Prince Andrew: Expert discusses Ghislaine Maxwell deposition

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Ghislaine Maxwell is awaiting trial behind bars in New York at the moment, having said she will renounce her French and British citizenships if she can be freed on bail. She was arrested last July on charges relating to her former boyfriend and long-time friend, Jeffrey Epstein. He was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, but killed himself in prison before his trial.

Ms Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all six counts, which allege she was involved in Epstein’s sexual exploitation and abuse of minor girls between 1994 and 1997.

Epstein also served a prison sentence back in 2008.

He pleaded guilty to a solicitation of prostitution involving a minor and was sentenced to 18 months in prison — he ended up serving 13 months and became a registered sex offender.

Then, in 2015, Virginia Giuffre alleged she had been forced into sex with Epstein and his friends and issued a civil defamation lawsuit against Ms Maxwell.

At the time, the British socialite expressed concerns she would be affected by the fallout of the case.

Shortly after Ms Maxwell’s arrest last year, a trove of unsealed court documents from that lawsuit revealed an email exchange between Ms Maxwell and the disgraced financier.

An email from Epstein, sent in January 2015, read: “You have done nothing wrong and i woudl [sic] urge you to start acting like it. go outside, head high, not as an esacping [sic] convict. go to parties. deal with it.”

Speaking in the latest episode from the podcast ‘Power: The Maxwells’, host and investigative journalist Tara Palmeri addressed the email exchange.

She said: “In it, he seemed to be calming her nerves about what those same people would say.

“That’s what she did — the party pictures kept coming until the end of 2016.

“Did the invites finally dry up or did she decide to step back?

“Maybe she saw the end was near.”

Ms Palmeri also alleged that the lawsuit did not affect Ms Maxwell’s social status at the time.

She claimed: “If the Upper East side set knew about these claims, it doesn’t look like they were shunning her or treating her like a pariah.”

One member of this social group also spoke to Mr Palmeri for the podcast and said she did not know about these allegations until years later.

The investigative journalist then compared Ms Maxwell’s behaviour with her father, Robert Maxwell, based on a photograph of him in 1991.

She said: “It’s baffling to think that someone with so much to hide would be mugging for cameras for all those years — or, just like her father, she was hiding in public view.”

Ms Palmeri continued: “It reminds me of a picture I saw of her father, from early 1989.

“He was attending the millionaire Michael Forbes’ 70th birthday in Tangiers — and he is wearing a full Moroccan dress.

“Shawls, beads and even a turban — it’s kind of awkward because it wasn’t a costume party.

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“No one else was dressed up. Robert Maxwell just wanted to be seen — maybe that’s where Ghislaine got it from.”

Mr Maxwell was famous for his opulent parties and champagne business, but, before his death in 1991, he had actually run his company into the ground through debt.

He had been illegally siphoning money out of his employees’ pension pots in an attempt to resurrect his publishing company.

Despite these background issues, he continued to live the high-life — as Ms Palmeri points out in her podcast, he even invited big businessmen such as Donald Trump to enjoy his yacht to flaunt his wealthy status.

Similarly, she noted: “There are tonnes of pictures of Ghislaine on the party circuit during those years [Nineties and Noughties].”

American producer and journalist, Holly Peterson, also discussed her interactions with Ms Maxwell from previous parties.

Speaking on the podcast, she explained: “Ghislaine had a kind of ballet dance that she would do — a kind of choreographed dance, where she would stand up, sit down, twirl and connect everybody in the room to each other obsessively.”

According to Ms Peterson, Ms Maxwell “tried to charm everyone in the room, know everyone in the room” and get “anyone that really mattered to make sure her name was in the bold and bright lights of the city”.

However, this reaction to Epstein’s first few scandals is a stark contrast to how she famously responded when he was arrested back in 2019.

She laid low and was discovered by the FBI in a Hampshire mansion.

In an investigation into Ms Maxwell, journalist and author Mark Seal wrote in Vanity Fair how Ms Maxwell withdrew from the party girl image.

He claimed: “Maxwell was in the process of quietly withdrawing from the life she had made for herself [by Spring 2018].

“She shuttered the ocean-protection charity she had founded, the TerraMar Project, which left her with debts of $549,093 [£388,000].

“She even gave up her name, sometimes introducing herself to new acquaintances only as “G.”

A friend, who bumped into Ms Maxwell back in 2018 on a commercial flight, also told Vanity Fair: “Looking back, I personally think she knew that the s*** was really about to go down.”

Power:The Maxwells is available on all podcast providers.

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