Epstein Files Nostalgia: My Childhood with Ghislaine Maxwell and the Investigation
This week, I received an unexpected phone call from a former colleague. "You're in the Epstein files," he said excitedly. "You're in them a lot." I know I cannot have been the only person to receive such a call this week, after the US authorities abruptly published some three million documents linked to the investigation into the dead paedophile financier. Many will have broken out in a cold sweat on hearing such news—were their glands able to produce sweat, that is. But for me, this news brought on a strange feeling of nostalgia.
Early Encounters with Ghislaine Maxwell
It took me back to a time some 25 years ago when I was an investigative journalist and my editor asked me to look at the wayward company the then Prince Andrew appeared to be keeping. That led in turn to me becoming the first journalist to publicly address the strange relationship between Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell—and to identify a third party in their very dark menage, a then little-known American called Jeffrey Epstein. I had never heard of Epstein before undertaking that investigation, whereas I had already known Ghislaine for most of my life—and disliked her profoundly.
I first encountered her in Oxford, as long ago as 1966. We had been born only five months apart but came from very different worlds: she was the precocious daughter of the local multi-millionaire, Robert Maxwell, and I was the son of the Maxwell family's GP. Ghislaine lived with her famous father and family at Headington Hill Hall, the grand mansion that the Czech financier had ostentatiously acquired as a family home—in a typically strange deal, renting it from the city council for just one pound a year.
In his role as the Maxwell family GP, my father, Dr Reginald Rosser, was regularly summoned to Headington Hill to discuss the health of one of the Maxwells—and he took to bring me along with him on these occasions. So, as my father and Robert Maxwell drank whisky and discussed grown-up matters, Ghislaine and I would be left together in the vast playroom. I assume both our fathers thought it might be nice for us to play together—but it wasn't. We loathed each other on sight.
A Glimpse of Her Twisted Character
Looking back now on this strange long ago scenario, it feels rather like the early encounters between lowly Pip and haughty Estella in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations—except in our case, the haughty Ghislaine would be the one whose expectations would turn out very differently to what she may have then imagined. We would spend many awkward and uncomfortable hours ignoring each other in that Oxford playroom. But worse was to come: that autumn, Ghislaine and I were both inducted into the same prep school class—what would now be called reception—at the local Greycoates School. And it was there she revealed the first glimpse of her twisted true character.
This happened when another member of class pinched the packet of peanuts with which her mother, Betty Maxwell, had packed her off to school that morning—and, rather than take this as part of playground cut and thrust as the rest of us would, entitled Ghislaine squealed. On hearing of the peanut theft, our teacher declared that whoever had taken the missing nuts would have to hand over their own snack in return. Having apparently clocked that I was the only classmate who had a chocolate bar in my tuckbox rather than something more healthy, Ghislaine spotted an opportunity: "Nigel ate my peanuts!" she announced.
Even though completely innocent, I was forced to hand over my Bar Six, which she then consumed in front of me—throwing triumphant glances at me as she ate. In this admittedly very small way, I had become one of the earliest victims of Ghislaine Maxwell. It is a status I now share with hundreds of others—all of whom suffered more gravely from the association, at least one fatally so.
Investigating the Unholy Trinity
Thankfully, our paths in life soon diverged, and it would be another two decades before I heard of her again—when she began to make appearances in the gossip columns as what they called then an 'IT girl'. None of this meant very much to me then—until I found myself investigating her. This came about because, by this point, I had become a journalist on the Evening Standard, at the time the London sister paper of the national Daily Mail, and, although she wasn't a significant enough character to warrant investigation on her own merits, a man she was hanging about with was.
Prince Andrew, as he was then, was a true VIP—he had been second in line to the throne until the birth of his nephews William and Harry. But he had recently left both his wife, Fergie, and his job in the Royal Navy—having famously seen active service during the Falklands war—and now appeared to be having something like a midlife crisis. In the preceding months, Andrew had been pictured with topless female sunbathers on a boat off Thailand; attending sweaty Florida parties with some insalubrious characters—and so on, and on.
My editor was curious as to the lifestyle choices he had been making and the company he was now keeping as the noughties began—and this company, I was to discover, was Ghislaine. Wherever I looked at Andrew, there was Ghislaine in the background, always. Ghislaine had met Andrew in the early 1980s while still a student at Oxford—where she'd arrived no doubt after Daddy made a sizable donation to Balliol College to get around the small matter of entry requirements.
Not for Ghislaine the usual student social scene of shabby junior common rooms and pubs though—instead, she would throw huge and reputedly debauched parties at Headington Hill Hall. And in turn, she would be invited to similar bashes in other grand houses where young posh girls like her would inevitably find themselves introduced to Andrew. Soon, she had outgrown the confines of the Oxford set and graduated—both literally and metaphorically—to the London party scene.
