Ghislaine was born with every disadvantage: extraordinary privilege, limitless resources, endless leisure, posh friends, inborn entitlement, and a repulsive beast of a father who seems to have bullied and indulged her by turns. Other people were born to do her bidding, while she herself was immune to accountability. She referred to the young women she exploited as trash. You don’t need to be a card-carrying Freudian to see that the man she pimped for, Jeffrey Epstein, was a surrogate father whose affection she could probably never depend on.

It wasn’t women of her age who attracted him. One unreliable father had already died on her, and another might metaphorically speaking do the same. In several of the photos of the pair, Maxwell is looking adoringly at Epstein, or even kissing him, while he is looking away or at the camera, apparently tolerating her devotion rather than reciprocating it. Desperate to continue as his partner in love, so I would argue in court, she was willing to become his partner in crime. People can do appalling things for the sake of love, but doing them for love is better than doing them out of cruelty or malevolence.

Was Maxwell fated to end up behind bars as a kid with a sexually abusive father and an alcoholic mother? Obviously not. Plenty of people with her upper-class handicaps turn out to be decent human beings. Maxwell didn’t have to inveigle young women into her lover’s massage room. That we amount to more than our circumstances is what we know as freedom. You can always act against the grain of your upbringing. It’s just that it can be fearfully hard to do so. Hangers and floggers aren’t wrong to think we have freedom of choice, simply blind to how arduous this can be. We are all free not to smoke, but a nicotine addict is less free in this respect than the Queen. If you want an image of freedom, don’t look at those who regard health and safety laws as fatal to human liberty; look at a man with a revolver who refrains from shooting the rapist of his small daughter.

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Ghislaine Maxwell's guilty soul

By Will Lloyd

It is only in the modern period that we start thinking of the will as a heroic force, one which overcomes our baser inclinations. It is thus that the idea of will power comes into existence. It is a matter of tensed sinews and gritted teeth. By contrast, for traditional thinkers such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the will is more a form of desire than a kind of power. On this view, to will to do something is to feel drawn to it — even, in the end, to love it. Far from struggling against what we want, the will has to plug into your deepest wishes if it is to work. Instead of a deep desire for heroin, you begin to feel an even deeper desire to be well. You embrace well-being because it’s enjoyable, not just because you’re likely to die if you don’t. Most addicts are aware of this possibility, but it rarely stops them from drinking or shooting up, just as nobody stops being a radical Islamist because somebody tells them they should.

The United States, true to its Puritan heritage, is a deep believer in voluntarism, regarding the will as supreme. That you’re responsible for absolutely everything you do is part of American folklore. It is this belief which puts so many of its citizens on death row. To point out that a lot of criminals were deprived and unloved as children is to sell out to determinism. The fact that there are degrees of responsibility goes unacknowledged. Freedom is as absolute in the judicial system as it is in the market place, and appeals to social conditions can be left to fancy-pants sociologists. Yet we wouldn’t have the concept of freedom in the first place, or know how to practise it, if we didn’t live in society. When Margaret Thatcher announced that society didn’t exist, she did so in the English language, which belongs to an individual only because it belongs in the first place to a particular civilisation.

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The enabling of Ghislaine Maxwell

By Julie Bindel

None of this is to deny that Ghislaine Maxwell is a despicable predator who richly deserves her prison sentence. She treated the young woman she hired as a sub-human species fashioned to serve her own interests, much as her father treated his employees. Like the rest of us, however, she was also a victim of original sin, which is a more everyday affair than snakes in gardens or forbidden apples. St. Augustine was right to see that original sin is transmitted down the generations, though he was wrong to think that this was a genetic affair. His view of it is broadly at one with that of the poet Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Larkin knew what he was talking about: his father was a fascist who supported Hitler, and Larkin himself was a racist and trade union-basher. The fact is that being born severely restricts your freedom. Nobody chooses to enter the world, or gets to select their parents. When a character in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame protests to another character “But you’re my father!”, the latter replies “Yes, but I didn’t know it was going to be you”. Nobody chooses their body, their social status at birth or much of their temperament, a discomforting thought for a society obsessed with options.

