Ghislaine Maxwell will be ‘naming names’, former Epstein associate says

Ghislaine Maxwell will be ‘naming names’ and ‘fully co-operating’ with the FBI and Prince Andrew is among those ‘very worried’ about what she might reveal, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein has claimed.    

Maxwell’s dramatic arrest on sex-trafficking charges yesterday has raised hopes among Epstein victims that prosecutors will untangle a ‘spider web’ of rich and powerful associates of the pair. 

The socialite and daughter of late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell was seized at a $1million home in New Hampshire and later appeared in court by video-link. It is unclear who she was there with. 

A mystery British technology entrepreneur is said to have helped her buy the home through an LLC in December. On Thursday, journalists reported seeing a man on the grounds with a British accent but it is unclear if he is the same person who helped Maxwell purchase the property.

She is now awaiting transfer to New York to face charges of procuring girls as young as 14 for Epstein to sexually abuse – and could even be held in the same Manhattan jail where Epstein died last year. 

If convicted on all counts, Maxwell faces 35 years behind bars at a maximum. It would mean she’d be 93 by the time she’d be released. 

The latest twist in the case has ramped up the pressure on Andrew to testify about his relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, but sources close to the Duke say they are ‘bewildered’ because he has repeatedly offered to help.   

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the Epstein accuser who dragged Andrew into the mire by claiming she had sex with him in the early 2000s, last night celebrated Maxwell’s arrest and called her an ‘insidious creature’ who deserved to be locked up. Andrew denies her allegations, saying he has no recollection of meeting Miss Roberts.

Speaking to The Sun, Epstein’s former employer Steven Hoffenberg said the paedophile’s ex-girlfriend Maxwell ‘knows everything’ and will ‘totally co-operate’ after her arrest. 

Hoffenberg, a convicted fraudster who employed Epstein at Towers Financial in the 1980s, said ‘there’s a lot of people very worried’ about what Maxwell could reveal. ‘She’s going to cooperate and be very important. Andrew is definitely, definitely concerned,’ Hoffenberg said. 

On Thursday, a source close to the Duke of York’s legal team told DailyMail.com that he was ‘bewildered’ by prosecutors’ remarks that they wanted to speak to him.   

‘The Duke’s team remains bewildered given that we have twice communicated with the DOJ in the last month and to-date, we have had no response.’

On Thursday, Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss said the investigation into Epstein’s decades of abuse is ongoing and that she’d ‘welcome’ Prince Andrew ‘coming in to provide a statement’, prompting speculation that he may among people investigators may focus their attention on next.

‘We would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk to us. We would like to have the benefit of his statement. Our doors remain open. We would welcome him coming in and giving us an opportunity to hear his statement,’ she said. 

It opens the door to questions of jurisdiction and whether or not US Attorney Strauss may charge for alleged incidents that happened in London and not America. Among the claims in the indictment is that Maxwell groomed one of the victims in London. At her press conference, Strauss said some of the sexual abuse also happened at Maxwell’s house in London. 

US attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents one of Maxwell’s accusers, said ‘all others accused of enabling Jeffrey Epstein’s predations must immediately be brought to justice as well’.  

‘Maxwell’s brutal, ruthless behaviour caused my client tremendous pain,’ Ms Bloom said in a statement, adding that she and her client applauded the socialite’s ‘long overdue arrest’. 

One Epstein accuser, Michelle Licata, has previously voiced hopes that prosecutors looking into Epstein were ‘going to start digging into his life… and start pulling out this spider web of people that were related to it’, according to the New York Post. 

Former federal prosecutor Jessica Roth told Bloomberg: ‘There is no way for prosecutors to present a case against her without going into all the evidence they had against Epstein, because the charges here are intertwined.

‘The original indictment against Jeffrey Epstein made it clear that he didn’t act alone and that the government had evidence that other people were also involved.’ 

Celebrating Maxwell’s arrest, Prince Andrew’s accuser, Roberts said last night: ‘Thank you to the FBI, Southern District of New York and anyone involved in the arrest of this insidious creature. Hope the judge throws the book at her. So so so happy- she’s finally where she belongs.’

