Media-dominant Maxwells — and Me

February 2000: Future President, future wife, plus two future co-conspirators

RATHER UNUSUALLY, I HAVE A PERSONAL STORY to tell this week — about my own dealings with a grotesque media mogul called Robert Maxwell and his family, including his now-notorious daughter Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s of course the former consort, and convicted accomplice, of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein; an abhorrent pairing of individuals whose joint exploitation of underage girls still preoccupies the fervid attention of our nation’s media.

To tell the story fully I have to go back more than fifty years. A loud ratatat on the door of my rooms in college woke me at three a.m.  I was being summoned to our payphone by the staircase. Incoming calls were rare after midnight, but when they came they were usually for me. I was a student journalist, editor of the student body’s newspaper. When I picked up the handset, I heard the distressed voice of my colleague, Denis, who every week wrote our paper’s gossip column.

“I’ve been kidnapped,” said Denis. “I’m somewhere in the countryside. Don’t know where. The farmer who let me use his phone can tell you. And what’s worse, David, they tarred-and-feathered me!” At this point he broke down in sobs … and I found myself talking with the farmer who gave me directions for coming to rescue my columnist.

When my team and I got to him, it was clear that Denis had (perhaps understandably) exaggerated his plight a little. After all he had been blindfolded, was confused and of course been very frightened. But it was not really thick tar, but in fact sticky pink emulsion paint that his assailants had poured over him, and then scattered onto it the contents of a torn goose-down pillow. Not as difficult to clean up as actual tar … but still pretty nasty.

Denis had been walking home to his college just before its gates closed at midnight, when three or four young men (he couldn’t be exactly sure how many) had jumped him from behind, tightened a black sack over his head and bundled him into a van. They drove out into farmland, tying his hands and yelling abuse at him along the way, including the rather odd insult “tabloid scum!” But they never said quite why they had launched their attack on him. They did the paint-and-feathering in a barn near the small Oxfordshire village of Cumnor, and left him there. He wasn’t locked up. He was able to walk to the farmhouse – giving its owner quite a shock when he desperately banged on his door, while unintentionally smearing it with pink daubs.

ROBERT MAXWELL, with youngest daughter GHISLAINE

We had a pretty good idea what lay behind this assault and humiliation. It was a revenge attack. For our weekly paper’s edition that had appeared only the previous day, I had elevated Denis’s column to a hard-news position on the front page. He had a news scoop, concerning the millionaire publishing magnate Robert Maxwell (right).

The businessman had just bought the rival publication to ours. Both were staffed entirely by undergraduates, and each owned by small, privately-owned companies who were not expected to be great money-makers. Ours was called Cherwell, a name that came from one of Oxford’s two rivers, and we imitated, certainly looked very like, our national tabloid dailies. The publication Maxwell had just acquired was Isis, named after our other river, and it was a glossy magazine. We were both regarded as kind-of feeder farms for the nation’s media industries. What made Denis’s story a great scoop for us, was that he’d somehow (and he was remarkable for having well-connected sources) gotten his hands on some company correspondence that indicated Maxwell’s personal, publicly unstated, motivation for making his purchase.

A disturbing fact, evidence no less of arrant nepotism, was that Maxwell’s son Philip — an older one in his brood of eventually nine children — had recently become an Oxford undergraduate.  Maxwell Senior’s plan, his office memos and mailed letters revealed, was that Philip would soon get to write for the now family-owned publication, maybe would become its editor (as was only right, so the elder Maxwell believed) and then later, after graduating, the son could expect to walk into a prime position at a Fleet Street national paper, at the BBC, or in some other elevated realm of the media.

MAXWELL with wife BETTY and five of their nine children in late 1960s. Teenaged PHILIP lower left; Ghislaine lower right. Brothers IAN at upper left and KEVIN upper right. Older daughter ISABEL is at left of father

As dawn rose over Oxfordshire, Denis calmed down a little now, thanks to a hipflask of cognac we’d brought for the victim. We decided to call the University’s disciplinary officers: the so called Proctors. During his ordeal Denis had recognized the voice of at least one of his attackers and he was sure it was a member of the Isis editorial staff. When the Proctors visited the Isis team and the Maxwell family, they elicited a confession of responsibility for the attack, though the family lawyers tried to minimize it as merely a piece of youthful mischief.