All of this is set for us by our ancestors, hordes of whom lurk within our most casual gestures. It is impossible to say how many people there are in a relationship, but the parents of both partners are certainly at work there, and probably their grandparents and great-grandparents as well. The dead can kill us or drive us insane. The past is what we are mostly made of, and it lives on to stymie the present and future. So much for the excited chatter of brave new worlds and technological wonders.

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Will Ghislaine Maxwell get a fair trial?

By Kat Rosenfield

Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, we are all guilty innocents, tainted by our origins. It’s notable that Oedipus, confronted with the fact that he has killed his father and married his mother, never once tries to defend himself by pointing out that he did all this unknowingly. For the ancient Greeks, guilt is an objective affair like disease or pollution, not in the first place a question of your intentions. And this is also true of the debt and guilt involved in our tangled inheritance. It infiltrates your bones and your blood whether you are conscious of it or not.

Characters in ancient Greek tragedy must move warily, as though picking their way through a minefield. Half-blind that we are, we can never know what damage our deeds will cause in the lives of others. Acts freely performed spin out of control and come to confront ourselves and others like some implacable destiny. It is this which the Greeks called Fate. Oedipus becomes a stranger to himself, while those who should be sexual strangers (one’s parents, for example) become intimate. In fact, there are no strangers, just friends you haven’t alienated yet. It would take a whole army of researchers to trace the consequences of any one of our actions, and some of them are very likely to inflict pain on someone somewhere. If we can’t move without hurting others, then simply to be alive is a question of guilt. There is a residue of harm built into social existence.

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Robert Maxwell was no mystery

By Tanya Gold

Original sin has to do with injuries of which we are innocent but are still in some sense responsible. Let’s say I sit on a bus and see the image of a desert island on a hoarding. The image begins to obsess me to the point where I abandon my family and spend the rest of my days lounging under a palm tree. Aghast at being deserted, my partner finds it impossible to carry on as a psychotherapist, with the result that one of her patients drowns himself in despair. Meanwhile, my daughter packs in ballet school and goes off to run a protection racket in Huddersfield. The culprit for all this is me; but the Malaysian workers who make spiral cuts on the bark of Para rubber trees to collect their milky latex also had a hand in it. Without them, there would have been no rubber to manufacture the tyres of the bus on which I was sitting. They are guilty innocents, bound up like the rest of us with those of whom they know nothing. All this is because Fate is a myth, and what we have instead is contingency: random collisions, collateral damage, unforeseeable effects.

The Larkin poem continues:

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

“They” refers to one’s parents; and if it is true that the fuckers-up are also the fucked-up, forgiveness becomes possible. The misery your mum and dad handed on to you was a crippling legacy bequeathed to them as well. By recognising this, as the drug-addicted Patrick Melrose does at the end of Edward St Aubyn’s magnificent sequence of novels, you can break this deathly lineage, at least in your head and with any luck in your guts as well. It is a tragic process, however, precisely because the price of achieving sanity and fulfilment in these conditions is so fearfully steep. But if Melrose can do it, so can Ghislaine Maxwell in the quiet of her prison cell. In fact, it is all that is now left to her. We should remember that people who act abominably are usually under the influence of forces they can’t fully understand. But we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it either.

What’s the point of Prince Andrew? I don’t ask this only to be cruel, although there is an obvious cruelty in suggesting that an actual person might be pointless. But Prince Andrew isn’t just a person — he’s also a prince, elevated by birth to a strange prominence in an institution that turned out to have no need of him.

He’s the redundant spare, not even useful for making dynastic alliances, since there are no royal houses left worth allying with; and anyway, diplomacy by human meat market was out of fashion before he was born. He doesn’t even have the dignity of being a working royal, since 2019 when he stepped back from all public duties over his “association” with the late sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Although Prince Andrew remains close to the Queen, the exact nature of that “association” continues to hang rancidly over the royal family. Was he just hanging around with Epstein, or did he — as Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Guiffre states in a lawsuit filed on Monday — take part in the sexual abuse of teenage girls? Was he somehow ignorant of everything he was adjacent to, or actually corrupt? Stupid, or degenerate? (Prince Andrew denies Guiffre’s claims.)