The 36-year-old’s claims against Andrew are not part of the charges against Maxwell and a judge ordered them struck from court records in a separate case in 2015, without ruling on their veracity. 

However, Miss Roberts is relevant to the charges because Maxwell is accused of perjury by claiming during a lawsuit against her in 2016 that she had no involvement in procuring underage girls. 

Andrew, 60, has been at loggerheads with US prosecutors for months after they claimed he was failing to co-operate with their Epstein probe. 

The Duke’s lawyers say he has offered to help on ‘at least three occasions this year’ but US officials claim he has ‘repeatedly declined our request’ for an interview.  

Royal commentators say the discrepancy may lie in the nature of the offer, with Andrew’s lawyers offering a ‘witness statement’ while former US attorney Geoffrey Berman made it clear he was seeking an ‘interview’.  

Andrew’s last verbal interview on the subject – his BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis – was widely seen as a disaster and led to his resignation from public life just days later. 

The prince was criticised for failing to show any empathy towards Epstein’s victims, and many of his explanations attracted ridicule. In a subsequent statement he said he ‘regretted my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein’ and ‘deeply sympathised with everyone who has been affected’. 

‘Of course, I am willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations, if required,’ he said at the time. 

The issue was thrown into further confusion last month when Berman was fired by the Trump administration in a separate row.   

Prosecutors renewed their appeal for Andrew to give evidence as they announced the charges against Maxwell yesterday, saying that ‘we would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk with us’.  

US lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents some of Epstein’s victims, said yesterday: ‘It is long overdue for Prince Andrew to stop making excuses and to stop playing the victim. He should contact the FBI immediately and agree to appear for an interview.’ 

A source close to the Duke said Andrew was ‘bewildered’ by the latest pressure, saying: ‘We have twice communicated with the DOJ in the last month and to date we have had no response.’ 

Asked about the Duke in an LBC radio interview today, Boris Johnson declined to say how Britain would respond if US authorities make an approach to interview Andrew. 

‘No such approach has been made and otherwise it really is a matter for the royal family,’ the PM said.  

Andrew’s legal representatives are adamant that the Duke ‘is not and has never been a target’ of the criminal investigations and that US prosecutors are seeking his help as a witness. He denies any wrongdoing. 

The prince was friends with Epstein and Maxwell during the 2000s but said in the BBC interview that he never witnessed or suspected any of Epstein’s crimes.

Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell last August after he was arrested on sex-trafficking charges. He was already a convicted pedophile after pleading guilty to a separate child sex charge in Florida in 2008.  

Maxwell was taken into custody yesterday morning in Bradford, a small town in New Hampshire, on Thursday morning. Special Agent William Sweeney said at a press conference later that the FBI had been ‘discreetly keeping tabs’ on her for some time and that she recently moved to the property. 

Maxwell is believed to have bought the 156-acre property with cash, using an LLC to hide her identity, in December. Agents ‘moved in’ yesterday morning. No other circumstances surrounding her arrest are known. 

According to a memo filed in court on Thursday asking for a judge to deny her bail, Maxwell changed her phone number and her email address. She registered a new phone number under the name ‘G Max’, and used a different, unspecified fake name to have packages delivered to her, it is claimed.  

She also moved money between 15 different bank accounts, the total balance of which has varied from hundreds of thousands of dollars to $20million over the last few years, according to investigators. In one case, she moved $500,000 from one account to another. 

Before that, between 2007 and 2011, more than $20million was allegedly transferred from bank accounts linked to Epstein into accounts linked to Maxwell, and then back again.  

The prosecutors point to the fact that Maxwell has three passports – British, French and American – and say her high-flying, international lifestyle makes her a major flight risk. They say she has made at least 15 flights in the last three years to countries including the UK, Japan and Qatar. 

Prosecutors claim she ‘made intentional efforts to avoid detection’ during the last year, including moving locations at least twice, and say her ‘transient’ lifestyle means she would have no reason to remain in the US if freed. 

In a video-link court appearance on Thursday afternoon, her attorneys agreed to have the case moved to the Southern District of New York – where she is being charged. 

There was confusion at the start of the call when a woman with a British accent was heard repeatedly asking ‘what the f**k’ and saying ‘I don’t understand’. 

