Hunting Ghislaine

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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.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein has been told in many ways over the past two years, but none have given more than a few cursory moments to Ghislaine Maxwell. 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. When Epstein’s life began to unravel, Ghislaine vanished, only to reappear when she was arrested by the FBI earlier this year.Another mystery, this one real-life and rather more sordid: Hunting Ghislaine, Global’s podcast about Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell. Presented and researched by veteran investigative reporter John Sweeney, this is as gripping as all his work. I don’t always agree with Sweeney, but he really is an immense storyteller: his script is fantastic, his interviewing to the point, his presentation fiery and compelling. 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. 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.” 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.” Carolyn said that she gave Epstein about 100 massages, all of them sexual, all of them ending with him masturbating.

In New York, under Epstein’s sway, she would go on hunting expeditions for adolescent girls, ostensibly to audition them as models. “I’ve got to get the nubiles,” she told one of Epstein’s employees. A number of girls subsequently turned up at his house wearing school uniforms and braces on their teeth. It’s a story both melancholic and macabre; a story arousing pity and disgust; a story of victims and monsters; a story of how some of the richest and entitled people on the planet used their money and power to silence the abused. The life of Ghislaine Maxwell is a dark fairy story, one that plays out in reverse, of how a clever and beautiful woman ends up serving a monster while too many of her powerful friends look away. It’s a mirror, that shows poor and vulnerable victims to be heroic truth-tellers and some of the biggest movers and hitters on earth to be corrupt or at best, complacent, while evil stared them in the face. Last week’s brilliant opening episode (of six), which looked at Robert Maxwell’s relationship with his youngest daughter, painted a swift and devastating portrait of the revolting media tycoon, and expressed some sympathy for Ghislaine. “I feel sorry for her up to the moment her father dies,” said Sweeney. “Because he has formed and deformed her.” 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.Hunting Ghislaine, by the investigative journalist John Sweeney, is based on Sweeney’s popular 2020 podcast of the same name. It’s a story with which we are all familiar – overly familiar, perhaps – but while Sweeney draws copiously on the extensive reporting done by others, his book, carefully researched and written in a breezy journalese, casts new light on the complex character of Ghislaine Maxwell and her fateful relationships with Epstein and her father. Sweeney comes to a weary conclusion. “Power and money can help blind justice around the world,” he says. “But in America it’s normal.”