Probably Unanswerable Questions About Ghislaine Maxwell
Over the past few days, people have been asking me a number of important questions about Ghislaine Maxwell to which I have no answers. I do, however, have the ability to discuss what might be true. So, with apologies to Bill Simmons, here are my “probably unanswerable questions about Ghislaine Maxwell”.
But first, a link to my interview on Australian TV about the Maxwell case, answering the questions that can be answered.
Why Did Ghislaine Maxwell Take Up With Jeffrey Epstein?
I am not a psychiatrist, so I do not know the answer. And, to quote (with some expletives removed) Sgt. Dignam from The Departed, “If I were Sigmund F—ing Freud, I don’t think I would get an answer.”
Others have speculated that Maxwell’s relationship with Epstein can be traced to her relationship with her father, the late Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell was a Czech Jew, who moved to the UK after World War II and became a press magnate, before dying in mysterious circumstances as his finances collapsed like a Ponzi scheme. The Times Of London wrote:
A few years after her father’s death she had attached herself to Epstein, and she could not have found a better daddy substitute. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein was corrupt, power-hungry and greedy for pleasure. Both reinvented themselves to fit in among the upper classes. Both were slippery in the extreme — and, in the most remarkable parallel, Epstein also managed to die in clouded circumstances just before his crimes caught up with him.
In her opening argument, Maxwell’s attorney Bobbi Sternheim said that when Maxwell met Epstein, “he was a James Bond-like character.”
One thing is for certain, Maxwell was not driven to Epstein by poverty, like so many of their victims. Even after Robert Maxwell’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell was a rich woman - with the money having been placed in trust over the years by her father. She never had to worry about money.
Why Didn’t Ghislaine Maxwell Flip On Epstein?
Again, I do not know. What I do know is that Ghislaine Maxwell made herself unusable as a witness at her April 2016 deposition. During that deposition, she denied that she participated in any sexual activity with minors, that she knew that Epstein had any sexual partners other than her (except for one four-way encounter with a “blonde and brunette” who went unnamed), and even that she never saw any females under the age of 18 at Epstein’s home (except for children of Maxwell’s friends, who came in the company of their parents). By the time Epstein was arrested in 2018, Maxwell could not be a credible witness against him.
Why Did Ghislaine Maxwell Stay In The United States, Instead Of Moving To France Where She Would Not Have Been Subject To Extradition?
To me, this is the biggest mystery of all. Because she was born in France in 1961, Ghislaine Maxwell is a tri-national, with American, British and French citizenship. In her bail application, she offered to give up her British and French citizenship, but was denied.
France will not extradite its citizens to the United States to face sex trafficking charges. This has been recently demonstrated by the differing fates of Claire and Sara Bronfman in the NXIVM sex trafficking case. Claire Bronfman, who remained in the United States, was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for her role in NXIVM. Her sister Sara remained in France, where she has not been subject to arrest and is free.
After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2018 (and quickly died in jail), Ghislaine Maxwell had to know that she was at risk of arrest if she stayed in the United States. In December 2019, she moved from her 7 bedroom waterfront mansion in Manchester-By-The-Sea, Massachusetts to a home in Bedford, New Hampshire that she bought under a pseudonym. She was there when the FBI arrested her in July 2020.
Did she take a perverse thrill from staying in the United States? Did her (soon to be ex-) husband insist on staying in the United States? I do not know.
The one thing that I know is that Ghislaine Maxwell will wake up in a cell tomorrow and have to regret the decisions that will likely lead her to be incarcerated for the rest of her life.