” which is German for “tall”.

In 1919, the family name changed again, when the village was absorbed into Czechoslovakia, and the Hochs ceased to exist. They were now known as the Ludviks, and in this new nation, stoked by nationalist fervor and surrounded by anti-Semites, Hannah and Mechel Ludvik added Jan to their son’s name. He was now Jan Abraham Ludvik.

Maxwell’s father Mechel was a giant of a man, and good-natured. His mother Hannah was of a higher class, literate, intelligent, and a passionate believer in social justice due to her impoverished status based on her religion. She was also a Zionist, and so, too, was her son Jan Abraham.

Their town was in the county of Marmures, in Carpatho-Ruthenia, in the Austro- Hungarian empire, and noted for its salt mines—and for its hardscrabble life. A Jewish proverb has it thus: “Ten measures of poverty were given to the world; nine of them were taken by Marmures.”

The family—Maxwell, his parents, and siblings Brana, Chaim, Shenie, Silvia, Zissel and Cipra, two of whom die in infancy—lived in extreme poverty in a threadbare cottage with a dirt floor that flooded in spring and baked in summer. The children shared shoes in the winter, stuffed with newspapers to make them fit.

“I think the experience of extreme poverty, really, really grinding, grinding, total poverty, scarred him for life,” said Peter Jay. “He had to have money. And he had to have it in ways which removed from his mind – although I don’t think he ever successfully did remove it – anxieties about being short of money.”

The newspapers stuffed into Maxwell and his siblings’ shoes are what Maxwell’s politically astute mother read, and which shaped her views, and his. She taught Maxwell to read and taught him about his Jewish faith. Maxwell later said-- whether true or not, as he was a master of juggling reality-- that she hoped he would become a great rabbi.

Robert Maxwell’s mother’s ambition for him to be a rabbi was really about her desire for him to leave the town because at the same time she implored him not to “look so Jewish,” so he dropped the Abraham and became Jan Ludvik. A life of varying identities began. Nevertheless, he said much later in life, when he had found his Jewish voice again, to acknowledge the faith of his birth: “I and my family were observant Jews. I believe in God, the God of Israel. I believe in the ethical lessons of Judaism. I love and admire my people’s devotion to the study of the Torah. I definitely see myself as a Jew. I was born a Jew and I shall die a Jew, so help me God.” It was a remarkable admission, for most of his British life, Maxwell had denied his Jewish-ness. “That was the only way to survive in anti-Semitic post- war Britain,” said his biographer, Tom Bower.

In 1938, the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia was not at all friendly to Jews, now being in Nazi hands, and the following year the entire country was occupied by a regime determined to make Europe “Judenfrei”. So, Robert Maxwell, 15- years-old but tall and robust and easily passing for 20, was encouraged by his mother with the parting words “if you are ambitious, there is nothing that is impossible,” and so he bid farewell to his impoverished village and traveled to Budapest, where he joined the French underground who were smuggling Czech volunteers to Western Europe. 

In December 1939, he was arrested as a spy, but escaped from the one-armed guard responsible for him (or in another Maxwell version, beat his Fascist guard to death) and fled to Istanbul. He wound up in Syria, joined the French Foreign Legion, and in March 1940, his unit was shipped back to France just in time to see the country fall to the Germans. To stay in France as a Jewish Czech soldier meant certain death.

Maxwell’s Czech unit was riddled with anti-Semitism. Of the 4000 Czechs who were to be evacuated to Britain, many Jewish soldiers were left behind to their awful fate. By the time Maxwell arrived in Liverpool, he and his fellow Czech soldiers had denounced their officers for cowardice and anti-Semitism. The British commander asked all Czech soldiers who felt that way to step forward. Maxwell, and 538 of his fellow soldiers did so, and were promptly arrested, discharged from the Czech army and put in a British prison camp.

To get out of prison camp, Maxwell volunteered for ditch-digging duty with the Pioneer Corps—the “white coolies” of the British Army. He used a pick and a shovel in England and Wales, and had his first love affair, with a nurse. He was 19, and she was upper class, and their relationship lasted two years. Her family accepted him as a guest to their home, and he quickly learned the manners and ways of the upper-class Englishman. The nurse later recalled Maxwell as “enchanting, fascinating, infuriating. His character was mercurial, most exuberant but sometimes deeply melancholic. At times he appeared almost illiterate, but at others he displayed such a breadth and depth of knowledge that he might have lived a hundred years. No one who knew him could ever forget him.”