There’s a photo of Prince Andrew from 2001 with then 17-year-old Guiffre. She beams at the camera, long blonde hair hanging below her collarbone and a flash of midriff exposed; he stands side-on, arm around her waist, adult fingers touching bare childish skin, an expression of dazed expectation on his face like a man who can’t believe his luck. And in the background, Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly groomed and recruited the girls (Maxwell denies this), smiling happily — the smile of a complacent friend or a satisfied madam, depending on what you choose to read into it.

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Prince Andrew’s response to this photo has been to suggest that it has been “doctored”, claiming: “I am not one to, as it were, hug.” (Pictures of him taken at various nightclubs suggest that he is very much one to, as it were, hug.) As defences go, it’s only marginally less hard to swallow than the Pizza Express alibi or the claim he cannot sweat. Still, you can understand his desperation to argue it away: twenty years on, the picture looks grotesque, his age an obscenity next to Guiffre’s youth.

Would it have looked that way at the time it was taken? The millennium was a strange, unsettled moment for talking about girls and sex. On the one hand, the tabloids had picked out paedophiles as the villains of the moment (the apotheosis of this came in 2000, when a paediatrician’s home was vandalised with graffiti reading “paedo”: police confirmed that the perpetrators had confused the job with the crime). On the other, the titillating concept of the “barely legal” girl was firmly established in pornography and spilling over into popular culture.

And at the same time, the American evangelical movement had been doing its part for the fetishisation of virginity by promoting “abstinence-only” education and coaxing teens into wearing “promise rings” that showed their commitment to no sex before marriage. Britney Spears wore one: it seemed to be taken less as an assertion of her innocence than as a provocation to those who fantasised about despoiling her.

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Matt Hancock's casual cruelty

By Sarah Ditum

In 2000, a businessman allegedly offered Britney $7.5m for the honour of deflowering her. Two years later, the DJ Chris Moyles was chatting about another teenage singer’s virginity on his Radio 1 show: on the day Charlotte Church turned 16, he volunteered to “lead her through the forest of sexuality”. (Moyles was censured by the Broadcasting Standards Commission, but he kept his job.)

The physical ideal of the late twentieth century and early noughties was nymphet-esque — slim hips, pert tits and, most important of all, a set of taut and unstretchmarked abdominals to make clear that all fecundity was as yet untested. The line of girl and woman was blurred and blurred again. In an early Kate Moss photoshoot that I’d see regularly on halls of residence walls later, the then sixteen-year-old model wears nothing but black knickers, stockings and heels, and holds a teddy bear to cover her breasts.

The taboo on underage sex was strong enough to make the idea of breaking it exciting, and no stronger. Even the wholly un-edgy indie band Travis (a kind of John the Baptist before Coldplay’s arrival as the Jesus of inoffensive guitar music) had a song called “U16 Girls”.

Prince Andrew now denies that he visited West End nightclub Tramps with Guiffre. But if he’d been there in the late 80s, he could have shared the dancefloor with Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and his girlfriend Mandy Smith — she was thirteen when they got together, and he was 47. When the relationship became public after she reached the age of consent, it was treated as a joke rather than a sex offence, with him the randy old man and her the canny little starfucker. Friends of the couple from that era look back and feel ashamed for turning a blind eye, but still, they turned a blind eye.

When, in 2012, the extent of Jimmy Savile’s predations became obvious and the complicity of the BBC undeniable, journalist Rachel Cooke wrote this in the Observer:

“Our outrage, in truth, has little to do with any institution, however remiss. It’s born of bewilderment that something so terrible could be in plain sight. Why, we wonder, did we not notice? Yet even this idea, if you unpick it, is kind of phoney.”

