What We Know About Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s Alleged Madam

On Saturday night, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on charges that he recruited dozens of underage girls into a sex-trafficking ring in Florida and New York between 2002 and 2005. The details of his indictment became public on Monday morning when federal prosecutors unsealed the sex-trafficking charges against him. Though Epstein is the only person named, many powerful people with ties to the 66-year-old are likely feeling a little nervous about the consequences of the billionaire’s arrest — including Ghislaine Maxwell, a confidante of Epstein’s who has been connected to him for more than two decades and is alleged to have played a critical role in recruiting and grooming underage girls into his sex-trafficking ring. Though Maxwell is a key figure in the Epstein case, she has not yet been arrested and has repeatedly denied accusations against her. As the details of Epstein’s alleged crimes become clearer, however, we’re likely to hear her name come up again and again.

Maxwell is the daughter of publisher Robert Maxwell — in short, she comes from money. After growing up and attending university in England, she moved to the United States following her father’s death in 1991. Exactly how Maxwell and Epstein met is unclear, but the two reportedly dated for a short period of time, then remained friends after breaking up. Per a 2002 New York Magazine profile of Epstein, Maxwell — who has been linked to Epstein for more than two decades — “lent a little pizzazz to the lower-profile Epstein.” The story continues:

The Oxford-educated Maxwell, described by many as a man-eater (she flies her own helicopter and was recently seen dining with [Bill] Clinton at Nello’s on Madison Avenue), lives in her own townhouse a few blocks away. Epstein is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women but there has been no boldfaced name to replace Maxwell. “You may read about Jeffrey in the social columns, but there is much more to him than that,” says Jeffrey T. Leeds of the private equity firm Leeds Weld & Co. She also, in 2012, founded the TerraMar Project, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting ocean waters.

She’s friendly with a number of notable figures, including Bill Clinton and British royal-family members.

Over the years, Maxwell has been photographed alongside many prominent, powerful people who are linked to Epstein, such as Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. Maxwell was even a guest at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010.

She’s been accused of recruiting and grooming girls and women into Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring.

According to multiple court filings reviewed by the Miami Herald, lawyers for one of Epstein’s alleged victims have claimed that Epstein and Maxwell acted as the leaders of an “organized crime family” and that Maxwell helped traffic girls and women to powerful figures. Per the documents, Maxwell lured the alleged victims into the sex ring by offering them modeling, fashion, and educational opportunities.

Though Epstein is the only one named in the new indictment, there are court documents that could shed light on Maxwell’s alleged involvement: around 2,000 pages from a 2015 defamation case filed by a woman named Virginia Giuffre, who publicly claimed in a sworn affidavit the year earlier that Maxwell had recruited her into Epstein’s sex ring to be a “sex slave” when she was just 16. (After being recruited, she says, she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz.) In response, Maxwell called Giuffre’s claims “entirely false” on numerous occasions, compelling the latter to file the lawsuit. But the case never went to trial: In May 2017, it was settled the day before the trial was scheduled to start, and a U.S. District Court judge ordered a significant portion of the filings to be sealed; furthermore, the records that were made public were heavily blacked out. On July 3 of this year, though, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered that some of the aforementioned sealed documents be released. However, the court did not provide a deadline.

(Additionally, in 2017, a woman named Sarah Ransome alleged in a lawsuit that Maxwell and Epstein had threatened to physically hurt her or ruin her career were she to refuse to have sex with the pair’s clients. Ransome withdrew the suit in December 2018 for reasons that were not made public.)

Sanford L. Bohrer, the Miami Herald’s attorney, has urged the New York appeals court to prioritize unsealing the 2,000-some pages of documents related to the 2015 defamation case, as the allegations against Maxwell are “an issue of critical public concern.” And speaking of the potential consequences of Epstein’s indictment, David Boies, the lawyer representing Giuffre, told the Herald, “The one person most likely in jeopardy is Maxwell because the records that are going to be unsealed have so much evidence against her.”

The_War_Economy
@The_War_Economy:

“Epstein has donated more than $100,000 to Democratic candidates’ campaigns, including John Kerry’s presidential bid, Bill Richardson’s reelection and the Senate bids of Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Charles Schumer.”

https://vault.fbi.gov/jeffrey-epstein/Jeffrey%20Epstein%20Part%2001%20of%2021

Wexner's leadership among major Jewish philanthropists was evidenced by his role in helping to convene and ultimately lead a group of some two dozen philanthropic peers in an effort that was known technically as the "Study Group" but more widely as the "Mega Group." This group of elite Jewish philanthropists was formed in 1991 and developed as an effort to conduct a high-minded philanthropic discussion about the pressing issues of the Jewish people. The group motivated a number of individual and collaborative philanthropic initiatives that, arguably, would not have otherwise occurred, including the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, Birthright Israel, the upgrading of national Hillel, and more. Wexner co-chaired the group with Charles Bronfman during the final years of its existence. While the group no longer exists in its original form, successor groups have surfaced and many of the original members continue to work closely with each other as a result of the associations they developed within the Study Group.: Wexner, Leslie H. The "Mega Group" mentioned here, profiled in an old WSJ article, included Wexner, the Bronfmans, Michael Steinhardt (mob ties and hedge fund manager), Max Fisher (mob ties), Laurence Tisch (OSS, Michael Milken associate), Steven Spielberg, Leonard Abramson, Harvey Meyerhoff; and Marc Rich also worked with them. . .

Forest Hills has been identified by the FBI as a major center for both the Russian-Israeli Mafia and Mossad and it is a place where the two interests often cooperate. In 2002, operation Spiderweb, a joint FBI-EUROPOL operation, resulted in the arrest of 20 Russian-Israeli dual citizens on charges of money laundering. The laundering primarily involved the Bank of New York (BONY), the Russian bank Menatep, and an ‘Internet bank’ called the European Union Bank. More importantly, the money-laundering network also included Benex, a firm connected to Bill Clinton-pardoned Mossad figure Marc Rich. Benex’ office was located on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills in the same building where Grigori Loutchansky headquartered two of his companies. Loutchansky is a Latvian-born Israeli who laundered billions through his Vienna-based NORDEX firm. National Security Agency (NSA) signals intercepts have reportedly yielded intelligence on Loutchansky’s role in the smuggling of nuclear materials. Forest Hills was also the hometown of international diamond dealer Yehuda Abraham, convicted in a plot to smuggle surface-to-air missile launchers from Russia into the United States, a mere four months after 9/11, and launder the proceeds from the deal through Malaysia.: Luchansky Grigory Emmanuilovich

. . .Donald Rumsfeld, co-chairman of the Dole-Kemp campaign, said on "Fox News Sunday" he was disturbed that Grigori Loutchansky, whose international firm, Nordex, has been linked to nuclear weapons smuggling, was invited to two DNC fund-raising dinners with the president. . .In a four-page report in July, Time magazine said that Mr. Loutchansky' s firm was linked with nuclear smuggling, drug trafficking, and money laundering, and that Nordex was originally established to "earn hard currency for the KGB." : Clinon linked to Russian Mobster Loutchanky - Nordex - WashTimes-17Nov96

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