The handsome, strapping Maxwell, a serial ladies’ man, who was rarely loyal for long, also had a romantic affair with a local Army widow, who had military connections which were useful, as Maxwell wanted to get back in the fight against the Nazis. He joined the Sixth Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment and returned to France in the second wave of D-Day landings. At this point, he changed his identity once again, appropriating a much more romantic moniker -- Leslie Du Maurier -- his surname snatched from that of a popular cigarette brand. He became a sergeant in charge of a sniper unit and was recommended for a battlefield commission but was turned down as unsuitable officer material—possibly because he was a foreigner, ironically, the kind the British Army was fighting to save.

According to Maxwell biographer Tom Bower, Maxwell responded to this insult with uncommon bravery by knocking out a tank, capturing 100 German prisoners, and leading an attack against the 12th SS Panzer Division. He won his officer promotion shortly after his 21 first birthday, and officially became a very British-sounding lieutenant named Ian Robert Maxwell. It was another name he co-opted from commerce, after watching a Maxwell House coffee commercial, and chose it to blend seamlessly into British society. “Maxwell’s whole objective was to be an insider – and make money,” said Bower.

But the identity change provided the Brits with an “aha moment” as they saw other uses for this handsome, multi-lingual Czech. Their initial plan was to parachute him behind enemy lines, a mission with a depressingly low survival rate, but they changed their minds and sent Maxwell to Paris, posing as a Czech black marketeer, selling forged documents to Nazis who had gone into hiding. Maxwell was exceptional at deception, and his success got him on the radar of Britain’s MI6- the country’s foreign espionage service. Espionage would become part of Maxwell’s repertoire for the rest of his life – something he may have passed on to Ghislaine.

After the war, Maxwell was posted to Berlin, which proved to be his launching point as both a businessman and a spy. “What was also very interesting in his early life in post- war Berlin 1945,” said Bower, “was that he was both working for the British as a British officer, but also made links with the Russian intelligence service on the other side of the divided city of Berlin and became a Russian spy too.”

Maxwell did not just limit himself to spying but saw in the ruins of Germany the future of his success as a shady publisher. “He was a big black marketer in Berlin after the Second World War,” Bower adds. “But he also managed to steal one of the biggest scientific publishing companies’ assets and bring them back to Britain, the Springer Publishing House. Which was the foundation of his business. But what he did which was very clever of his, was that he did it with the help of British Intelligence. British intelligence officers wanted the German scientific secrets. And Maxwell helped them, and at the same time took the publishing arm of those assets for his own personal profit.”

In 1944, Maxwell had arrived in newly liberated Paris, where he met the other ingredient he needed for his successful future: a wife. Her name was Elisabeth Meynard, and she was a Sorbonne-educated, vivacious and pretty 23-year-old daughter of a silk merchant. She had hoped to become a lawyer, but Maxwell got in the way of her plans. She was wealthy and Protestant; he was poor and Jewish. The difference did not matter. She later told her children that it was love at first sight, saying “her legs felt all wobbly and she was going to feint.”

Maxwell and Elisabeth married in 1945 and produced nine children over the next sixteen years: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine.

Elisabeth would later recall how they were recreating Maxwell’s childhood family, most of whom perished in the Holocaust, though two sisters survived, and Maxwell brought them to England after the war.

Despite the ineffable sorrows of the Holocaust, Maxwell’s daughter Karine died of leukemia at age 3 in 1957. And two days after Ghislaine was born, the Maxwell’s eldest son Michael was severely injured in a car crash, at the age of fifteen, when his driver fell asleep at the wheel. Michael never regained consciousness and died seven years later.

Ghislaine’s first three years were lived under a cloud of parental grief and anxiety, to the point that as a toddler she had to remind her parents of her presence. “By then Betty had had so many children, so many unbelievable tempestuous and dreadful crisis, that there came a point when she, Betty, was so distant from her youngest daughter that Ghislaine actually said to her, “Mother, you’ve forgotten me, I do exist,” said Bower.