What Savile was had always been obvious. But for decades, it was seen as an ugly but acceptable peccadillo for a man to have sex with a girl. And then, one day, it wasn’t seen that way at all anymore.

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By Terry Eagleton

How we think about age, power and sex has changed immeasurably over the last decades. When I saw the revival of David Mamet’s sexual harassment drama Oleanna — currently running in London — it seemed flat, despite the sparring dialogue. In 1992, when the play debuted, audiences saw genuine ambiguity in the relationship between a professor and his wounded female student. Did he cross the line? Was she coaxed into seeing herself as a victim of campus politics?

In 2021, the moment he steps up behind her and places his hands on her shoulders, he’s lost. We know, now, that a tutor doesn’t touch a student that way. Even if she’s technically an adult, her comparative youth and institutional inferiority are blatant. The violation is unarguable.

What a shock, I suppose, to be one of the men around whom this cultural shift took place. To be, say, Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 used a plea bargain to wriggle out of being prosecuted for procuring a minor for prostitution, and was able to return to his life of wealth and high-rolling connection, until in 2019 he found himself imprisoned and facing a similar set of charges all over again.

The taint of connection with Epstein spilled out, with Prince Andrew alongside Bill Gates and the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret in the list of those whose reputations have turned to dirt. Epstein’s suicide hastened the civil suits such as the one against Prince Andrew, which would otherwise have had to wait for the criminal trial to conclude. It also made them more urgent: from the perspective of Epstein’s victims, with him dead, they must look to the living for someone to hold accountable. For Guiffre, suing Prince Andrew is the next best thing to justice.

So maybe this will be the point of Prince Andrew. His relationship with Epstein, and its transformation from something that could be winked at to something that could potentially soil the entire royal family, could prove to be a measure of the change in his lifetime. There’s plenty still that’s grim in the treatment of girls, but at least today if someone were to be proven to have knowingly had sex with a trafficked teenager — even if that someone was a prince — there’d be no laughing it off.

My take is pretty straightforward. Yes, there is evidence to suggest she was abused by her father, and it is clear that Epstein had a certain level of power and control over her. But Maxwell is a woman with immense privilege and power of her own. She was not convicted for associating with Epstein, she was convicted for procuring young women into prostitution. There is nothing of the victim about Maxwell.

She was corrupted by her own power. She wasn’t just a “daddy pleaser” who transferred her subservience to Epstein as a replacement for her father. She was an agent in her own downfall; she used her wealth and class superiority to outsource abuse. Maxwell had scant respect for her victims: during the trial, we heard how she would refer to the poor, barely educated, vulnerable young women as “scum”. It’s all grimly reminiscent of what happened during the grooming gang cases in England, where the girls were viewed as “troublesome slags” who had “chosen” a lifestyle of prostitution.

Just as in Rochdale and Rotherham, the girls served up to Epstein and his friends were mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds. Seen as “disposable”, the perpetrators knew that if the victims spoke out, it was likely they wouldn’t be believed.

Prostitution, regardless of who is procuring, drags everyone down to the same level. Epstein and Maxwells’s victims have become complicit in the abuse of other women, just as happened with the grooming gangs in the UK. Victims are encouraged to bring along other girls, which they do because they are terrified. I have interviewed so many desperate women who escaped prostitution only by recruiting others to take their places. The prostituted victim becomes the pimp. The guilt they then feel when they finally escape the sex trade is almost as traumatic as the nightmare of prostitution itself.

The truly distressing thing about all these cases, though, is how the victims are belittled, ignored and erased. All those young women who were raped are barely mentioned in press coverage nor even during the trial. And we know very little about the sheer numbers of lives Epstein and Maxwell conspired to ruin.

Reports say that Epstein demanded sex with women and girls up to three times a day. Presuming none were consensual, that could mean up to 1,068 rapes a year. It is also known that Epstein had been abusing girls for 30-40 years, which could account for over 30,000 instances of rape and sexual exploitation. We don’t know any of their names.

