Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell ( gee-LEN; born 25 December 1961) is a British former socialite and accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein. In 2022, she was convicted of child sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Born in France and raised in Oxford, England, she attended Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1980s and became a prominent member of London's social scene. She is a naturalised American citizen and retains both French and British citizenship. She worked for her father, the media proprietor Robert Maxwell, until his death in 1991; she then moved to New York City, where she continued living as a socialite and developed a close relationship with Epstein. Alongside Epstein, Maxwell built up a vast social network consisting of prominent elites. Documents released by the US Department of Justice reveal that she had maintained friendships with Naomi Campbell, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Bill Clinton and Kerry Kennedy.

In July 2020, Maxwell was arrested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged by the US federal government with the crimes of enticement of minors and sex trafficking of underage girls, related to her association with Epstein as his recruiter. She was denied bail. She was convicted on five out of six counts, including one of sex trafficking of a minor, in December 2021.

Early life

Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell was born on 25 December 1961 in Maisons-Laffitte, Île-de-France, France, the ninth and youngest child of Elisabeth (née Meynard), a French-born scholar, and Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), a Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor. Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was of Huguenot (French Protestant) descent. Maxwell was born two days before a car accident that left her fifteen-year-old brother Michael in a prolonged coma until he died in 1967. Her mother later reflected that the accident had an effect on the entire family, and surmised that Ghislaine had shown signs of anorexia while only a toddler.

Throughout childhood, Maxwell lived with her family in Oxford at Headington Hill Hall, a 53-room mansion, where the offices of Pergamon Press, a publishing company run by her father, were also located. Her mother said that all her children were raised as Anglicans. Maxwell first attended Oxford High School for Girls in North Oxford and then, at age nine, was enrolled at Edgarley Hall preparatory school in Somerset, followed by Headington School at age 13. She attended Marlborough College to study for A-Levels, before earning a degree in Modern History with Languages from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1985. While at Balliol she fraternised with Boris Johnson and Anna Pasternak.

Maxwell had a close relationship with her father and was reportedly his favourite. According to Tatler, Maxwell recalled that her father installed computers at Headington in 1973 and her first job was training to use a Wang 2200 and later programming code. The Times reported that he did not permit her to bring her boyfriends home, or to be seen with them publicly, after she started attending the University of Oxford.

Career

Maxwell was a prominent figure in the London social scene of the 1980s. She founded a women's club named after the original Kit-Cat Club and was a director of Oxford United Football Club during her father's ownership. She also worked at The European, a publication her father had established. According to Tom Bower, writing for The Sunday Times, in 1986, Robert invited her to the naming in her honour of his new yacht the Lady Ghislaine, at a shipyard in the Netherlands. She spent a large amount of time in the late 1980s aboard the yacht, which was equipped with a jacuzzi, sauna, gym, and disco. The Scotsman said Robert had also "tailor-made a New York company for her". The company, which was engaged in corporate gifts, was not profitable.

The Sunday Times reported that Maxwell flew to New York City on 5 November 1990 to deliver an envelope on her father's behalf that, unbeknownst to her, was part of "a plot initiated by her father to steal $200m" from Berlitz shareholders. After Robert purchased the New York Daily News in January 1991, he sent Ghislaine to New York City to act as his emissary. This furnished her entry to the Manhattan social scene. In May 1991 Maxwell and her father took the Concorde on business to New York, from where he soon departed for Moscow and left her to represent his interests at an event honouring Simon Wiesenthal.

In November 1991 Robert's body was found floating in the sea near the Canary Islands and Lady Ghislaine. Soon afterwards, Ghislaine flew to Tenerife, where the yacht was berthed, to attend to his business paperwork. She attended her father's funeral in Jerusalem alongside Israeli intelligence figures, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who delivered the eulogy. Although a verdict of death by accidental drowning was recorded, Maxwell has since said she believes her father was murdered, commenting in 1997: "He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered."

After his death, Robert was found to have fraudulently appropriated the pension assets of Mirror Group Newspapers, a company that he ran and in which he held a large share of ownership, to support its share price. Pension funds over £400m were said to be missing, and 32,000 people were affected. Two of Maxwell's brothers, Ian and Kevin, who were the most involved with their father in daily business dealings, were arrested on 19 June 1992 and charged with fraud related to the Mirror Group pension scandal. The brothers were acquitted three and a half years later in January 1996.

Maxwell moved to the United States in 1991, shortly after her father's death. It is reported that, owing to social discomfort she experienced in the wake of the pension fraud perpetrated by her father, she purchased a one-way Concorde ticket to New York in November 1992. Maxwell was provided with an annual income of £80,000 (equivalent to £216,935 in 2023) from a trust fund established in Liechtenstein by her father. By 1992 she had moved to an apartment of an Iranian friend overlooking Central Park. At the time, Maxwell worked at a real estate office on Madison Avenue and was reported to be socialising with celebrities. She quickly rose to wider prominence as a New York City socialite. In 1996 Maxwell made headlines when she was arrested in West London for drink-driving; the media reported her occupation as "internet operator".

Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

Accounts differ on when Maxwell first met the American financier Jeffrey Epstein. According to Epstein's former business partner Steven Hoffenberg, Robert Maxwell introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s. The Times reported that Maxwell met Epstein in the early 1990s at a New York party following "a difficult break-up with Count Gianfranco Cicogna" (1962–2012) of the CIGA Hotels clan. Maxwell and Epstein were associated with each other by February 1993. In 1995, Maxwell and Epstein were guests of honour on a cruise organised by Lindsay Fox who had invited Rodney Adler and wife Lindi as well as James Packer and then-girlfriend Deni Hines.

Maxwell had a romantic relationship with Epstein for several years in the early 1990s and remained closely associated with him for more than 25 years until his death in 2019. The nature of their relationship remains unclear, although at trial, prosecutors said that from 1994 to 1997 they were engaged in an intimate relationship.

A January 2001 article by Nigel Rosser of the Evening Standard reported that friends of Epstein said Maxwell "remains desperate to marry Epstein", further elaborating: "You could say she was pretty much entirely dependent on him. She loves him. He sometimes treats her well, sometimes off-handedly. You could say she sees something of a father in him."

In a 2009 deposition, several of Epstein's household employees testified that Epstein referred to her as his "main girlfriend" who also hired, fired, and supervised his staff, starting around 1992. She has also been referred to as the "Lady of the House" by Epstein's staff and as his "aggressive assistant". In 1995 Epstein renamed one of his companies the Ghislaine Corporation; based in Palm Beach, Florida, US, the company was dissolved in 1998.

In a 2003 Vanity Fair profile on Epstein, the author Vicky Ward said Epstein referred to Maxwell as "my best friend". Ward also observed that Maxwell seemed "to organize much of his life". As a qualified helicopter pilot, Maxwell also transported Epstein to Little Saint James, his private Caribbean island in the US Virgin Islands. In her October 2025 memoir Nobody's Girl, Virginia Giuffre alleged Maxwell and Epstein sought to use her to be a surrogate mother for a baby they were planning to have together.

Politico reported that Maxwell and Epstein had friendships with several prominent individuals in elite circles of politics, academia, business, and law, including the US presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, known at the time as His Royal Highness Prince Andrew. However, it has been acknowledged that Clinton, who Maxwell has stated was actually her friend and not Epstein's, was in fact connected to Epstein through her.