Those words shocked her parents into realizing how neglected she had been, and galvanized Robert Maxwell into lavishing his youngest child with attention, which was not always of the affectionate kind.

The Maxwells lived in a 53-room palace known as Headington Hill Hall, just outside of Oxford, England. Maxwell called it the best “council house” in Britain, as he rented this former mansion built in 1824 for the Morrell brewing family on a 21-year lease in 1959 for the favorable sum of £2400 a year (about £46,000 today) from Oxford City Council. In 1978, he extended the lease for another 99 years, and turned the place into a fortress. Guards were posted at the main entrance, the fence was reinforced with barbed wire, and video cameras were fixed to trees. 

Staff were kept away from the main house and its swimming pool and tennis court, and speakers were fitted to every office so that Maxwell could make grand and often unnecessary announcements to the staff. “It was frequently comedy, and with a high element of chaos about it,” said Peter Jay. “Nothing was certain. I think it was a bit like working for Donald Trump, must be. You had no idea what the day’s agenda was or what was going to happen. Or what should happen. And until the man himself appeared and began to throw off, as he did spontaneously, his current thoughts. He had a way of telephoning me at about 4 o’clock in the morning to ask what time it was. That definition of Chief of Staff is not what most people imagine.”

It was in this chaotic surveillance state—one prefiguring that of Jeffrey Epstein -- that Ghislaine Maxwell grew up, and it was here that every Sunday, Robert Maxwell held a kind of tyrannical court over his family at Sunday lunch.

At these lunches he would quiz his children about world affairs, and if they made an error, he would erupt in a rage and would even beat the child at the table—in front of everyone, including guests. “Bob would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp,” Betty Maxwell wrote about her husband after his death.

“We know he was a martinet with his children,” said Roy Greenslade, his editor at the Daily Mirror, who saw how Maxwell would interrogate his children in front of his family and anyone who happened to be attending their infamous Sunday lunches. Greenslade recalled that Maxwell would “Ask them impossible questions about the state of the economy or politics. And was not above using corporal punishment and chastising them. And his wife did not step in to intervene.” 

If a school report was not perfect, Maxwell beat the children with a cane. “Remember the three Cs — Concentration, Consideration and Conciseness,” was his motto. One that he certainly did not practice.

Stuart Urban was a friend of the Maxwell family who wrote a drama series for the BBC about the Maxwells which the network inexplicably killed. Perhaps they objected to Urban referring to Robert Maxwell’s “preference for corporeal punishment to discipline the children. If Ghislaine got into trouble at Marlborough College where she later boarded, that there was a punishment room at home, and it would either be the cane or the riding crop.”

Urban surmised that “Ghislaine’s relationship with her father was ‘I worship dad and he beats me’. One can’t help but wonder that the whole story of Ghislaine’s relationship with Epstein was informed by this sadistic/affectionate / wanting to please the older man/ upbringing.”

From an early age, Ghislaine Maxwell had to devise how to avoid the wrath of this powerful, wealthy man who was also her father. She had to learn how to please him, and to avoid his anger, which she apparently did, as she became his favorite child.

“The root of where Ghislaine has ended up today is all to do with her relationship with her father,” said journalist Anna Pasternak, who grew up with the Maxwell children in Oxford, and was later a contemporary of Ghislaine’s at Oxford University. “That he was this terrifying figure with this massive temper, and all the children would’ve learnt early that you had to please daddy. And no matter what cost, he had to be placated, he had to be pleased, you had to behave in a certain way.”

While their mother was a French Protestant, and their father was Jewish – when it suited- all the Maxwell children were brought up in the Church of England. Despite Maxwell’s statement in later life that he strongly identified with his Jewish faith, he dropped that identity faster than a name change -- once telling a newspaper, the London- based Jewish Chronicle, that he no longer wished to be considered Jewish after he had been elected a Labour MP in 1964. 

So, despite their membership in the Church of England club, a sense that they were strangers in a strange land and must always be a step ahead of the locals was part of the household dynamic. Maxwell’s biographer Tom Bower, who has known Ghislaine since she was 11 years old, said that all her life she has “worshipped rich, domineering men”, and criminal and cruel men, for her father—and Jeffrey Epstein –are both. She had to learn to navigate that world to her own advantage.

