Ghislaine maxwell

Wednesday

Rachel K. Paulose

What to expect from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial

One of the highest-profile human trafficking cases ever charged in the United States is underway in federal court in New York. Ghislaine Maxwell, an Oxford graduate and the youngest child of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, stands accused of six counts of human trafficking and two counts of perjury. Her alleged co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein died in his jail cell after committing suicide in 2019 following his arrest by the FBI. Human trafficking is a $150 billion illegal global enterprise, second only to drug trafficking. Though the law has long outlawed sexual slavery, the George W. Bush administration began a vigorous attack on the systemic roots of human trafficking, newly empowered by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

ghislaine maxwell

Sunday

Rachel Johnson

It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell

From our UK edition

This week, I’m having puppies! First litter! The Johnsons were not doggy as we always moved around too much (my late mother claims it was 32 times in 17 years), but once you have a dog, life seems boring without. I have a theory that children give couples something to talk about and, when they go, only a dog can fill the conversational void. The mother (or ‘dam’) is Ziggy, who entered our lives one week before lockdown after I had a sudden strong urge to get a dog. On 13 March last year I drove to a farm in Somerset and fell for a puff of white fur with three black dots for a face for which I shelled out a four-figure sum. I’m afraid she is a cockapoo, like every other dog in London, but that’s not her fault.

prince andrew
Chadwick Moore

Prince Andrew’s BBC interview was utterly brilliant

Doddering Prince Andrew, known as Randy Andy among the Teterboro class, appeared on BBC’s Newsnight Saturday evening for a sit-down from Buckingham Palace to set the record straight on his relationship with dead sex trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein. It’s being called some of the best television of the year, or at least the best episode yet of Brass Eye, despite the BBC’s Emily Maitlis failing to ask the Duke of York the most obvious question on everyone’s mind, ‘Who killed Jeffrey Epstein?’ ‘It would be a considerable stretch to say he was a very close friend,’ Andrew said of Epstein, explaining the pair only saw each other, like, three times a year, or triple as often as many people see their own parents.

Tuesday

Keith McNally

Instagram is appallingly mundane

New York Four years ago, I had a stroke that left the right side of my body paralyzed and my speech so impaired that I sound like I'm talking under water. But the stroke also left me not giving a fuck what anyone thinks of me. I didn't know a thing about Instagram until 18 months ago when a friend explained how it worked. Looking at some typical posts for the first time, I was appalled how mundane the majority were. At least half were of dogs, kids or spouses, falsely attesting to the happiness of their lives. There were some brilliantly ironic posts, but not many. The political posts were the worst. I found the iron-like conviction of their opinions so frightening that I decided to half throw my fool's cap into the ring and oppose them. I loathe cancel culture.

keith mcnally

Thursday

Nicholas Coleridge

Nicholas Coleridge: The Ghislaine Maxwell I knew

From our UK edition

I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked her, everyone did, and I find it hard to reconcile the Ghislaine I knew with the heinous crimes of which she now stands accused. I visited her several times at Headington Hall, her family house on the edge of Oxford, when her father Robert Maxwell was at the height of his power. It was a peculiar house, rented from the council, like an enormous municipal town hall. The entrance hall and corridors were lined with at least a hundred framed cartoons by Jak and Mac of the great narcissist newspaper owner. The spare bedrooms had buzzing minibar fridges like in a hotel.

Thursday

Toby Young

How did I end up in Epstein’s little black book?

From our UK edition

Every time Jeffrey Epstein is in the news, I start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me. This happened a lot when the billionaire financier was found dead in his jail cell last year after being arrested on sex trafficking charges, and it has started again following the arrest of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell a couple of weeks ago. The reason is that my contact details were in Epstein’s ‘little black book’, and whenever his name pops up some kindly soul takes it upon themselves to post a picture of the relevant page, which shows my mobile phone number, on Twitter. I may have to change my number, so frequent have the calls become. On one level, it’s quite flattering.

Taki

My advice to Johnny Depp

From our UK edition

Gstaad Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored by old news repeated ad nauseam by people who hadn’t — and still don’t have — a clue? Well, your intrepid High life correspondent does have a clue, so here goes. But before I go on about la Maxwell, a few thoughts about the drama taking place in Court No. 13 of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, where I had the leading role in a 1986 drama — also starring Charles Moore and some lesser characters — that almost broke the poor little Greek boy and also impoverished our great ex-proprietor Algy Cluff.

