Ghislaine Maxwell: The life of the Jeffrey Epstein associate found guilty of sex trafficking
Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of British newspaper baron Robert Maxwell and his French wife Elisabeth, was born in affluent Maisons-Laffitte in northern France on Christmas Day 1961, the youngest of nine children.
Just two days later, her teenage brother Michael was involved in a car accident that would keep him in a prolonged coma until his death in 1967, a tragedy that marked the family.
Ghislaine and her siblings were raised in Oxford at the Maxwells’ Headington Hill Hall home, a sprawling mansion that also served as the headquarters for their father’s Pergamon Press publishing outfit, which, at 14, Ghislaine would help by learning to programme a new suite of Wang computers her father had introduced in 1973 as part of a modernising initiative.
The Maxwell siblings were reportedly held to exacting standards by their patriarch, who would often call on them sternly to account for their future ambitions in front of his illustrious guests over dinners at Headington, an atmosphere some rejected but which Ghislaine told Tatler in 2000 she found “inspiring”.
Maxwell attended Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford, where she studied modern history with languages, befriended the actor Hugh Grant and established an Oxford United supporters club, later becoming a director of the football club after her father assumed the chairmanship between 1982 and 1987.
Known as a socialite