Ghislaine spent the beginning of her teenage years at Oxford High School for Girls in North Oxford (a fellow student was London’s now troubled Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick), and was sporty—enjoying field hockey, tennis, and football.

She then went to the upscale boarding school Marlborough, where she did her A- Levels (the equivalent of high school senior). The British theater director, Nick Hutchison, dated her briefly while they were at Marlborough, and remembered her as “fun and sweet, and kind of shy.”

After leaving Marlborough, Maxwell did what many British students do and took a “gap year,” joining her father’s publishing company, Pergamon Press, which he ran out of offices next to their home at Headington Hall. She recalled “doing anything from typing to managing congresses” and after nine months at Pergamon, Robert Maxwell sent her alone to Spain – to fend for herself and sell books.

“He said go and do a useful job and come back fluent. I wouldn’t say I did a brilliant job, but I did sell some books and came back fluent,” she later said.

Ghislaine then followed her brothers Ian and Kevin to Oxford University, where she studied French and Modern History at Balliol College, along with future British prime minister Boris Johnson. Rumour had it that Ghislaine, like her brothers, had been admitted to Oxford because Robert Maxwell had written the university a large check.“

"Robert Maxwell has a relationship, a financial relationship with Balliol College, Oxford,” said Bower. “And all his children somehow miraculously find a way to become students there. But this is the most interesting thing of all, at Balliol, you’d think teaches their students to be honest. To be moral people. To know the difference between right and wrong. But strangely it failed to do that with many of the Maxwells.”

Even so, people who were at Oxford with her remember her as both a hard worker, and a hard partyer.“ On the way to my morning tutorials at Oxford I would bump into Ghislaine when she was in her final year,” recalled the journalist, Anne McElvoy. “She once confided that she was "going straight from a party which had lasted till dawn, to the library."

The UK—and Oxford especially—were socially stratified in the 1980s, with the line between Upstairs and Downstairs very much in evidence. Ghislaine Maxwell flaunted her Upstairs world, throwing parties at Headington Hill Hall, and hanging out with the blue- blooded, monied crowd that commanded an exotic patch of Oxford turf. Even then, contemporaries saw her as calculating player.“

So, at that time in the eighties, when I was at Oxford with Ghislaine, we were at different colleges, but I was very much in her social circle,” said Pasternak. “I knew her to say hello to at parties, things like that. It was an interesting period, because in that social set, which was very much the Bullingdon Club photograph that we all know – we were there with Boris Johnson, David Cameron – you were kind of accepted if you were from an aristocratic family. So, it was interesting that you had kind of the Sloane Ranger, the old toffs, the sort of English aristocrats, and then somebody like Ghislaine, who was perfectly at ease in that Oxford set that we were all in, and she had an entrée to it because of her father’s notoriety and her wealth." 

Pasternak also remembers Maxwell as being the same kind of lone wolf, social predator as her father. “And the fascinating thing is when you think about Ghislaine’s life, where are the really strong girlfriends? I don’t remember her at Oxford as in a tight coterie with girlfriends. Pasternak remembers her as a naked social climber, always casting an eye beyond who she was talking to in order “to see someone more influential, somebody possibly more helpful to her, more interesting. You never got that sense of, “Oh, hi. It’s great to see you. Lovely.” You for you. With Ghislaine, from very early on, it’s who can be most useful to me.”

At Balliol, she lived a life of wealth and privilege, with her father sending Filipino servants to the college house she shared to clean, arrange the table and cook, in the event of a party. She also towed the line about boyfriends—her father would not let her bring any to their mansion and was protective of her to a fault because he wanted her to be “the ultimate prize” when she married.

So Ghislaine kept her promiscuity and her potential love interests far from Headington Hall. Nick Stafford-Dietsch was one of them. He was a 24-year-old graduate student who was ambushed at a party by then 20-year-old Ghislaine. “I was still at the stage a gibbering idiot whenever trying to pluck up courage to invite a woman on a date. So, when she just said, ‘Will you take me out to dinner?’ I was intrigued. And so, I said, yes, why not?”

Oxford, then as now, is a city whose main currency is rumor, and Stafford-Dietsch wanted to keep rumor at bay by taking Ghislaine out to dinner far outside of Oxford, so he chose a restaurant seven miles beyond the city and thought that distance would give them enough privacy to see where things went. But it quickly became clear that Ghislaine had only one destination in mind.

