Hunting Ghislaine

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Shawn said of Carolyn, one of three girlfriends he says he pimped out to Maxwell and Epstein: “She was a child”, one who, “only had two jobs ever. She worked at Arby’s [a US fast food combine] and she worked for Jeffrey” [Epstein]. Carolyn’s grandfather raped her when she was four years old. Ten years later, she said she was sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell. As such, it’s a perfectly sensible proposition, which may well be true, but as Maxwell herself has never really spoken about any of it – she elected not to give evidence at her own trial – it’s hard to know how damaged she was before she began damaging. Paula Cuddy, Eve Gutierrez and Jill Green will executive produce for EHF alongside Chris Baughen for Global and Robbie Ashcroft for The Story Lab. John Sweeney will act as series consultant and executive producer. John Sweeny, what a guy. I wish I had a fraction of his ability to not give a crap! His guests are always fascinating and John gets some great answers out of them

John Sweeney said: “No old school Fleet Street reporter like me who knew what a monster Robert Maxwell was cannot feel some pity for Ghislaine Maxwell on the day he fell off his yacht. But then Ghislaine fled to New York to serve a second monster. This is a dark fairy story of our times, about how power and money and connections can, for a time, blind justice. But not forever.” His girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes against a series of underage women, some as young as 14, Ghislaine has remained in the shadows. Global Player is Global’s entertainment hub, which allows listeners to enjoy all of Global’s radio brands, award-winning podcasts and expertly curated playlists all together and all for free on mobile via the Global Player app, online and through your smart speaker. The enormous cowpat has had the last laugh: Sweeney is very proud of Hunting Ghislaine. “The journalism is solid. We set out points of view and investigate them and get to a conclusion.” So, from one of her father’s greatest enemies in life, for the monster’s daughter, some measure of pity.One of the unexpected pleasures of making the podcast was bumping into old friends from Fleet Street like Kenny Lennox, the great Daily Mirror photographer who ID’d the body of the drowned publisher in 1991 and Noreen Taylor, a feature writer on the paper who recalled Maxwell “dragging people into this nightmarish maze and making demands and then cancelling the demand, then making fresh demands. But not because he could get joy out of it. He was just in his own swirling nightmare as well.”

Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein. John speaks to people like him, who are not prepared to be part of the silent majority. They have put their livelihoods and personal reputations on the line to challenge those who run our governments, lead our industries, control our finances and dictate the way we live. They refused to toe the line, and have found themselves in trouble. Big trouble. Activists, agitators, heroes… or villains. You decide. That is, when 14, 15 or 16, they were invited by Maxwell or her assistants to give Epstein a massage, that they didn’t know that it was going to be sexualised, that they were nearly always white, slender, just post-pubescent, free of tattoos, naïve, each and every one more child than woman.Hunting Ghislaine with John Sweeney sets out to tell the strange story of Maxwell and her role in the Epstein scandal. As for Maxwell, Sweeney muses on the impact of adoring and being adored by her father Robert, who owned and plundered the Daily Mirror. Ghislaine was raised in a life of privilege at the 51-room Headington Hill Hall near Oxford, where her father had himself memorialised in stained glass as Samson bringing down the walls of Gaza. We learn from Hunting Ghislaine that he would urinate from his helipad atop the Daily Mirror building on to people below. He behaved worse in his office. “Maxwell also had the habit, common to megalomaniacs, of crapping in front of people. Perhaps not visibly doing it, but going to the loo with people waiting so would have to listen to him evacuating – whatever you want to call it.” You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Maxwell refused to take the stand in her defence, telling the judge that the case against her had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. The truth, Sweeney writes, is she knew she would be ripped to shreds. Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a sadist, a war criminal, a monster. His cruelty deformed Ghislaine Maxwell long before she met Jeffrey Epstein. Her one-time lover was convicted for being a paedophile. So Ghislaine’s life has been spent serving not one monster but two.

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I have had a week of listening to different mysteries, and it has been most enjoyable, thanks very much. Absorbing, well-told, what’s-really-going-on? tales unfurling in your ears is a wonderful way to distract yourself from 2020’s killer combo of fear and boredom. Oh, the comfort of stories with a beginning, a middle and an actual, definite end! Plus, when there’s a scary element, even ironing becomes exciting. Sweeney raises the question of whether she has been left to carry the can for these two men who, the evidence suggests, killed themselves (Maxwell herself never believed her father’s death was suicide). As he writes: “The vast majority of Epstein’s Palm Beach victims never meet Ghislaine, never hear her name.” Every now and then, reporters go to hellish places - I’ve stepped unwittingly in other people’s blood from the Romanian revolution in 1989 to the Bataclan in 2015 – but listening to a host of “nubiles” claiming sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was grim indeed. Epstein is dead but Maxwell is very much alive and denies everything. Sweeney explores the theories about Epstein having laundered Robert Maxwell’s ill-gotten funds, without ever getting to the bottom of it. But it seems clear that Ghislaine knew Epstein, or of him, before she flew to New York in the wake of her father’s death. She became Epstein’s lover, factotum and the manager of his various homes, although they never cohabited; he had his mansion, and she had the mansion he bought for her. One female acquaintance recalls a party at Robert Maxwell’s posh “council house”, Headington Hall (rented from the local authority), where Ghislaine organised a game of “guess whose”, in which the men would be blindfolded and the women removed their bras to be fondled and groped. Ghislaine, she says, saw “sex as simply a currency”. Another puts it more bluntly, saying “she was obsessed”.

Sweeney theorises that, like a cult victim, just as Ghislaine could never bring herself to believe her father was the monster he palpably was, so she “blinded” herself to Epstein’s depravity, even as she became a willing accomplice to it. A former acquaintance sees it differently, observing that Ghislaine would not be the first woman who “possesses a sexual pecadillo of sharing women with her boyfriend. Underlying all of this was her libertarian sexual appetite.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. In LBC’s new podcast Hunting Ghislaine, investigative reporter John Sweeney (Panorama, Newsnight, The Observer) sets out to tell the strange story of Ghislaine Maxwell. That denial is dark and strange because, if so, it means that all these women who say that Maxwell was a handmaiden to a mega-rich paedophile are deep in a conspiracy of lies, all the darker because they didn’t know one another at the time and, pretty much, they all say the same thing. After hiding for almost a year, she now finds herself facing multiple charges for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually exploit and abuse under-age women which could lead to her spending the rest of her life in jail.For the past six months I have been working on a six-part podcast investigation, Hunting Ghislaine, for LBC, Britain’s biggest commercial news-talk station. I have come away from this deep dive into the life of Ghislaine believing, one, that the evidence against her is damning; two, that sat around the high tables of Manhattan, Palm Beach, London and Windsor sit some pretty disgusting people; and, three, that a part of me feels pity for her. UPDATE: From December 10th you can hear exclusive updates of Ghislaine Maxwell's trial in New York with our brand new podcast Hunting Ghislaine: The Trial, exclusively on Global Player - https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/42Ktor/