She became increasingly upset and had to be reminded to mute her line.

The woman is not thought to have been Maxwell though. She spoke later to answer the judge’s questions and was calm in her one word answers. 

Journalists could not see her but they were permitted to dial in to listen to the proceedings. 

Prosecutors asked the judge to deny her bail, saying she is a flight risk with an international network of friends and access to unlimited resources. She has been held for now without bail and is likely to appear in court in New York City either tomorrow or on Monday. 

It is unclear where she will now be detained before her next court appearance but the judge said she would be ‘temporarily’ placed in custody. If she is moved to New York she could be held in the same Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan where Epstein died last August. 

A grand jury returned a sealed, six-count indictment against her on June 29, almost a year after Epstein was charged.   

The indictment alleges: 

• Maxwell groomed three unnamed girls, all under the age of 18, in London, New York and Florida, and New Mexico between 1994 and 1997 
• She befriended them by taking them to the movies or on shopping sprees and ‘normalized’ abusive behavior by getting undressed in front of them herself 
• She encouraged them to travel to meet Epstein and engage in sex acts with them and him like ‘group massage sex’ in Epstein’s homes  
• Her introduction of them to him resulted in him abusing them when she was not present  
• She lied in 2016 depositions while being sued by Virginia Giuffre Roberts that she’d never groomed or had sex with underage girls herself  

Maxwell, who has yet to enter a plea, faces 35 years in prison if convicted. She has previously denied any involvement in Epstein’s crimes. 

The indictment reads in part: ‘Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s access to minor victims knowing that he had a sexual preference for underage girls and that he intended to engage in sexual activity with those victims’.  

Among the allegations in the indictment is that Maxwell groomed the girls, including one in London.  

‘Victim 1’ met Maxwell when she was 14 in 1994, the indictment reads.

Maxwell allegedly groomed her by taking her to the movies and on shopping trips, asking her about school, her classes, her family and other aspects of her life.

‘She then sought to normalize inappropriate and abusive conduct by, among other things, undressing in front of her and being present when she undressed in front of Epstein,’ according to the indictment.

The trio then engaged in ‘group sexualised massages’ on more than one occasion, the indictment claims. The victim was allegedly encouraged by Epstein and Maxwell to travel to the financier’s homes in New York and Florida ‘for the purpose of sexual encounters with Epstein’. 

‘Victim 2’ met Ghislaine in 1996 and was allegedly groomed by her at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch. 

The indictment claims that Maxwell gave her a topless massage and ‘encouraged [her] to massage Epstein’. 

‘Victim 3’ met Maxwell in London in 1994 and was groomed until 1995, it is alleged. Maxwell encouraged her to massage Epstein ‘knowing that Epstein would engage in sex acts’ as she did so, prosecutors claim.

The indictment alleges that Maxwell knew the three women were underage at the time.  

At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Acting US Attorney for the Southern District Audrey Strauss, said: ‘Maxwell enticed minor girls, got them to trust her, then delivered them into the trap that she and Epstein had set for them. 

‘She pretended to be a woman they could trust, all the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein in some cases, by Maxwell herself. 

‘Today after many years, Ghislaine Maxwell finally stands charged for her role in these crimes.’  

FBI Special Agent William Sweeney said the bureau had been ‘keeping tabs’ on Maxwell ‘for some time’. 

‘We have been discreetly keeping tabs on Maxwell for some time.

‘She slithered away to a gorgeous property in New Hampshire, continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims continue to live with the trauma inflicted on them years earlier.’  

Before Epstein’s disgrace, she and Maxwell had an astonishing network of influential and important friends and acquaintances around the world, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. 

Maxwell was photographed at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and she also flew with Clinton on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’ because it was used to ferry young girls to his private Caribbean island or ranch in New Mexico. 

She has also been photographed with Epstein and Donald and Melania Trump at parties, years before Epstein became a social pariah.  

So will Ghislaine Maxwell clear Prince Andrew – or damn him? RICHARD KAY on the agonising questions for the Queen and the Palace 

By Richard Kay for the Daily Mail 

There is never a good time for the proverbial ‘bad penny’ to turn up, so imagine how the Queen received news of the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell and her appearance in court on sex-trafficking charges.