The eventual outcome was decidedly satisfactory for me and Denis. At the Proctors’ insistence the Isis team wrote a fulsome apology for the assault, which we featured prominently on Cherwell’s front page at our next printing..

I was often to recall that sordid episode of low-grade thuggery as I pursued my career in London. Britain’s public life throughout that time, the 1970s and ‘80s, carried for me the feel of hectic melodrama, in a landscape populated by some ridiculously extravagant personalities. Foremost among them had to be Robert Maxwell. “Monstrous” … “Fleshy” … “Bestial” and worse … were the sort of words regularly applied to him. He was certainly massive – six feet, two inches tall, and carrying – in my occasionally quite up-close assessments – a weight of nearly 300 pounds.

I wanted nothing to do with him, given my undergraduate experience of his and his people’s methods, but nevertheless I kept being drawn into proximity with him.

I even once had lunch with him – but to be truthful not an entire lunch. The London tv company where I then worked was considering making a documentary about his fast-growing publishing empire — and inevitably about his oversized public image.  I was reluctant at first to take the assignment, but then did so because I had to agree with my bosses that there was some strangely compelling fascination to Maxwell - an alpha male who did outrageous things and got away with them. Mistakenly, perhaps, we considered him to be at the time an unusual phenomenon. Nowadays, especially with Donald Trump in mind, I rather doubt we’d find someone like Maxwell to be all that exceptional. 

He responded to my inquiry (made though his PR representative) by telling me to meet him in the dining room of London’s historically grand Café Royal Hotel. When the carving cart was rolled to our table, the toque-wearing server sliced off, without being told, an enormous (3-inch thick) slab of roast beef for him, and ladled onto it a sizable pile of roasted potatoes and gravy. I opted for a mere wiener schnitzel and green salad.

Our talk didn’t go well, though he was hearty enough to begin with, asking me, “So what can I do for you, young man?” I’d say he was three-quarters of the way through his giant dish, and I was toying with mine, just eking it out slowly, when his tone changed. He now called me “my dear fellow” a couple of times, with more than a hint of sardonic menace. Then without warning he suddenly stood up, a seismic move that rammed our table’s edge into my solar plexus, and muttered, “That’s enough!”  He stomped away, right out of the restaurant.

I can’t be sure which of my questions had ticked him off enough to trigger his departure; it might have been my curiosity about the bank loans that I felt must have been involved in his business’s recent expansion.

His inordinate dominance of the media scene grew even greater when he acquired the nation’s biggest selling newspaper, the Daily Mirror and (of course) used it constantly to promote himself.

He was quite simply a bully. He bullied anyone who worked for him, and bullied all of his family too, as one member of his long-suffering retinue told me -- though he did seem to have, my informant said, a softer spot for his youngest offspring, the daughter Ghislaine.

His very public excesses seemed only to increase with time. And they only ended (or so we all thought) when he mysteriously died at sea in 1991, either falling or jumping off the side of his luxury yacht, named Lady Ghislaine for that favorite last child.

It turned out that part of his management, or gross mismanagement, of the Daily Mirror group’s finances had been a fraud of gigantic proportions – he had stolen vast amounts from the pension fund for all the company’s employees.

Several of the Maxwell children had gone into the business, his sons Kevin and Ian in particular, plus Ghislaine – but not (very notably) Philip, the older son whom the father had groomed at Oxford (so deviously and crudely) for a journalistic or publishing career. When Philip graduated I heard he wanted to run, in his own words “as far away from my father as possible.” He did so quite literally, by emigrating to Argentina.

His brother Kevin had the misfortune to carry much financial responsibility for the scandal. In fact Britain’s medieval-sounding government authority, the Official Receiver, declared him to be the biggest-ever individual bankrupt in UK history, personally owing in today’s money the equivalent of just over a billion US dollars. 

By some overly neat irony, I was assigned to cover Kevin’s and Ian’s months-long joint trial on fraud charges. In the end both brothers were acquitted. Good expensive lawyers employed the apparently persuasive defense that the massive money transfers they carried out were all done under the father’s cunningly false direction. We reporters, perhaps especially those from the Daily Mirror itself, couldn’t fail to be disappointed by the verdict.