“The only subject she really had to talk about was her father,” said Stafford-Dietsch. And Maxwell kept talking about her father all the way through dinner, emphasizing how much she loved the media attention that he got by being the media baron that he was. The restaurant was small and as the evening progressed, Stafford-Dietsch became aware that the other diners had stopped talking and were listening to Ghislaine’s monologue. “There was nothing I could do about it.”

The impression Maxwell left on Stafford-Dietsch was one of deep insecurity, who was using her father’s accomplishments to try to impress him, because she yet had none of her own.

That would change, surprisingly, when at age 22, her father rewarded Ghislaine with a most unusual position, when she became a director of Oxford United Football Club in 1984. She had become a familiar figure at matches sitting alongside her father, who was the club chairman, in the directors’ box, sporting a yellow and blue United scarf and cheering on the team.

She had played football herself as a midfielder for the girls’ team, The Grannies, while in the sixth form at Marlborough College. In an interview with The Oxford Times, Maxwell revealed that she had started a United supporters’ club at Balliol College. She had already attracted 160 members and had arranged a discount for them to attend United matches.

The national press immediately dubbed her “the most attractive director in the league”, a tag she did not dispute. “At least they’re being nice about me,” she said, a statement resounding with irony given what the media has said about her since.Two years later, Robert Maxwell surprised her again, when he commanded her to fly to a Dutch shipyard to pop a bottle of champagne and name his new yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. 

This christening was viewed by many as a snub to her mother, for whom Ghislaine had seemingly become a surrogate, traveling the world with her father, and being seen in public with him far more frequently than her mother was. “She was the most important figure in his life, said Anna Pasternak “And, of course, that meant Betty was less important, which is never good for a child’s development, to be the Oedipal winner, to be the one that has more power than the co- parent. It leads to some very difficult psychological issues later. Because children need boundaries, and you got the sense that she didn’t really receive those boundaries. In a way, she was an adult too soon. She was almost like Robert’s partner, and, who knows, partner in crime, very early on. So, this gave her a sense of her power, but it’s a faux power.”

Despite his rages and his violence, Elisabeth Maxwell remained steadfast in her love for Robert Maxwell, who began cheating on her in 1974 when Ghislaine was 13 years old and continued doing so for the rest of his life, though prostitutes replaced consensual participants. “Betty” looked after the family while Robert Maxwell traveled the world, expanding his business as he sought to become the biggest media baron in the world, bigger than his archrival, Rupert Murdoch. According to Ghislaine’s older sister Isabel, their mother loved Maxwell totally, at first being content to look into his face with adoration. Only later did she see how Maxwell’s face could change in an instant, and become “a strange, steely mask, sending a chill right through you.”

UK journalist and Ghislaine’s former friend, Petronella Wyatt recalled, “My basic view of Ghislaine is that she grew up with a man who instilled in her a low opinion of women – he was unfaithful to his wife and had countless mistresses. Robert Maxwell despised women. And Ghislaine had a fixation with her father.”

Roy Greenslade, Maxwell’s former editor, took an even darker view of Robert Maxwell. “He was a mercurial, monstrous sociopath. He was civil when he needed you but mistreated you once he felt he owned you. He was an utter control freak and treated everyone abysmally,” Greenslade recalled.

He was meeting with Robert Maxwell when he first met Ghislaine, and it became clear to him that she was treated differently by her father for a remarkably simple reason. “I was in his tenth-floor apartment when she tripped in. And I made as if to leave and Maxwell sat me down. And he was initially, I thought, he was going to tear a strip off her. He said, ‘Why do I have to hear that you’ve been misbehaving? That you nearly drowned?’ And she said, "Oh, father, that was nothing. I just hit my head on a pole in the--. ‘Why do I have to hear this from Signore Agnelli?’ That’s the kind of showing off thing as well– that he was involved with the Agnellis. And then he said, ‘You’re always doing foolish things." And she said, ‘Well, I’ve told you about that jumping out of the airplane on skis over the sea.’”

