British socialite charged with perjury, conspiracy and transporting minors with intent to engage in criminal sex acts.

Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and close friend of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested in the United States on Thursday on charges of helping to lure underage girls who were then sexually abused by Epstein.

Maxwell, who lived for years with Epstein, was taken into custody around 8:30am in the state of New Hampshire, said FBI spokesman Marty Feely.

Epstein killed himself in a federal detention centre in New York last summer while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Maxwell, 58, has been accused by many women of recruiting them to give Epstein massages, during which they were pressured into sex. Those accusations, until now, never resulted in criminal charges.

She is the daughter of late British media magnate Robert Maxwell, who founded a publishing house and owned tabloids including the Daily Mirror. It emerged after Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death in 1991 that he had looted hundreds of millions of dollars from employee pension funds to prop up his crumbling business empire.

In the early 1990s, she moved to New York, where she worked selling real estate. Around that time she became romantically involved with Epstein, who described her in a 2003 Vanity Fair article as his “best friend”.

Maxwell largely disappeared from public view in 2016 and was particularly elusive after Epstein was charged with sex trafficking. The Washington Post reported in August that Maxwell had been living in a secluded oceanfront mansion in Massachusetts owned by a technology entrepreneur, Scott Borgerson, who declined to comment when asked about her location.

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