Maxwell was once a welcome visitor to royal homes, an overnight guest at Sandringham as well as being invited to one of the starriest parties ever thrown at Windsor Castle, the so-called Dance of the Decades in the summer of 2000.

Nor was that her only invitation to royal glamour at Windsor. In 2006 she was a guest at Princess Beatrice’s lavish costume ball to mark her 18th birthday. 

On another occasion the vivacious socialite was photographed at Prince Andrew’s side in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, where admission is at ‘Her Majesty’s discretion’.

Yesterday, with the Queen still in lockdown with Prince Philip at Windsor, there must have been the iciest of feelings at the news that the daughter of disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell had been taken into custody. 

As a mother, Her Majesty will, of course, be anxious about what Maxwell’s arrest and her knowledge of the alleged activities of paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein mean for her son.

And as monarch there will be anger at the prospect of the good name of the Royal Family being dragged through the mud once again. 

No family matter has concerned her more than the shadow hanging over Andrew. To her, it is infinitely more serious than the selfish trivialities of the exiled Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex.

For more than seven months it has been an ongoing crisis, with every sordid revelation lapping that bit closer to Buckingham Palace. 

Ever since that Newsnight interview in which Andrew spectacularly failed to offer any sympathy for Epstein’s victims and showed no remorse over his friendship with the billionaire sex offender, fears about the implications for the Prince have multiplied.

Maxwell’s arrest changes everything. She, remember, is in the famous photo of Andrew with his arm around the bare midriff of teenager Virginia Roberts — a picture of which the Duke of York has no recollection — which was taken by Epstein in Maxwell’s Belgravia home.

Does she really believe Andrew’s insinuations that the photo was doctored or manipulated?

Then there is the most damaging claim of all from Roberts, who says that, aged 17, she and Andrew had sex three times. The Prince denies it.

If anyone knows the truth it must be Maxwell, whom Andrew befriended during visits to New York after his divorce from the Duchess of York.

It was through Maxwell that Andrew was introduced to Epstein, who was found dead in his New York prison cell a year ago. And on all those social occasions — including Beatrice’s party — where Ghislaine was a guest of Andrew, so, too, was Epstein.

As the Royal Family and their advisers have agonised over how best to protect the integrity of the monarchy from the fall-out of the Epstein affair, there may be some slim consolation.

The charges brought by the FBI against Maxwell relate to a period in the mid-1990s — before Prince Andrew had ever met the sleazy Epstein.

Perhaps more significantly, the decision to strip Andrew of all royal duties and force him to step down from official engagements looks even more of a wise move.

With the benefit of hindsight, the prompt action — brokered by Prince Charles and Prince William — has been the only moment when the royals have been on the front foot. Andrew’s stubborn failure to sever contacts with Epstein after he was first accused of under-age sex offences, was the major contributor to his own downfall.

He did, belatedly, end up cutting ties with him — but only after he was photographed walking with the financier in Central Park, New York.

Yet he continued to keep up his friendship with Ghislaine, the woman who brought them together and who was described as ‘Jeffrey’s pimp’.

Although the relationship between the two was said to be platonic, their lives were so intertwined that Fergie was reported to have become concerned that Maxwell was exerting an unhealthy influence on him. Even so, the two remained friends.

In the Newsnight interview, Andrew admitted he had seen Maxwell last year. The meeting, he said, was before Epstein’s arrest on sex-trafficking charges last July and that they did not discuss the billionaire. He said: ‘There wasn’t anything to discuss because he wasn’t in the news.’

Epstein and Maxwell met in New York, where she had set up home following the death of her father, who fell from his yacht and drowned in 1991.

She was a pivotal figure on the New York social scene. ‘Great fun, always was, still is,’ said a friend. ‘I’m not at all surprised that Prince Andrew likes her. She is full of energy, full of plans.

‘She would ring and say: “Ten of us are going to a restaurant then a club. Do come, it will be fun.” She was persuasive, too, and Andrew loved that.’

By 2000 Maxwell and Andrew, who were introduced by the Duchess when she was a regular fixture on the New York party circuit, were very close.

