by Whitney Webb at Unlimited Hangout
Despite being found guilty late last year for her role in sex crimes against minors, Ghislaine Maxwell, the “madam” and chief accomplice of the intelligence-linked pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, may soon walk free. A juror in the case, Scotty David, subsequently took credit for the jury’s decision to find Ghislaine Maxwell guilty and “inadvertently” revealed that he had incorrectly answered a pre-trial questionnaire. As a result, the possibility of a mistrial, and Ghislaine walking free, now looms large.
David has some interesting connections, as he currently works for the Carlyle Group – the global investment firm whose ties to the bin Laden family during the early 2000s have come under scrutiny. Carlyle’s executives often have ties to intelligence, with one example being its former chairman and then chairman emeritus, Frank Carlucci, who had been deputy director of the CIA and, later, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. Carlyle’s current co-founder and co-chairman David Rubenstein, as noted in this article from Free Press Report, served on the board of the influential Trilateral Commission during the same time as Jeffrey Epstein, while his ex-wife Alice Rogoff (divorced in 2017) had a very close working relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, including with her now defunct “charity” the TerraMar Project. Given the fact that there are known ties between David’s employer and Ghislaine Maxwell, why has this potential conflict of interest gone unmentioned by mainstream media?
Not only that, but – according to a family member of one of the women who testified against Maxwell during her trial – David was connected with the journalist who would publish the now infamous, post-verdict report via Vicky Ward. Ward has been denounced by Epstein victims and others close to the case for having had a past “chummy” relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell she declined to disclose for years and for subsequently telling Ghislaine that Epstein victim Maria Farmer had been the person who had first reported Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI back in 1996. Farmer later claims that Ward’s lack of journalistic integrity, after promising to keep Farmer’s identity secret, had put her life in danger and forced her into hiding.
It seems that there is, yet again, a major cover-up in the works, one which involves major centers of financial and political power in New York City and beyond. In order to fully understand the sexual trafficking and blackmail operation that Maxwell and Epstein oversaw, and why powerful forces apparently continue to intervene in the case, one must first understand its genesis, particularly how and why Ghislaine Maxwell arrived in New York City. In this second installment of “Meet Ghislaine” (read Part 1 here), the beginnings of Ghislaine’s career – closely controlled by her father, Robert Maxwell, until his 1991 death – are followed in detail.
The Young Ghislaine
Early on in life, Ghislaine Maxwell was surrounded by the rich and powerful figures who frequented her father’s offices as his publishing empire and political connections grew both in the UK and abroad. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a dominant force in her life as he was for her siblings as well, though Ghislaine gained a reputation as his favorite child, despite having been neglected in the earliest years of her life.
However, Ghislaine did not escape the abuse that was known to befall Robert Maxwell’s other children. While brothers Kevin and Ian were well known to regularly receive tongue lashings from their father in full view of friends and business associates, Ghislaine received “prearranged hidings [beatings]” from her father, with a nine-year-old Ghislaine telling author Eleanor Berry, a friend and confidant of her father’s, that “Daddy has a series of things lined up in a row. There’s a riding crop with a swish to it, another straight riding crop and a few shoehorns. He always asks me to choose which one I want.”
By all accounts, Robert Maxwell had firm control over Ghislaine’s young life. This was particularly true when it came to her love life through her teens and into her time at university, when he reportedly would ban her boyfriends from the family home and try to keep her from being seen with them publicly. It appears that Robert Maxwell applied this rule uniquely to Ghislaine and not to his three older daughters. Though such behavior could be attributed merely to his being a protective father, he later went to great lengths—even involving his publishing empire—to promote Ghislaine’s affairs with certain individuals, particularly those who inhabited elite circles (explored in more depth later in this article). This behavior suggests that Robert Maxwell may have seen Ghislaine’s sexuality as a useful tool in growing his influence empire, beginning when she was quite young. It also may have contributed to Ghislaine’s willingness, years later, to sexually exploit and abuse the young women targeted by herself and Jeffrey Epstein.
In much the same way as Ghislaine’s young personal life was controlled by her father, her entry into the working world after her graduation from Oxford was directly facilitated and managed by her father, with Robert Maxwell setting her up “with a string of jobs across his business empire.” By 1984, at age twenty-two, she was serving as a director of the British football club Oxford United alongside her brother Kevin. At the time, Robert Maxwell held shares in the club through a company created explicitly for that purpose. He served as the club’s chairman beginning in 1982.
Prior to and during this same period, Ghislaine worked in various roles at her father’s companies Pergamon Press and the Mirror Group, with British media later describing her early career as “entirely dependent on her father’s patronage.” She was working for the Mirror Group by 1984 and possibly earlier. During this period, Robert often used Ghislaine to market and generally represent his newspapers publicly.
In 1985, and with Robert Maxwell’s full approval, The People — the Sunday edition of the Daily Mirror— ran a story claiming that efforts were being made to blackmail the paper’s publisher, Robert Maxwell himself. The blackmailer had reportedly threatened Maxwell with information regarding Ghislaine’s alleged relationship with David Manners, then-Marquis of Granby and the future Duke of Rutland. The article sought to paint Robert Maxwell as bravely resisting the “blackmailer,” but there is more to the story.
