John Sweeney’s new book sheds fresh light on Maxwell’s ‘servile, abusive’ relationship with her father – but its prose will make you cringe
With Ghislaine Maxwell now confined to a cell in Florida’s Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institute, serving a sentence of 20 years for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors – and with the names of those wealthy and powerful men to whom, it is alleged, Epstein peddled sexual favours still awaiting disclosure – comes yet another chapter in this most horrific saga.
Hunting Ghislaine, by the investigative journalist John Sweeney, is based on Sweeney’s popular 2020 podcast of the same name. It’s a story with which we are all familiar – overly familiar, perhaps – but while Sweeney draws copiously on the extensive reporting done by others, his book, carefully researched and written in a breezy journalese, casts new light on the complex character of Ghislaine Maxwell and her fateful relationships with Epstein and her father.
Robert Maxwell was “untameable, dangerous, unpredictable with power over all he surveyed”. Physically huge, brutal, narcissistic and sadistic, he was hated by almost everybody he came into contact with, except for the youngest of his nine children, Ghislaine, whom he apparently adored, but not enough to restrain his bullying and frequent beatings.
Sweeney offers fresh light here. We think of Ghislaine as Maxwell’s spoilt favourite, which she was, yet at the same time he treated her appallingly. Nothing was too good for her, but nothing she did would ever be good enough for him. Her adoration seems almost Stockholm-syndrome-like. It is clear that Ghislaine was damaged long before her father toppled off the back of his 180ft luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, serendipitously avoiding the revelation that he had been embezzling £460m from the Mirror pension scheme.