But they were not a couple. She would even introduce him to future girlfriends, such as Emma Gibbs. They were often seen together in public.

The pair caused a minor stir when they made an appearance at a Ralph Lauren launch in the city. One source observed: ‘They certainly seemed to have a good time together.’ Andrew was also a regular guest at the dinner parties she would hold at the home of Epstein, who was by then her ex-boyfriend, on the Upper East Side.

Such was the importance of the role Maxwell played in Andrew’s life that it was even claimed he once asked the Queen’s permission to take her on an official work trip. This was refused.

Andrew was widely criticised after he appeared with Maxwell at a ‘pimps and prostitutes’ theme party thrown by the model Heidi Klum. 

To his ex-wife, such behaviour was beginning to damage his reputation. She was also concerned at the effect it would have on their daughters.

In 2001, when Andrew was about to take up his role as Britain’s trade envoy, a friend of the Duchess told the Mail on Sunday: ‘Fergie and a lot of other people who love Andrew believe his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein has become really dangerous. They’re using him just for his name and access and he is so innocent he doesn’t realise.’

How prophetic those words were to become. Among courtiers there is considerable anxiety about what Maxwell’s arrest means for the Duke of York. They believe that such is her intimate knowledge of Epstein, she could damn Andrew or clear him.

For Andrew, his reputation is gone — but for the Queen at 94, this latest twist to one of the most unpalatable episodes of her reign can only be troubling. 

GUY ADAMS: She was born into fabulous wealth and was the toast of the New York Party set. How DID Ghislaine Maxwell plunge from society darling to be a sleazy ‘pimp’ and disgrace?    

British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a close friend of paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested on Thursday in New Hampshire. She is accused of sex crimes that involved the disgraced financier who killed himself in his New York jail cell last year. GUY ADAMS explores how Maxwell plummeted from a wealthy elite to a sleazy ‘pimp’…

Jeffrey Epstein, in one of the few on-the-record interviews he gave to someone who was neither a lawyer nor a policeman, was asked to explain his close but somewhat mysterious relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. 

He responded simply: ‘She’s my best friend.’ It was 2003 and the colourful financier was speaking to Vanity Fair. 

The magazine’s reporter was puzzled by the exact role played by the British socialite, then aged 41, whose duties seemed to range from organising Epstein’s personal diary to running various households and popping up on his arm at glamorous social functions.

Although the squalid chain of events that would end with Epstein taking his own life in prison had not yet begun, the magazine writer, Vicky Ward, got an inkling that something wasn’t quite right. 

‘One young woman recalls being summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein’s townhouse where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far,’ she wrote. ‘These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners… many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.’ 

A source told Ward that at another cocktail party, also thrown by Maxwell and attended by Prince Andrew, the room was ‘filled with young Russian models’, adding: ‘Some guests were horrified!’ 

Compared with the revelations of subsequent years, in which Maxwell was directly implicated in a global paedophile scandal involving scores of victims, some as young as 12, this might seem relatively insignificant stuff. 

Yet it speaks to a simple truth: the journey that culminated yesterday with well- spoken, 58-year- old Maxwell being arrested by the FBI and taken into custody reflects her decision to embrace the role of Epstein’s official ‘best friend’. 

The indictment alleges:

• Maxwell groomed three unnamed girls, all under the age of 18, in London, New York and Florida, and New Mexico between 1994 and 1997 
• She befriended them by taking them to the movies or on shopping sprees and ‘normalized’ abusive behavior by getting undressed in front of them herself 
• She encouraged them to travel to meet Epstein and engage in sex acts with them and him like ‘group massage sex’ in Epstein’s homes  
• Her introduction of them to him resulted in him abusing them when she was not present  
• She lied in 2016 depositions while being sued by Virginia Giuffre Roberts that she’d never groomed or had sex with underage girls herself  

The question of whether she will spend the rest of her life behind bars hinges on a simple question. 

Was she really, as various accusers have already testified on oath, a sleazy madam who not only recruited vulnerable teenage girls to provide sexual services to her ex-boyfriend but illegally trafficked them around the world and took part in appalling episodes of abuse? 

