House of Maxwell

All right! Good morning, everybody,

and welcome back to

True Crime Loser. I hope you're doing well.

So, I have an exciting new update

regarding the Ghislaine Maxwell case.

Her trial is right around the corner and it's time to find out

what's going to happen to old Ghislaine.

This is a sinister-looking place.

This is where she's been...

..out in Brooklyn for the past year.

FAINT COMMOTION

Listen to it. You can hear people screaming and clapping

and moving around, and not where you want to be.

Ghislaine went from private jets all over the world,

private islands, hanging out with royalty, academics, scientists.

Now, she probably feels very alone.

50 years, this family has been in a scandal.

First, the dad.

Then, it's the brothers. And now,

here we are, Ghislaine is on the chopping block.

Stay tuned.

BIRDS TWEET, DOG BARKS

REEL WHIRLS

Well, it's sad. It's always very sad

when you lose a parent, but you have to go on.

REEL WHIRLS

Very happily married for 42 years.

We have seven children.

We have seven children. We're very proud of them.

We're very proud of them.

REEL SPINS

I still have ambitions, which I intend...

..with God's help, to fulfil.

REEL SPINS

SHARP CLUNK

DISTANT BIRDS SQUAWK

It's nearly six o'clock on Sunday, November 3rd, 1991,

and this is the last-known image of Robert Maxwell alive.

He's on the yacht named after

his daughter, the Lady Ghislaine.

Sailing off the Canary Islands,

he's filmed relaxing by his staff.

But across his vast media empire,

the mood is different.

PHONE RINGS

Something is worrying his senior executives,

which Maxwell knows,

because he's secretly bugging their phones.

RINGING CONTINUES

PHONE CLICKS

These recordings have never been made public.

They've been re-voiced to protect identities.

PHONE RINGS AND CLICKS

PHONE CLICKS

What happens to Robert Maxwell

over the next 48 hours sends

shock waves around the world...

..and changes the destiny of his family... forever.

I mean, what drives you on? Why do you do this?

DOOR OPENS Sorry.

Jesus. Now, that's an unwelcome visitor. Fuck off.

In the early hours of this morning, a victorious

Robert Maxwell emerged from Reed International's

London headquarters after clinching

the multimillion-pound takeover deal.

At last, he'd achieved his lifelong ambition to own

a Fleet Street newspaper,

and he went straight to The Mirror offices to claim his prize.

The first thing that happens is, he calls all the executives in to

the main executive restaurant at The Mirror, saying,

"I am your saviour. I am a wonderful person."

He promised everything.

But that morning that Maxwell arrived, we had, none of us,

any idea the way the whole thing was going to be shaken up.

Looking this way. Thank you. CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK

Can you look this way?

I keep on repeating,

I'll say it for the last time,

I'm not on some ego trip.

Could you look this way? HE CHUCKLES

To be honest, I'd never met a man with a bigger ego,

but who could blame him?

A self-made millionaire,

a brilliant businessman,

a former member of parliament

and, to top it all, a war hero.

If he moved into a room, the crowds parted like the sea.

He was extraordinary.

I mean, you would be on your toes all the time,

wondering what was going to come next,

and from what direction it was going to come, too.

Again, the subtitle is missing.

It's on its way, I'm told.

Bang, bang.

Up to now, sales had been pretty dismal,

and he had his sights set on our greatest rival.

HE WHISTLES

Could you come a little bit closer, please?

I am committed to getting The Mirror on top of The Sun.

I have set myself a target of two years to achieve the goal.

We were all right behind him.

We wanted to... we wanted to win as much as he did, obviously,

and there was a great deal of enthusiasm

for things that he wanted to do.

The Sun was the biggest-selling tabloid.

It was owned by Rupert Murdoch,

and Maxwell and Murdoch were sworn enemies.

Fleet Street is caught up in its first all-out, no-holds-barred

circulation battle since the 1930s.

The proprietors of The Sun and The Daily Mirror

are in sudden and fierce competition for readers.

I don't know that I relish war,

but the public likes to see this fight,

and let's see how it ends.

I'm going to beat Mr Murdoch fair and square in the marketplace.

No vendettas.

Yesterday, Mr Maxwell called me a "moth-eaten kangaroo".

Well, I, er, never got quite to that stage!

He could see how it could be a big commercial success,

and he did make it a big commercial success,

and it was making a lot of money for him.

And his way of doing things was very different.

Everybody who works in circulation will have it as his or her duty,

and I'm astonished to see no women at all, by the way.

Is that so? Yes, that is so. Well, I do promise you that

I will want to see women recruited into this profession.

Why are there no women in this?

Well, I think one of the basic problems is that the number

of occasions when a chap has to get out early in the morning

and lug bundles of papers about to make good shortages, and it's

a matter of physical strength more than anything else, and...

Many women have been kept out of interesting jobs on this notion

that they can't lift a bundle.

When did you last lift large quantities of bundles?

Before I went to the Sunday Mirror, I worked for Rupert Murdoch,

and he used to ask me what it was like to work for Rupert.

And his whole life was

a competition with Rupert.

It's tiring and tough on the toil to the top,

but some women have already climbed aboard

the high-speed elevator to the executive floor.

Eve Pollard took command of

the Sunday Mirror,

and she's got a masterful way with a meeting full of men.

We're waiting for Tony Frost.

Thanks.

Tony, will you close the door? Yeah.

It was certainly a brave decision to hire a woman.

It was my first newspaper editorship,

and editing a newspaper is about the most fun you can have,

and he did not make my life difficult.

I think being a woman, I got away with slightly more than the men did,

because it wasn't a challenge to his masculinity.

It was his whole dream about being a newspaper publisher.

There was the image, you know, Rolls-Royces everywhere,

champagne at receptions,

big events that he would have,

and he liked the court of King Bob.

Erm, but, of course, he was clever.

I mean, there's no doubt about it.

Of course, he was a crook, but I didn't know that then.

I mean, he was quite smart, he was interested in politics,

and he lived in Headington Hall,

this great house in Oxford.

And it was a beautiful big old house.

Apparently, it belonged to the council and he leased it.

Never occurred to me to think that it was owned by Oxford Town Council,

and that he was just paying rental on it. I just thought,

"Well, he's obviously done terribly well with the papers."

It was sort of a mini Hollywood-sur-Oxford.

It was not like a British family.

I mean, aristocrats of those times lived in sort of houses

slightly falling apart, with torn sofas and loads of dogs.

That was not the life of Bob Maxwell.

CLAPPING

When you go to Headington Hall, at the root of it, there is Bob's wife,

Betty, and there are the children.

And they were there. I mean,

Bob often, you know, barely went home at the weekend.

Or went home for an hour or two, or half a day, and then would

come back to the Sunday Mirror on a Saturday night.

You'd think he'd stay in that lovely house with his children,

and that would have been quite hard sometimes.

I mean, you want your father to be this lovely cosy father,

to love you unconditionally.

And also, he'd had a family where, you know, children had died,

one child was in a car crash.

I mean, they'd had a lot of tragedy in that family

and, yet, they kept going. And the children all were well-educated,

obviously went to school and

did well because Betty helped them,

and Bob obviously sort of

rather insisted on it.

I mean, I'm sure he loved his children.

I mean, I saw him being very fond of

Ian and Kevin and Ghislaine.

But it's the sort of love that can grab you by the throat,

as well as by the heart, and you never knew which way it would go.

PHONE RINGS

RINGING CONTINUES