Is she hiding in a submarine? In a bunker? The hunt for Ghislaine Maxwell

This time last year, Ghislaine Maxwell was off the grid. The Oxford-educated socialite was lying low as the focus of a frenzied media hunt pivoted to her after the suicide of her erstwhile lover Jeffrey Epstein.

“For Ghislaine-watchers, the autumn of 2019 through to the summer of 2020 was a mystery,” says Mark Seal, the Vanity Fair special correspondent who followed her story. “She was said to be hiding in a submarine, lying low in Israel, in the FBI witness protection programme, in a luxurious villa in the south of France, sunning herself on the coast of Spain, or in some high-security doomsday bunker owned by rich and powerful friends – all seemingly possible, but all, thus far at least, wrong,” he adds.

In the summer of 2019, “she was photographed at