Or was she merely a naive party girl with a gift for networking, who helped the rich but somewhat awkward Epstein climb the social ladder, yet had little idea about the sordid sex crimes he was committing? 

One thing which can’t be denied is that no one has a better knowledge of the billionaire paedophile and his relationships with the great and good than Maxwell. 

She beams like a proud mother in the notorious 2001 photograph of the Duke of York with Virginia Roberts, then a 17-year-old, who now claims Epstein paid her to sleep with the Prince after a late-night visit to the nightclub Tramp. 

Epstein himself took the picture at Maxwell’s mews house in Belgravia. Maxwell looks on as the Prince drapes an arm round his painfully young acquaintance. 

Maxwell also pops up in photographs of Epstein and Donald Trump taken at the latter’s Florida resort Mar-aLago, and in pictures that show her socialising with teenage girls (plus a middle-aged French model agent called Jean Luc Brunel, also allegedly implicated in Epstein’s crimes) on the late financier’s private island in the Caribbean. 

And Maxwell’s name runs, like letters in a stick of rock, through the many lawsuits and legal depositions filed by Epstein’s alleged victims, many of whom accuse her of recruiting them, flying them around the world and, in several cases, presiding over sickening abuse. 

Flight records show Virginia Roberts took at least 23 journeys with Maxwell on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’. 

She says she was 15 years old when Maxwell first persuaded her to visit Epstein’s Florida mansion, where the walls were covered with pictures of naked girls and the bathrooms contained soap shaped like male and female genitalia. 

She claims Ghislaine stripped naked and told her to do the same, before showing her how to wash the middle-aged financier with soap, then perform a series of sex acts. 

In court papers, she has said ‘Ghislaine took several nude photos of me for Jeffrey’ and used to buy erotic outfits for teenage visitors to his house to wear. ‘Jeffrey loved the latex outfits Ghislaine had for us girls,’ reads a 2011 court filing. ‘He had bondage outfits, he had all different kinds of outfit but his favourite was the schoolgirl.’ 

A second woman, Johanna Sjoberg, has testified that she was a cash-strapped student when Maxwell approached her on the campus of a small university in Palm Beach. She says she was offered $100 to perform foot massages at Epstein’s nearby home but ended up being told to strip n a k e d w h i l e M a x w e l l performed a sex act on her. 

In 2001, Sjoberg and Roberts say they took tea with Maxwell and Prince Andrew at Epstein’s New York home. At one point, they allege, the Duke groped their breasts with a Spitting Image puppet. 

A third woman, known as ‘BB’, claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that Maxwell ‘maintained a wardrobe at Epstein’s estate in which she kept sexual toys and outfits’, and ‘upon her own volition, actively and passively participated in sexual acts with minor girls she recruited’. And so on. 

These and other alleged been helping the FBI with their investigations. But however the legal case plays out, Maxwell has had plenty of practice at coping with public disgrace. 

The favourite child of crooked newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, she had a gilded upbringing, attending Marlborough College and then Oxford University before moving to London in the 1980s to start the Kit Kat Club, which purported to be an alternative to the old- school-tie network for high-powered women. 

She then worked for her father’s newspaper The European and was made a director of Oxford United football club, which he owned. 

This happy existence imploded in November 1991 when her father drowned after falling off a yacht named Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter. 

It soon emerged that his newspaper empire was built on the proceeds of epic financial criminality, which had seen him defraud its pension fund of almost half a billion pounds. 

Vilified in the UK, where Robert Maxwell’s victims were angered by the plush lifestyle his family had enjoyed at their expense, Ghislaine relocated to New York, where she took up residence in a small apartment and set about reinventing herself as a socialite. 

It was an inspired move. ‘Ghislaine has always been a prodigious networker,’ an acquaintance once told me. ‘People in New York didn’t care about the pensions scandal. 

And, of course, they are all suckers for an English accent.’ 

Maxwell, then 30, quickly met Epstein, who was almost a decade her senior.

Reportedly attracted by his resemblance to her father, she was soon being photographed as his guest at social functions. ‘He saved her,’ was how a friend put it. ‘When her father died, she was a wreck; inconsolable. 

And then Jeffrey took her in. She has never forgotten that and never will.’ Initial romance soon mellowed into close friendship, however, amid rumours that Epstein wanted to see other women. 