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By Will Lloyd

And naming is important, as is the language used to describe what happened to these women. We dehumanise them by using the word “trafficking”. Trafficking is merely a process used by pimps to coerce victims into the sex trade. The word obscures the grim reality of what happened. We need to call this type of abuse what it is: “child rape and prostitution”. Maxwell and Epstein, as well as the grooming gangs in the UK, were commodifying another human being for one-sided sexual gratification. It’s a human rights violation, not a transportation issue.

Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an organisation that fights against commercial sexual exploitation, has been watching the Epstein/Maxwell case closely. “We must see the verdict as just a first step toward accountability, not a conclusion,” she says. “And remember that Epstein and Maxwell offered many of these girls as cocktail gifts to some of the most powerful men in the world, from princes to presidents, from philanthropists to politicians. Maxwell was an incredibly successful sex trafficker and the whole episode underlines how difficult it is to tackle the male demand for prostitution that fuels the global sex trade.”

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By Tanya Gold

She is right. A collective tolerance of the sex trade, and the acceptance of the sale and consumption of female bodies, by both the misogynistic Right and the liberal Left, lies at the heart of this problem. This is sexual abuse of the most vulnerable. But by labelling Epstein a “pedophile”, we suggest that his attraction to young girls was beyond his control, and obscure the fact that this was a massive commercial endeavour. And Ghislaine Maxwell was right beside him.

She was no coerced “handmaiden”; but she has been a useful fall guy. After Epstein killed himself, Maxwell became the sole focus of the survivors. Her conviction, though, only means that four women have been believed. What about all those other survivors? Where is their justice?

What if Maxwell were to name names? What if she were to tell law enforcers who paid Epstein for their human merchandise, no matter how powerful or well-connected these men are? That would bring all those silent women some sort of closure. It might also act as a meaningful deterrent: it might even make some men think twice before they rent a child to rape as an after-dinner treat. And surely all feminists can agree that would be a good thing.

They’ll be sitting outside the school gates, or in the resort where they are doing holiday work, or on a bench at a summer camp. Head down in a book. They want to be singers, or anything to get away from home.

The approach is made by a couple, or by an older woman on her own. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: friendly, worldly, wealthy. Ghislaine is armoured with a classy accent, a Yorkshire terrier, and expensive clothes. She plunges into their lives. One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name. But forget that. Ghislaine wants to play the giggly older sister; pal and confidante.

The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.

Ghislaine Maxwell was from a different universe. The question of her trial was whether she, like the girls, is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein too. Ghislaine, daughter of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and variously described as Epstein’s girlfriend, madam, employee, best friend, pimp, and general, was arrested in 2020. She was accused by the US government of gathering up Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Anne over a decade, like a beachcomber, and delivering them to Epstein.

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For four weeks, the trial in lower Manhattan has been watched with awe. Outside the courthouse stand placards and protestors and paranoiacs. Three overflow rooms inside contain the world’s press, concerned private citizens, and podcasters. They are drawn there for irresistibly tabloid reasons: the downfall of rich people in heavenly places who did evil things.

Epstein and Maxwell were high society floaters, who bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams, fishing for famous friends. (Taki says she was “not a bad girl” — I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it.) By the time Epstein earned his first conviction for sex crimes in 2008, the couple had collected an entire Met Gala of chintzy brilliancies: actors, publishers, royals, writers, scientists, academics, and politicians. That constellation has blinded many to the couple’s more gothic collection of broken young women. Why care about them, when they are landmines lying in wait for Prince Andrew, Ariana Huffington, Geordie Greig, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton?

These embarrassing links, the dozens of embarrassing photos that accompanied them, and the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his death, transformed Epstein. In the world’s imagination he was no longer a rich bullshit artist and an abuser. He became a popular demon, a supervillain, a Halloween costume. Writers polished their 24 Carat allusions: Epstein was Machiavelli, he was Mephistopheles. He was the ultraviolet scan that illuminated a rotten system of perversion and power. Maxwell’s trial was widely considered to be the last chance at justice for many of the women who claim to have been abused by Epstein.

