Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell?

Once upon a Christmas time in a big house on a hill

there lived a man, his wife and their eight children.

The family filled the house with their excitement,

presents for everyone,

particularly Ghislaine, who is five on Christmas Day.

And like the baby of any family, has Daddy very much under control.

When Father Christmas came last year, I was fast asleep

and I took my daddy's stocking away from his bedroom

and I hanged it up on my bed

and Father Christmas put some toys in my daddy's stocking.

Breaking news !in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.

She has been convicted of helping American financier Jeffrey Epstein

sexually abuse teenage girls.

Ghislaine Maxwell just got convicted

of five of six of the serious counts against her

including the most serious counts: Sex trafficking of a minor.

Three of her siblings were inside there to hear

!that verdict being handed down.

She's from a !dynasty that has known disgrace

and is now disgraced, herself.

Ghislaine Maxwell! was the socialite whose manners and magnetism

attracted princes and presidents.

Prince Andrew, who was friends with both Ghislaine Maxwell

and Jeffrey Epstein

during this lurid chapter of abuse.

The women who took the stand,

they say that Ghislaine Maxwell identified their frailties.

It was her charm and her magnetism

that made them feel safe.

Ghislaine Maxwell faces up to 65 years behind bars.

That could potentially be the rest of her life.

The road to justice has been far too long,

but today, justice has been done.

The women were to take off their tops and bras

and present their breasts to the men.

It was really as if just being Ghislaine wasn't enough.

I began to see! that there was a deficit there,

which was being filled by being this charming host.

I said to Jeffrey, like,

"She has really masculine, aggressive energy".

And he said something like, "Yeah, she's got a bigger penis than me".

She ferociously slammed the table

and my court reporter looked at me and said, "I'm so scared".

We had to find massage therapists for him,

and the younger the better.

I have been silent for 20 years.

I don't want to be a victim.

I remember a little girl walking upstairs crying.

And she was wearing a uniform,

you know, and I'm like, "Whoa. She's a kid".

And she says to me,

"They are nothing, they are trash".

I think there were signs that things were happening.

At what point, if she did,

did she see what was becoming of her?

The football league's first elected lady director

is still, in fact, a student.

She's at Balliol College in Oxford, studying French and History.

My name is Michael Crick, I'm a journalist,

and more than 40 years ago I was president of the Oxford Union.

To make ends meet, I did some tutoring,

and one of my tutees was Ghislaine Maxwell.

She'd been at Marlborough,

one of our top private schools in this country.

She hadn't done as well in her A-levels as she should have done,

and that's where I came in.

Ghislaine would sit there, on the corner of the desk.

There was I, I was 21, she was 17,

and she knew she was good looking, and she was very self-assured.

She was incredibly bright, she picked things up very, very quickly.

But the problem was, she just didn't do enough work.

I vividly remember her showing me one essay

that was two thirds of one of side of paper,

and I was expecting sort of seven or eight pages.

She'd probably written it in ten minutes on the bus.

There was a lot of pressure on her to succeed.

Particularly, as her father, Robert Maxwell,

he'd actually given money to Balliol back in the 1960s.

Oxford United have gained a reputation,

justifiably, for attractive football,

but that image is not just restricted to the pitch.

It goes all the way up to the boardroom,

and I'm delighted to welcome Ghislaine Maxwell.

Well, I actually went to a boy's school,

where there were something like 1,000 boys and 40 girls.

And so the few girls that were there, we decided to get together

and get ourselves a football team.

And so I played mid-field for them, and we were very successful, as well.

I have a feeling you were a rebel until the end.

When I arrived at Oxford,

she was a very well known name.

The name Maxwell was huge in those days because of her father, Robert.

But she was also very rapidly, I think,

established as a person in her own right.

She was in the glossy magazines, she was in the newspapers.

I think there was always something fascinating about Ghislaine.

What is this person like?

What is it like to be that famous?

She was perceived as the child who could do no wrong.

It's just one of these things that happened,

that the father has a particular favourite child.

Because Bob had nine children.

But she was the youngest,

and she was totally and utterly spoilt.

And I think she was spoilt from birth.

She said to me one day, she said, "Don't forget, I'm Daddy's girl".

My name is Mike Maloney, OBE,

and I was personal photographer to Robert Maxwell.

Robert Maxwell is one of Britain's most influential businessmen.

He was born Ján Ludvík Hoch in Czechoslovakia

to Jewish peasants who were swept away in the Holocaust.

Today he is the stormy petrel of the international big business world.

Robert Maxwell now owns theDaily Mirror, theSunday Mirror,

theSunday People, theSporting Life,

and two Scottish newspapers.

And it was Bob Maxwell who introduced me to his favourite daughter.

And she was lovely.

Very young,

very attractive,

but very quiet.

Almost timid.

She was, literally, the apple of his eye.

She'd be all lovey dovey,

and go up and snuggle up to him, or give him a kiss,

sit up on his knee, things like that.

Especially if she wanted something:

Money, gifts, luxuries.

She knew how to work her father, let's say.

And that's exactly what Ghislaine did.

The old boy's network which leads from public school to Oxbridge

and then to the top positions of power,

is under threat from within.

Undergraduates at Oxford have now started visiting state schools

in a bid to persuade more pupils to apply to go there.

The Oxford of that time was very marked still by distinctions

between class and birth and money.

I don't think she was entirely seen

as being of that top drawer,

families who'd been there for many generations.

Oxford had all these different kind of cliques.

There were the Oxford Union people

who really seriously wanted to go into politics,

people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

Ghislaine had a different group

which were more sort of famous household names,

like Hanson, Sainsbury's,

and she flirted and talked to those people.

One of the first times I photographed Ghislaine,

she was at the Bullingdon Point to Point.

She was dancing about, very physical, rushing around.

She was flirty with boys.

I remember clearly, I don't think she was drinking at all,

and I remember quite a lot of people ended up

in the mud that day but not Ghislaine.

Ghislaine was ambitious.

Even within a world in which she already sat, in the glossy posse,

she wanted to make her mark.

One good thing about her not being entirely

from that world within the English class system,

was that I think that she was very easy at talking to people.

She had this extraordinary voice,

this very sort of low voice, it was like a purr.

I think she also did quite enjoy being queen bee.

She always presented herself as more knowing,

a sort of wise counsel to probably some quite giddy people.

I met Ghislaine soon after I arrived

as an undergraduate at Oxford University.

The"jeunesse dorée"of Oxford,

hell-bent on enjoying themselves.

Those of a nervous disposition should now be warned

that they may well be looking at future prime ministers

!and Chancellors of the! Exchequer and, God help us all,

a future minister of defence.

And there was one set of people in particular

who were living life to the limits.

A lot of alcohol.

There were a lot of drugs.

There was a lot of sex.

It was pretty wild.

And a lot of them had serious money.

And that's one reason I could never really be integrated.

And at its heart,

among other people, was Ghislaine.

She was a great social organiser.

She knew everybody's name.

She did draw you in quite, quite literally,

sometimes grab you by the hand and pull you in and say,

"Right, come and meet this person".

And so she helped you to overcome your own shyness.

And so she made you feel welcome,

even though in retrospect, it's clear that I didn't really belong.

For that moment, I felt, "Oh, yeah, I'm here. I've arrived".

Hi! Good to see you. Come on in.

You can come on up.

She was interested in sex. I mean, we have to say that.

Yeah.

I do remember one evening meeting her in Jericho

in one of these little houses that students lived in.

And there is Ghislaine on the sofa with her hair.

She must have been smoking, I can't remember.