THE MAXWELL TENTACLES LATER FOLLOWED ME, rather surprisingly, to New York. An acquaintance of mine, a one-time BBC bureau chief in the city, said he had a message for me. Of all unlikely people it came from Ghislaine Maxwell. Since her own move to the city she’d been hearing “good things” about me and my work, and wondered if I’d like to have a drink with her. By this stage of my life I’d long stopped drinking alcohol — and more than that, I frankly had no great wish to mix with anyone bearing her family name. But nonetheless (and probably out of the sheer morbid curiosity that I know I often exhibit as a reporter) I agreed to a meeting – at the old “44” bar of the Royalton Hotel.

I was guarded when we met, at 3pm one April weekday in the late 1990’s, she sipping champagne, I a seltzer. She was effusive in the face of my obvious caution, talking of how very much she was enjoying New York life, and was I? I merely nodded a slow assent, and she gushed onward.

I didn’t want to mention her family, preferring to wait for whatever she might say about them unasked. She made no reference to them at first, but did talk about her “friend,” calling him early on “You know, the financier Jeffrey Epstein.” I didn’t know him, though I acknowledged I did know of him.

DONALD TRUMP and GHISLAINE MAXWELL at a 2000 event in NYC — Photo © Patick McMullan

She painted an enthusiastic picture. “Jeffrey does throw the most splendid parties. I could get you on the list for the next one. Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz often come – and John Glenn the astronaut.”

“Really?” I said flatly, in hope of communicating my minimal, actually zero interest.  

With an abrupt shift she suddenly asked, “Did you know my father?” I ventured only as far as to say, “Well, our paths crossed a few times, but I can’t say I knew him in any real sense.”

“But you know how he died,” she said. “Off the Canary Islands, yes? I believe he was murdered.”

I was skeptical. “If you mean that someone threw him overboard,” I said, “who could possibly have done that?”

She gave an exaggerated upward shrug of her shoulders. It was the only time in our 45-minute exchange that even a moment of silence was allowed to elapse. And then she turned back again to her financier friend. She insisted once more that I should come to one of their parties; another would be due soon, probably within the next couple of months. “He has an island, too,” she suddenly added. “It’s pretty amazing.”

We parted, with me for one feeling relieved the encounter was over. She gave me her card with full contact details; I gave her an email address (which was publicly available on my website anyway) but not my phone number.

Over the next year or two she was to send me three, maybe four emailed invitations to Epstein parties. I ignored them and they eventually stopped. Then two decades later (in mid-2020) Ghislaine was apprehended in New Hampshire, to where she had fled after Epstein was arrested on child sex abuse charges for the second time — and this time evidently killed himself while in federal custody. My reaction was — of course — to feel inexpressibly glad that I had never accepted any of her invitations.

But I couldn’t help feeling curious about how she ever got involved with Epstein. I contacted the Maxwell company insider who had once before helped me appreciate the extent of her father’s crushing intimidation of both employees and family. He raised a question in return, “What do you do if you’ve lived in the shadow of a very strong, very selfish, demanding character who turns out to be a rogue? Maybe you find solace with another strong, selfish character who you know is also a rogue, but you think you can overlook that.”

Three years now after her conviction — and 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking — Ghislaine has, we all know, surfaced again to public view. The same US President who had said when she was arrested, “I wish her well, whatever it is. I do wish her well. I’m not looking for anything bad for her,” was now encouraging his Justice Department to “open discussions” with her. To what real end, I have had to wonder, along with many of my fellow journalists.

The discussions have apparently ranged over a reported one hundred names-she-could-name as being involved in her and Epstein’s ugly form of partying. Speculation inevitably went rampant over a possible commutation of sentence for her, maybe even a Presidential pardon. Trump himself declined to comment on that possibility, except to remind reporters that “Well, I'm allowed to give her a pardon …” And earlier this week her Florida-based lawyers submitted to the US Supreme Court a fresh filing in pursuit of her claim that she’s entitled to federal immunity under a plea-bargain previously made with Epstein.

A caustic colleague, John Sweeney, back then with The Observer newspaper, reported like me on the two brothers’ London trial … and then all these years later (unlike me) also covered their sister’s New York trial. He gave me what I must consider a sharp summation: “The Maxwells have a history of getting off … and all over the world, but especially in the US, money and power can always ‘trump’ justice.”