But Epstein is dead. This was Ghislaine’s trial, and throughout she has been circumspect, almost dignified, and given nothing away. Videos outside the courthouse showed her old and arthritic and beaten down. She does not look like she will ever adjust to thinking of herself as a dangerous criminal. She appeared tired of being herself. Sooner or later, compassion was bound to be felt for the accused. It’s only natural. Old university acquaintances suggested they felt pity for her. Others wondered what went wrong, without ever probing the circumstances of Maxwell’s alleged crimes. Friends anonymously briefed glossy magazines, and said they could never imagine her scoring trailer trash by skulking around outside public schools. It just wasn’t her style, darling. None of them ever took the stand to defend her though. That just wasn’t their style.

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These disposable, costless emotions were a perfect echo of the defence put up by Maxwell’s attorneys. They said she had become a bullseye for the limitless greed, pointless anger, and false memories of the accusers. Maxwell was the real victim here. This was whiplash; an acidic backwash from Epstein’s death that mistakenly threatened to dissolve their client, because he could never stand trial. Eternal archetypes were invoked. “Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple,” said one Maxwell lawyer, “women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men”.

The men were Epstein, and at a more distant remove, Robert Maxwell. To believe in the defence, you had to believe that Ghislaine had been without a sense of her own interest for decades. That she was helplessly shaped by these amoral patriarchs. Her father and Epstein were eerily similar, if not the same man. Both escaped obscurity and exchanged it for wealth. Both courted ‘brilliant scientific minds’ with praise and parties. Both were talented at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals they destroyed on their way up. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Hoffenberg might have been describing Maxwell.

How much of their behaviour was for show, and how much was real, and whether they knew the difference, was unclear. A bewildering aura of fantasy surrounds them. They had a curious shared interest in the Marquis de Sade, and they inhabited airlessly Sadean worlds of selfishness, injustice, and misery. In de Sade’s pages nobody ever changes. His characters are glazed and flat; moral development is an impossibility. As one of the libertine monks in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) — a novel Epstein displayed in his home and proudly showed off to a journalist — rhetorically asks: “Can we become anything other than we are?”

Maxwell and Epstein answered that question with an emphatic no. They would forever be outsiders who shredded convention, determined to consume whatever and whoever they found once on the inside. Each was regarded with a mixture of dread, sarcasm, and awe. Their most credulous, generous supporters came from the top. Epstein, as Maxwell did the British establishment of his time, regarded them with contempt. He once told his brother that if the public knew how corrupt his Wall Street friends were, there would be a revolution.

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Prince Charles has finally won

By Will Lloyd

Above all these men lied, unstoppably and uncontrollably. They lied to business associates, mistresses, journalists, judges, creditors, and lawyers. They lied about money to make more money. Their skill was faking and lying uncommonly well enough to create new, unstable realities. Their lies became eight-storey yachts and the largest townhouse in Manhattan. Every new acquisition was honeycombed with surveillance equipment; recording devices and teeny tiny cameras. This is usually considered further evidence of these men’s perfidy. Blackmail gatherers, Epstein and Maxwell, working on another sick angle, preparing a new front in their war on everyone they ever met. But they were not spying on their guests.

The evidence that Epstein blackmailed his friends is thin, and has fallen apart before. Maxwell used his devices to track a secretary who didn’t love him around London, as she slept with one of his underlings. They surveilled their environments because all their lies made their environments, and themselves, insecure. Each was one or two discoveries away from the collapse of their entire world. The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail. It was a form of consolation. It proved that for all their lies, they were still real. One of Epstein’s homes was lined with framed glass eyeballs made for injured English soldiers from a deadlier century. The display was a warning to his guests, and a reminder to himself: watch your every move.

Are we supposed to paint Ghislaine Maxwell on this bleak canvas as the feckless girl next door? A crass ingénue, an Eve who didn’t know any better? It is closer to the truth to say that both men needed her as much as she needed them.

Maxwell family legend has it that Ghislaine was anorexic as a very young child. She was probably abused by her father, as he was by his, when she was an adolescent, with riding crops and shoe horns. But by the time she arrived, fully formed and totally integrated, at Oxford during its woozy Brideshead revival years in the early Eighties, Ghislaine’s dramas of individuation were over.