Wednesday

Cockburn

When Ann Coulter met Jeffrey Epstein…

In an interview last week with Breitbart News Tonight, Ann Coulter revealed a curious episode from her past in which she met Jeffrey Epstein. Coulter recalled Epstein picking her up in a limousine and taking her to his Manhattan townhome. She was so creeped out by the encounter that she later asked to be dropped off two blocks from her own home. Cockburn has acquired the transcript of Coulter's story. ANN COULTER: I had my own encounter with Jeffrey Epstein, and before I give you this little vignette: very important that I tell you something. All of my friends know I have absolutely no radar on freaks, on weird people. I'm a terrible judge of character.

Ann Coulter

Monday

Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper

What did Ghislaine Maxwell want?

In 1990, Jeffrey Epstein spent $2.5 million on a Palm Beach mansion less than a mile and a half from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Epstein had money and all the luxuries of wealth: multiple homes, private jets and beautiful women. Yet Epstein had a difficult time fitting in with elite society circles. Friends described him as crass. Epstein might have lived among the elites, but he was not one of them. That is, not until he met Ghislaine Maxwell. She introduced him to class, was his match in every way, and would eventually become his partner in one of the darkest schemes one could ever imagine. In the early 1990s, Ghislaine Maxwell was young, popular, and broke.

ghislaine maxwell

Friday

Alan Dershowitz

The Ghislaine Maxwell I know

From our UK edition

My wife and I were introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell by Sir Evelyn and Lady Lynne de Rothschild, and we subsequently met her on several occasions — generally in the presence of prominent people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, presidents of universities, and prominent academic and business people. We never saw her do anything inappropriate. We knew her only as Jeffrey Epstein’s thirty-something girlfriend. Now she stands accused of serious crimes allegedly committed a quarter of a century ago. Like every other arrested person, she must be presumed innocent. Many in the public however, will presume her guilty because of the portrayal of her in the Netflix series about Jeffrey Epstein.

Monday

Dominic Green

Prince Andrew fires back at Department of Justice

Prince Andrew isn’t hiding from the Department of Justice, a source close to the Prince told me on Friday — and Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, isn’t telling the truth. Who to believe, the prince or the prosecutor? Andrew has kept his head below the parapet since discussing his connections to Jeffrey Epstein in a disastrous BBC interview last November. But Berman has been a voluble and public presence. Three times in the last six months, Berman has accused Andrew and his lawyers of refusing to co-operate with the Department of Justice’s request that he make a witness statement. Andrew and his team have said nothing — until now.

prince andrew

Thursday

James Delingpole

Jeffrey Epstein really was a streak of slime

From our UK edition

Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix series — Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich — about his secretive, sordid life, I care very much. Sure, his squalid death in jail, apparently from suicide while awaiting trial for numerous sex crimes, was thoroughly deserved. But justice would have been far better served if this noisome creep had spent the rest of his days rotting in prison, deprived for ever of all sexual activity save the involuntary variety provided in the showers whenever he dropped the soap. I hadn’t expected to respond quite this viscerally to the Epstein tale. Indeed, before I watched the documentary I was inclined to think that perhaps the nefariousness had been overdone.

Monday

Dominic Green

Prince Andrew has never looked more guilty

Prince Andrew has already lost his case in the court of public opinion. His floundering and implausible BBC interview about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein saw to that. ‘Randy Andy’ also seems to have forfeited the confidence of his own family: after the interview was broadcast, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace and relieved of his public duties. After last night, and a second broadcast by the BBC’s investigative Panorama program, The Prince and the Epstein, it is impossible not to conclude that Andrew is an unreliable witness to his own life: on screen, Andrew’s already flimsy alibis dissolved in the acid of Panorama’s evidence and testimonies.

prince andrew

Saturday

Davis Richardson

Inside the damaged web of Ghislaine Maxwell’s family

The now-infamous photograph of Ghislaine Maxwell at a California In-and-Out Burger has captivated Western audiences. She is calm. She is poised. She is a British heiress surrounded by fast food and Americana capitalism, a stranger to both empires but not the forces which govern them. Like every new development in the strange, perverted saga of Jeffrey Epstein, the snapshot raises more questions: mainly, what does she know? Amid fallout from Epstein’s death, we are left studying peripheral actors to better understand how the powerful protect their own, arriving at bloodlines.

ghislaine maxwell