Perversion of Justice. The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown

Author:Julie K. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

The Prince and the Piper

In 1992, the British media was fixated on Ian and Kevin Maxwell, who had been directors of their father’s companies. Investigators alleged that the Maxwell brothers had illegally transferred ninety-one million dollars out of the public corporation’s pension funds, and that their father had used that money to buy stock to prop up his failing businesses. 1

Angry pensioners, bankers, and creditors were demanding the return of their money, as the Maxwell family empire collapsed. The New York Daily News filed for bankruptcy, and the family’s assets were frozen. Liquidators moved in to recover whatever they could turn into cash.

Ghislaine Maxwell escaped the scandal by moving to New York and renting a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, which she furnished with flea market finds.

Despite her mother’s claim that the family was broke, Ghislaine was rumored to be receiving one hundred thousand dollars a year from a million-dollar trust fund set up by her father.2

Detectives hired to trace her father’s money were skeptical that Ghislaine had been left penniless.

“It is entirely possible, and we didn’t have the resources to check, that Maxwell could have siphoned off money from some of his 400 companies in America to her. She was living on something,” one investigator said. 3

At twenty-nine, she was venturing into New York’s social scene, attending fashion shows and restaurant openings. To her delight, she realized that very few people in New York cared about her family scandal.

She set about reinventing herself in a way that she couldn’t on the other side

of the Atlantic, where victims of her father’s fraud scheme were still palpably angry. On a visit to London, she wore a platinum-blond wig over her hair to disguise herself so she wouldn’t be recognized by the media. 4

Her sisters Christine and Isabel had moved to San Francisco, virtually vanishing from public life. The twins had married well and they amassed their own fortune in the 1990s Silicon Valley internet boom. One of their companies produced the internet search engine Magellan, which they sold for millions. 5

Despite her Oxford education, Ghislaine, however, exhibited little ambition to build a business or a career. Having been born into a charmed life, she was known for entertaining, socializing, and shopping. The British tabloids took to calling her “the shopper” when she embarked on the Concorde to London for an extravagant shopping trip in November 1992. It was rumored she was living off her father’s stolen money, and she showed

little sympathy for the victims whom he had robbed.6

Upon her return to New York, she was seen accompanied by a graying, frumpy, overweight businessman who was barely noticed. Jeffrey Epstein was described as “a shadowy, almost maverick New York property developer” who was said to be introducing Ghislaine to Manhattan’s social circuit. 7

The two had become inseparable, and within months, it was rumored that she had fallen in love with the mysterious financier. His friends attributed Epstein’s rise in Manhattan society to “a remorseless attraction to well-connected, rich and

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