Maxwell then turned to his editor and asked Greenslade what he thought about all of it, and Greenslade dodged the question as he watched the father-daughter drama play out to its punchline. “The interesting thing was he was still just playing with her, being gentle with her. She kissed him on the cheek, called him ‘Daddy’. And when she left, I looked at him and said, ‘Children, eh?’ And he said, "She’s really like me, you know." And there was a sense of pride there. He thought Ghislaine exhibited some of the hutzpah with which he regularly embraced.

Anna Pasternak remembered how after Oxford, “Goodtime Ghislaine” was a London nightclub fixture and well-regarded member in elite aristocratic circles. She and her girlfriends were known as party girls who were keen to meet and marry wealthy men, and Ghislaine was a founding member of the Kit-Kat Club, named after an early 18th century political club. Maxwell’s version created a female-friendly gathering place, designed to bring together women from the arts, politics and society.

She described Ghislaine in her early twenties as “a sleek haired beauty, magnetic, mesmerizing and intimidating, with an intense sexuality and allure and a pathological desire to please men – almost ‘geisha like’.”

Ghislaine was also friend of Prince Andrew, who said in an interview that he had known her since she was in college, and she was a friend of the American prince John F. Kennedy Jr., as well as several European aristocrats. Ghislaine was also travelling extensively abroad with her father who was introducing her to major international media players, as well as to his extensive contacts in the intelligence community.

In Spring 1991, Ghislaine was put in charge of “special projects” of the New York Daily News, which Robert Maxwell had bought in his ongoing competition with Rupert Murdoch to rule the world’s media. “All his working life, he was haunted by the fact that Rupert Murdoch was so much more successful than he was,” said Greenslade. “He took over the News of the World against a counterbid from Robert Maxwell. He took over The Sun against a counterbid by Robert Maxwell. He grew into an international media company before Maxwell had even got started. So, all the time, he would constantly say to me, ‘What do you think Murdoch thinks of this? What do you think Murdoch’s done? Do you think Murdoch’s OK?’ He was obsessed with him and obsessed with the people who worked around Murdoch, like the editor of The Sun and so on. He wanted to know what he was doing. So, the idea, when it came up for sale, that he could move into New York, where Murdoch owned the other tabloid newspaper, and that he could at last be competing toe- to-toe on what he saw as Murdoch’s home ground, was just a transformative moment for Maxwell.”

New York was perfect for Ghislaine as she could use her father’s connections and money to create a whole new society. “She was, like her father, quite accomplished in languages,” said Greenslade. “And she clearly had no real path, career in life. She wasn’t going to be a journalist. She wasn’t going to be a model. She wasn’t going to do any kind of profession. She had what are, in a cliché term, called people skills. And she used those.

They were useful to her, and in a sense, they became her career. That’s how she lived. She lived by being whatever people wanted her to be. Charming.”

But just a few months later, New York would become a most necessary refuge, after her father fell off, jumped off, or was pushed off the Lady Ghislaine in the Canary Islands, and died.

After his mysterious death, investigators discovered he had stolen nearly £500 million from The Mirror pension fund, though his biographer Tom Bower thinks the figure to be much higher, “more than £2 billion.”

All Ghislaine had left was her grief, a brutally tarnished family name, and despite her late father’s financial woes, a trust fund that generated £100,000 a year. She took the supersonic Concorde to New York (causing more outrage in the UK), and began to invent a new life, just as her father had done half a century before.

And in New York, Ghislaine connected with a man she had met years earlier in London. A man very much like her father, the corrupt and wealthy Jeffrey Epstein. There he was, waiting to rescue her in her grief, and offer her a life of wealth and luxury that she had grown accustomed to—and which her father’s death and massive corporate theft had destroyed. It was perfect timing, this meeting between the mourning Ghislaine, and the welcoming Epstein, who saw in this British socialite all kinds of tantalizing possibilities for him to climb thanks to her connections to the top of society’s mountain.

It would be a wonderfully dark rom com moment, if only it were true. For in this twist to the very sinewy life of Ghislaine Maxwell, she first met Jeffrey Epstein in the mid- 1980s, --when he was working as an international arms dealer and possible spy, under the guidance of none other than Robert Maxwell. And so, the connection between Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein in 1991 was very much a reconnection. Because she was already in love with him when she landed in the USA after her father’s death.

And they had already begun their life of crime.

Next Chapter: Meeting Jeffrey