She was ahead of the pack, imperious from the off. She spoke five languages and was the director of a football club. The beautiful “glamazon” rested a boot on Boris Johnson and parties with Gottfried von Bismarck. She was inadvertently to blame for the creation of George Monbiot. Her father kept one photo of his nine children on his desk — a portrait of Ghislaine. As his mania grew and his business empire fell apart in the later Eighties, she remained good, pure, true. His colleagues thought him “pre-moral”, disconcerting, disgusting, and frightening. And he was fond of saying “I have a beautiful daughter who is just like me.”

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Ghislaine was already in New York when her father died in 1991. Supposedly adrift, grieving, and broke, the conventional narrative has Epstein performing a bat-like swoop and winging Ghislaine off into his cave. “He saved her,” one Maxwell friend told Vanity Fair, “Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that, and never will.” In this telling Ghislaine is another picked-up, pitiable woman, ensnared by a master manipulator. Whatever crimes she involved herself in later could almost be excused. They were payments for a debt.

All you have to do to believe that is forget she was Robert Maxwell’s daughter. She had a glittering upbringing. She was skilled at getting what she wanted, at reeling people in, at throwing parties. Epstein was cash rich but class poor. Described in these early years so often as a “schlub”, he needed a charismatic partner to launch his conquest of Manhattan’s charity auction set. Otherwise he was just another nerdy dogsbody who helped plutocrats avoid paying tax. Every bank in the city had a thousand of those.

Ghislaine helped propel his somersault into the ranks of the super wealthy. He valued her as his equal: “Ghislaine is the best at what I need,” he said in 2002. “Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently… She’ll come to a meeting, and not only will she be able to translate what the person’s saying… but she can also give me a sense of is the person telling the truth.” All she received in return were private jets, lavish estates, and vast sums of money.

This world melted away, like her father’s did. The trial came long after the deluge. It was mind-numbing. There were endless examinations of flight logs, property portfolios, and financial transactions. The accusers were tortured on the stand by Maxwell’s lawyers. To save their Eve, they had to destroy the credibility of four others. The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”

If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom. You had to look for it elsewhere. The dozen pictures of her and Epstein released during the trial are a good place to start. She has the same face in every photo. A greying man and his partner, affluent and easy, sitting in a grass field with a dog; as perfectly self-possessed and unreal as a couple in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

This was the only reveal from the trial. There were no big prizes, no doomily grim revelations about paedophile rings operating at high altitude, among the jet set, that the placards outside the courthouse prayed for. The apocalypse never arrived because the apocalypse had already happened: it was the afterlife of the four accusers. There was no final answer to the mystery of Epstein’s death. Only the look Maxwell gives him in each image, taken over the span of their eleven-year relationship. Love. Nothing could be guiltier.

At its best, this is a noble impulse: to recognise how women, so often denied direct access to the levers of power, have had to find other ways to wield it. To give credit to the mothers, sisters, wives, and girlfriends of great men who had to content themselves with pulling strings behind the scenes rather than wielding swords on the front lines. But at worst, this feminist narrative has a dark underbelly: if behind every great man is an even greater woman, then who will you find standing in the shadow of a man who did terrible things?

Two years ago, the internet was on fire with debate about the disgraced financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting justice for his crimes. The investigation into his death is ongoing, but meanwhile the investigation into his misdeeds has found a new villain. Epstein isn’t just gone; he’s quickly being forgotten, relegated to a supporting role in the scandal that bears his name. Our focus has turned to Ghislaine Maxwell, whose status has grown so great in the wake of Epstein’s death that she has all but eclipsed the man without whose bad acts there would never have been a story at all.

Much has been made of Maxwell’s relationship with Epstein, including her possible complicity in his crimes. The charges against her include enticement of minors and sex trafficking of underage girls, with several women alleging that Maxwell recruited them to work with Epstein in full knowledge that he would abuse and assault them. (She has denied all the allegations.) But it’s Maxwell herself who is increasingly the object of fascination and derision.