This astonishing article claimed that people connected with the British MP Harvey Proctor had tried to blackmail Maxwell via The People. The article claimed that a “sinister phonecaller” had warned that, if the newspaper continued its campaign to expose Harvey Proctor, they would “produce a story about Ghislaine and Lord Granby at Belvoir Castle with incriminating pictures of them in compromising positions.” Manners denied the claim, stating that he and Ghislaine were merely friends.
The bizarre decision to publish a front-page story exploiting his own daughter’s alleged sexual relationship because of an anonymous phone call was especially odd given that Robert Maxwell was known for his tight control over his youngest daughter’s love life. As previously mentioned, he had banned her boyfriends from visiting the family house and had gone to great lengths to prevent her from being seen in public with them. Yet, for whatever reason, Robert Maxwell clearly wanted information linking Ghislaine to the future duke put out into the public sphere. Though it is difficult to know exactly what was behind this odd episode in Ghislaine’s past, the situation suggests that Robert Maxwell saw Ghislaine’s young sexuality as a useful tool in building his influence empire.
The story is also odd for other reasons. The motive of the blackmailer was ostensibly to prevent Maxwell-owned papers from covering the Harvey Proctor scandal. But Manners (Lord Granby in the article), who was allegedly involved with Ghislaine, was also a close friend and later the employer of Harvey Proctor. Why would someone close to Proctor seek to blackmail Maxwell by putting the reputation of his own friend on the line?
In addition, the appearance of Harvey Proctor, a Conservative member of Parliament, in this tabloid spectacle is interesting for a few reasons. In 1987, Proctor pleaded guilty to sexual indecency with two young men, who were sixteen and nineteen at the time, and several witnesses interviewed in that investigation described him as having a sexual interest in “young boys.” Later, a controversial court case saw Proctor accused of having been involved with well-connected British pedophile and procurer of children Jimmy Savile; he was alleged to have been part of a child sex-abuse ring that was said to include former UK prime minister Ted Heath.
Of course, the Maxwell-owned newspapers, in covering the alleged effort to blackmail Robert Maxwell, did not mention the “young boys” angle at all, instead focusing on claims that distracted from the then-credible accusations of pedophilia by claiming that Proctor was merely into “spanking” and was “whacky,” among other things.
As was mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Ghislaine had also become involved with “philanthropy” tied to her father’s media empire during this period, which included hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO. Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, with the former known being for his strange obsession with Adolf Hitler. The gala was attended by members of the British royal family. The same evening that the Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms bar in what was labeled a suicide.
The attendance of royals at this Ghislaine-hosted gala was not some lucky break for Ghislaine or her “philanthropic” efforts, given that Ghislaine had been close to the royals for years, as some of her later employees and victims attested to having personally seen pictures of her “growing up” with the royals, a relationship allegedly facilitated by the Maxwell family’s ties to the Rothschild banking family. Ghislaine was heard on more than one occasion describing the wealthy and influential Rothschilds as her family’s “greatest protectors,” and they were also among Robert Maxwell’s most important bankers, who helped him finance the construction of his vast media empire and web of companies and untraceable trusts.
While Ghislaine was working in these capacities for her father’s business empire, there are indications that she had also, to some extent, begun to become involved in his espionage-related activities. According to former Israeli intelligence operative and associate of Maxwell in his dealings with Mossad, Ari Ben-Menashe, Ghislaine accompanied her father to events frequently, including the now-infamous 1989 party on Maxwell’s yacht where several key figures in the intelligence-related PROMIS software scandal were in attendance.
Ben-Menashe has also claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was brought into the group of Israeli spies that included himself and Robert Maxwell during this period in the mid-1980s and that Epstein had been introduced to Robert Maxwell after having been romantically involved with Ghislaine.
In 2019, Ben-Menashe told former CBS News producer Zev Shalev that “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our group. . . . I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick Davies [foreign editor of the Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.” He then added that Maxwell had stated during the introduction that “your Israeli bosses have already approved” of Epstein. Shalev later corroborated Epstein’s affiliation with Israeli military intelligence during this period with another former Israeli intelligence official. Epstein’s former business associate Steve Hoffenberg, who worked with Epstein from the late 1980s until 1993, has also stated that Epstein had boasted of his work for Israeli intelligence during that period and “rumors” of Epstein’s affiliation with both Israeli and US intelligence appeared in media reports as early as 1992.
Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies, and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this period. Epstein is also have known to have been involved with arms dealers at this time, including with UK’s Douglas Leese and the Iran-Contra–linked Adnan Khashoggi. Ben-Menashe went on to tell Shalev that he had “met him [Epstein] a few times in Maxwell’s office, that was it.” He also said he was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for anyone else he knew at the time but that Maxwell wanted to involve Epstein in the arms transfer in which he, Davies, and Ben-Menashe were engaged on Israel’s behalf. He later clarified that he had seen Epstein on several occasions after his initial recruitment, as Epstein “used to be in [Robert Maxwell’s] office [in London] quite often” and would arrive there between trips to and from Israel.