The Rise and Fall of a Socialite
And there her life was a whirl of parties and holidays and champagne—until the dark day in 1991, when the man funding all this, who adored her enough to name his luxury yacht 'The Lady Ghislaine', somehow fell off said yacht into the Atlantic off the Canary Islands. In the weeks that followed, it became apparent that Robert Maxwell had been an enormous fraud: he had been keeping his foundering business empire afloat by embezzling cash from, among others, Daily Mirror pensioners. Ghislaine's brothers were both arrested (and later acquitted)—and she, who had never wanted for anything, was suddenly penniless.
This dramatic change in circumstances meant that the only currency she now had was social—a close relationship with people like Prince Andrew suddenly was enormously valuable to wealthy people who wanted to meet a senior royal. This seemed to explain why Ghislaine was there with the divorced womaniser Prince at every party, making introductions. The article I duly wrote for The Standard focused on this, bearing the headline: "Andrew's fixer; She's the daughter of Robert Maxwell and She's manipulating His Jetset Lifestyle". It was, I believe, the first newspaper article to expose the increasingly strange and symbiotic relationship between Andrew and Ghislaine.
But my investigation into the pair also threw up another name who also seemed to be becoming ever present: Jeffrey Epstein. There were already a number of stories swirling around about this strange and mysteriously wealthy man. A friend told me how Epstein had brought a NYPD-issue pump action shotgun to a dinner party as a stunt. Another told how Epstein had arrived—with Ghislaine—at an upmarket Parisian restaurant wearing a cowboy hat and a tracksuit, and both proceeded to be 'vile' to guests and waiters alike.
Connecting the Dots
Epstein seemed fishy business-wise too. Official records in the States showed he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon in New York, how he'd bought up vast tracts of land in New Jersey—and he had mysterious links to Southern Air Transport, a former CIA black ops outfit that he ran from Columbus, Ohio. But where did his vast wealth come from? Ghislaine had initially dismissed Epstein, in characteristically caustic manner, as 'that Jewish grifter from Brooklyn', but as it became plain quite how much money he had at his disposal, she thought again—and they were soon best of friends. And now Andrew was joining them in an unholy Trinity.
When I called Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse in early 2001 to ask about all this, Epstein answered the telephone himself—but instead of responding to my various questions, he just chuckled down the phone while I talked. Far from disliking scrutiny, he was apparently enjoying it. Again, I believe I was the first journalist to connect Andrew, Ghislaine, and Epstein—as it had become plain that all three were becoming inexorably entwined. And in the years that followed, Epstein loomed larger and larger in both their lives—and Ghislaine was suddenly flush with cash again, and Andrew at more and more parties, meeting more and more women—and girls.
Epstein Files Cameo and Aftermath
So this is how I came to have an Epstein Files cameo this week, featuring in some 12 documents among the six million pages relating to the case released by the US Department of Justice. First, there was the inclusion of that 2001 Evening Standard article. Then, also included were a series of emails from me from 2009, by which time I was back looking at Epstein, this time as a freelance reporter for The Mail on Sunday. Serial sex offender Epstein had finally been arrested in 2007, charged and subsequently convicted of various offences. And this in turn emboldened the numerous victims of Epstein and Maxwell's years of sexual abuse and trafficking to begin to come forward in their droves.
Depositions were sworn in the US courts, including references by a victim named only as 'Jane Doe 102' to an unnamed 'Royal' involved with the scheming pair. I was all but certain who this would be referring to but was trying to corroborate this to a degree that would satisfy the Mail's lawyers to publicly name then Prince Andrew in connection with a vice ring. I had long been in correspondence with lawyer Brad Edwards, one of the good guys who had helped put Epstein behind bars. I knew that if I could identify Jane Doe 102, whose claims were backed up by independent depositions by eyewitnesses that I obtained from lawyers, then she would be able to confirm she was talking about the then Duke of York.
The Epstein Files show though that Brad could not help connect me to Jane Doe 102; our emails were used as evidence in another trial. This came when Epstein filed a lawsuit against Edwards later in 2009, accusing him of racketeering and fraud. Epstein alleged that Edwards had fabricated allegations to extort money from him. Thankfully and rightly, Edwards won, and Epstein eventually issued a public apology to the lawyer. In the fullness of time, Jane Doe 102 would turn out to be Virginia Giuffre, the best known victim of Epstein and Ghislaine. And Andrew, by now confirmed as the 'Royal', eventually gave her a reported £12million payout in an out-of-court settlement without admitting any impropriety or crime.
Of course, Virginia took her life last year—making her the most tragic victim of this whole horror show. Soon after this, I moved on to other things professionally, so it was a strange reminder of old times to see my name in those documents this week. And Andrew is now stripped of his title and terminally disgraced, Epstein too is dead, and my old playmate and classmate Ghislaine is serving 20 years in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. It's strange how things work out sometimes.