The charges filed against her yesterday allege she was involved in trafficking young girls for sex with him by 1994. 

To outsiders, Ghislaine was a sort of fixer-cum-confidante, helping run Epstein’s households, travel and social calendar — a role in which she would continue for more than a decade, taking him into circles where the Clintons, Kennedys and other world leaders moved. 

Her relationship with Prince Andrew, to whom she was purportedly introduced by old chum Sarah Ferguson, gave Epstein an entrée into royal circles. By the early 2000s he was being invited to Balmoral, as well as to the Queen’s birthday party. 

In return, Epstein gave Maxwell a jet-set lifestyle far beyond anything she could afford from the reported £80,000- a-year trust fund set up for her by her crooked father, travelling in private jets and dividing her time between his Florida mansion, New Mexico ranch, private Caribbean island and New York home, the city’s largest private residence. 

Yet there was a dark side to life at these glamorous residences. Juan Alessi, a former butler, has said he would clean up Epstein’s bedroom (which adjoined Maxwell’s) after he had enjoyed erotic massages and would sometimes find vibrators and sex toys in Maxwell’s sink. 

Alfredo Rodriguez, another former butler, has testified that Maxwell kept an office under the stairs in the Palm Beach house, where her computer contained a list of girls who came to give massages there, along with their phone numbers and nude pictures of some of them. ‘I don’t think they knew they were being photographed,’ he said. 

Tony Figueroa, a former bodyguard, has claimed in legal papers that Maxwell asked him to recruit school-aged girls to visit Epstein. He also testified that Maxwell and Epstein took part in multiple threesomes with some of them. 

When the whole edifice crumbled in 2005, Florida police had identified between 36 and 60 victims. 

A ‘little black book’ containing Maxwell’s contacts included details of scores of young girls. Notepaper left by the telephone showed she was arranging for several of the girls to regularly visit Epstein. 

Epstein was eventually arrested but, after three years of legal wrangles, he negotiated an extraordinary plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to two minor prostitution charges and was required to spend 13 months in open prison. 

Despite the public setback, Maxwell remained a loyal friend, continuing to organise his social calendar and at Christmas 2010 — by which time he was a convicted child sex offender — persuading Prince Andrew to join Woody Allen and a host of celebrities at a dinner party at Epstein’s New York home. 

In 2013 Prince Andrew attended her birthday bash at the Dorchester in London. Yet by then, more trouble was brewing. 

In 2014, I revealed that court papers had been filed in Florida which, for the first time, accused Maxwell of orchestrating Epstein’s abuse. 

She responded by hiring London law firm Devonshires, who claimed Epstein’s crimes ‘were committed long after Ghislaine Maxwell ceased to have dealings with him’ — an allegation that was demonstrably untrue. 

At this point, she remained in close contact with Prince Andrew. A leaked email sent at 5.50am on January 3, 2015, reveals that Andrew wrote to Maxwell: ‘Got some specific questions to ask you about Virginia Roberts.’ 

She replied: ‘Have some info — call me when you have a moment.’ And in June last year she visited the Prince in his private quarters at Buckingham Palace. Two months later, Epstein was arrested for the second and final time. 

By then, Maxwell was thought to be quietly holed up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, north of Boston in the U.S., with a tech company boss called Scott Borgerson. 

She had reportedly moved to a £3 million oceanfront mansion with several acres of private woodland in 2016, having allegedly persuaded Borgerson, then 43, to abandon his wife and young children for her. 

By the time the media descended on the property, she had vanished and there followed a surreal period during which she seemed to have disappeared entirely, offering neither explanations nor apologies to Epstein’s many victims. 

There was one apparent sighting at a Los Angeles burger bar, another in a Brazilian hotel resort. At one point her own lawyers were forced to tell a New York court they had no idea where she was living and were unable to contact her. 

In a final act of shamelessness, she filed a lawsuit against the (by then) late Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, claiming she was entitled to his cash to pay her legal and personal security fees. 

That claim has yet to be settled. But, given the seriousness of the events yesterday afternoon, Ghislaine Maxwell may soon be spending an extended period in the one place where money can’t buy you a better existence.