Ghislaine Maxwell, whose trial on sex trafficking charges began in Manhattan’s Federal Court House on Monday, exerts a poisonous and powerful fascination. We are appalled, although not especially surprised, perhaps, when a rich, older man like Jeffrey Epstein preys on young girls, treating them as toys. When a well-brought-up woman is alleged to have been involved in procuring the girls, reeling them in for creepy Croesus in his Florida lair, the reaction is one of profound shock and revulsion. A witness, who claimed she was ensnared in the Epstein-Maxwell web as a teenager, recalled that she found “Ghislaine” reassuring, even motherly.
It explains the lack of sympathy we feel, I think, for an English socialite who has endured 16 months in solitary confinement in a 10ft by 12ft cell. A young girl does not expect an older female to put her in harm’s way. She takes the proffered hand (a promise of more money than she’s ever had, a career involving massage, but only at the start, honey) and trustingly follows the smiling lady.
Maxwell, we should remember, is still innocent until the jury returns its verdict. Although her crimes were of an infinitely more heinous kind, Myra Hindley used her femininity to pick up children and bring them to the psychopath Ian Brady, the boyfriend with whom she was obsessed. (It was a Faustian pact of that kind which Maxwell is alleged to have had with Epstein.) Brady murdered the children, but it was Hindley who became the poster girl for evil. We expect better of women and when they are revealed to be devoid of maternal instinct they are damned irredeemably in the public imagination.
They say you must never confuse a Madame (a respectful title for a French lady of high social status) with a madam, a woman who runs a brothel and procures prostitutes for rich male clients. Yet that is the confusion of which Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused. Born into wealth, privilege and domestic tyranny (her bullying father Robert Maxwell owned the Mirror Group of newspapers), Ghislaine attended Balliol College, Oxford, and is said to have dandled an ankle on the young Boris Johnson’s knee. It’s quite a journey from jeunesse dorée to rat-infested jail.
In the first few days of the trial, it sounds as if Maxwell has been turning her famous charm on the jury as though her life depended on it. Which it does. The 59-year-old faces up to 80 years behind bars if convicted on all counts.
Maxwell is certainly an easy person to dislike. That annoying, posh, unpronounceable name – Ghee-line? Gar-lane? Gizz-lean? – for starters. Still, we might pause and ask ourselves why a woman is the only one in the dock for Epstein’s depravity. What happened to all the male celebrities listed in the flight logs of the Lolita Express, so called because Epstein used it to fly under-age girls to his many houses while he entertained high-powered male “friends”, including Bill Clinton?
Ghislaine Maxwell will deserve whatever the US jury decides – but, from here, it looks like she is the fall gal for a lot of bad guys.