In 2019, when Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, Maxwell was covered as more of a curiosity than an accomplice — let alone a puppeteer pulling his strings. Even Vicky Ward, who has said her reporting on the sex abuse scandal was removed from her Vanity Fair profile of Epstein — allegedly because he put pressure on then editor Graydon Carter — did not seem comparably suspicious of Maxwell’s character at the time. “Full disclosure: I like her,” Ward wrote. “Most people in New York do. It’s almost impossible not to.”

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Needless to say, there are no such disclosures to be found in coverage of the case today. Instead, Maxwell’s guilt is treated as a foregone conclusion in most public conversation about the case, to the point where her recent fretting over the possibility of a tainted jury pool doesn’t really seem so far-fetched. The word most commonly used to describe her in the press is “monster” — as in “Ten Monsters of 2020”, and, “Donald Trump Just Wishes This Monster Well”, and “Ghislaine Maxwell Called ‘the Real Monster’ as New Legal Hurdles Emerge”.

A new documentary, Chasing Ghislaine, promises to take us behind the scenes of Maxwell’s “twisted and chilling partnership with Epstein”. But the public narrative has already promoted her from partner to boss. Maxwell was “worse than Epstein”, per one alleged victim. Another calls her “the power geisha orchestrating everything for Epstein’s maximum delight”. Still another told 20/20 that “Ghislaine was 100% the lady of the house at Jeffrey’s. He made that very clear. We knew who was in charge and it was Ghislaine.”

“She was vicious, she was evil and she was a woman,” Virginia Giuffre, who is expected to give evidence at Maxwell’s trial, told CBS News last year. “Jeffrey was a sick pedophile, but she was the mastermind.”

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It’s worth remembering, here, that the feminist narrative of under-appreciated heroines has a misogynist cousin. The female villain who wields power in the form of manipulation is an ancient fictional archetype; from Eve and the apple on up, it serves to tell us that it’s women’s ambition which forms the true roots of men’s evil deeds. In Snow White, it’s the power-hungry and jealous queen who orders a huntsman to cut out the heart of her stepdaughter. In Shakespeare, it’s Lady Macbeth who gets stuck with indelible bloodstains on her hands.

These narratives serve men. The more we dwell on the idea of a conniving female pulling the strings, the less responsibility we assign to the man pulling the trigger — or in Epstein’s case, committing the assaults. In fact, the more we hear about Ghislaine Maxwell, the less agency Epstein seems to have. He was just a big, dumb animal; she was the one bringing him fresh meat, the brains of the organisation.

Taken to its natural conclusion, this type of rhetoric leads us to a place where men can’t be held accountable for their choices at all, if there’s a woman somewhere in the vicinity who could be seen as a behind-the-scenes manipulator. It’s how we decide that Prince Harry is just a hapless lump acting at the Machiavellian whims of his wife; it’s how we turn our attention away from men who commit violence in favour of pointing fingers at the mothers who raised them. At what point does giving due credit to women become just another way of excusing men?

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Feminism requires finding this balance. If we believe that women have agency, we can’t give this one a pass for her involvement with a monster; we must embrace the radical notion that Maxwell is a person as capable of evil and avarice as anyone else. But there’s a fine line here between feminism and sexism — and between justice and vengeance — when we set out to condemn the nearest woman in the place of a dead, bad man.

There is an aggressive fervour surrounding Maxwell’s impending trial, and a thirst to see her punished in every possible way before that it even begins. Images from pretrial hearings show her shackled, her hair lank, her face bruised. In a recent dispatch from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, she described being kept in solitary confinement in a rat-infested cell, assaulted by guards, and given food crawling with maggots — all of which were promptly celebrated by her detractors as no less than she deserves. The fact that Maxwell’s guilt hasn’t yet been determined by a court of law is irrelevant to the public glee at seeing her suffer. She’s too good a villain.

And unlike Epstein, she’s still here.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.