ERSON he had to loan Epstein money which had seized Epstein’s car s that Epstein didn’t have two , says that Epstein always had re to his friends so they didn’t v he got them,” Crane recalls. her times they didn’t. I rememing a Concorde jacket. He asked or so. My friend never got the ell people he always flew on the h, Les Wexner would have been vife, Wendy, had her suspicions e presented himself and the way ner circle. ing Epstein the virus. s weren’t the point. Wexner was stand why the billionaire would ked with a Ponzi king like Steven : Wexner and Epstein would get 114 CHAPTER 29 Ghislaire Maxwell: 1991 R obert Meister was not the only friend who helped Jeffrey Epstein, the boy from Coney Island, on his way up the social ladder. There was also Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy heiress from the United Kingdom who’d retained her ties to some of the world’s most glamorous and scandalous jet-setters. Maxwell was the youngest and most favored child of one of the most famous-ever infamous-men in Europe. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech refugee who had fought in the French Foreign Legion and with the British in World War II and had gone on to become a member of Parliament. By the 1960s, he’d become a media baron. Born into a Hasidic family-his birth name was Ján Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch-Maxwell died in disgrace in 1991 after falling or perhaps jumping off the side of his supersize yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. “The sheet! Solotvyno, where I come from, it is no more,” 115 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009266¶
JAMES PATTERSON Maxwell said a few months before his demise. “It was poor. It was Orthodox. And it was Jewish. We were very poor. We didn’t have things that other people had. They had shoes, they had food, and we didn’t. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives, and neighbors. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realized that they’d been tricked into a gas chamber.” Maxwell’s own death was followed by an international scandal. It turned out that he’d stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds and used them to prop up his empire. Two of his sons were tried for conspiracy to commit fraud and ultimately exonerated. But Ghislaine, who had grown up in luxurious surroundings and counted the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, among her intimates, could not escape the dark shadow her father had cast. Looking to start fresh, she took the Concorde to New York City. At first, it seems, Maxwell and Epstein were lovers. “She was madly in love with Jeffrey,” says a longtime friend of Ghislaine’s. Then they became something more. Ghislaine took care of Epstein’s travel arrangements. She managed his household and opened doors that very few Brooklyn-born Jewish boys could have passed through. According to lawsuits and witness testimony, she also became one of several women who procured young girls for Epstein. She was not jealous, according to people who knew her back then. If anything, Ghislaine seemed to take pleasure in satisfying Epstein’s needs. Ghislaine introduced Epstein to a fabulous world that the 116 Brooklyn boy knew not taught Epstein the differ But despite or was it Epstein, she, too, gradi According to Jane Doe filed in 2009 by a womai of the services Maxwell ment of underage wom papers. Maxwell has ve Virginia, with any othe with, or with any crimina In a 2016 answer to a c Maxwell called the allega The case of Nadia B. first noticed by Epstein, in the eyes of her mother Björlin’s Iranian-born years ago about her fami and Epstein. Björlin’s fat music, had died a year ea this made the girl a vulm “She was at school a Michigan, when she met “My daughter was a s little girl, not mature for thought she was nine or “Epstein was a big dc ner father had died, so st He said, ‘Here’s my numb “He kept saying, ‘Cor HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009267¶