INSIDE HER DARK WEB
London, 1990. I have just arrived at a dinner in a newly opened Soho restaurant with people I barely know. I see a long table crammed with the deafening confidence of entitled rich young things. I sit down and immediately notice the atmosphere radiating around an attractive dark-haired girl. “Hi, I’m Ghislaine,” she says, with an electric smile that wants you to like her. But I already know who she is: the youngest and most favoured child of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, an Oxford graduate and the toast of social London.
As a naive 25-year-old who had just started working in the city, I watched more than I spoke that night. Which was fine because Ghislaine barely drew breath. She was loud and great fun; dressed in black shorts, sheer tights and a top hat, with a touch of gold, possibly a scarf. She looked naughty and sexy, but tomboyish too, markedly at odds with the Diana-esque taffeta femininity around us. She was intriguing, an anomaly. After that I became a keen Ghislaine-spotter.
As I write, Ghislaine has been at the centre of one of the most high-profile trials in recent times: alleged to have been the accomplice of the late multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein in his systematic grooming and sexual abuse of vulnerable and often underage girls.
She was arrested on July 2, 2020, while in hiding at a remote property in New Hampshire in the United States and is on trial for eight charges, including trafficking, grooming, enticement and transportation of minors to engage in criminal sex acts between 1994 and 2004. Since her arrest, she has been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn in reportedly grim conditions. At least four bail requests have been made, all of them denied.
