For a year leading up to her arrest, the vanishing act of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime friend, lover, and alleged accomplice vexed the authorities, the press, and the women who accuse her of luring them into a web of sexual abuse.
“Ghislaine, is that you?” The woman making her way into the first-class cabin of a commercial flight from Miami to New York City was almost unrecognizable. Her attire, once stylish and attention grabbing, now seemed designed to deflect notice; her face, usually painted to perfection, was devoid of makeup.
There was a hint of gray in her signature black bob, and her days of starvation diets and charity-circuit appearances seemed far behind her. Wearing no traces of her glamorous New York life, much of it once provided by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell could have been anybody. Or nobody.
It was the spring of 2018, and it had been a decade since Maxwell’s former best friend and lover had served 13 months in a Palm Beach jail, with time free on work release, after pleading guilty to two charges, including soliciting a minor for prostitution. Maxwell, who had sold her Manhattan home—a five-story, 7,000-square-foot town house on East 65th Street—was essentially homeless.
“No fixed address,” someone claiming firsthand knowledge of her situation would later say. She might have spent the flight in anonymity had she not been spotted by a friend from New York who was sitting just behind her in the second row. “I was so shocked by her look,” the friend recalls. “I didn’t recognize her.”
The friend had known all the incarnations of Ghislaine Maxwell: the cherished youngest daughter of the British media baron Robert Maxwell, who died during a voyage on his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, under mysterious circumstances in 1991; the “broken bird” who returned to New York to move into a smaller apartment and launch a new life as a business consultant; the boldface-name Ghislaine, who seemed to be everywhere at once, so socially connected and sexually self-assured that she once hosted a dinner for East Side socialites on the fine art of giving a blow job, with dildos at each place setting.
Will this vile thing get the opportunity to name names and sink a few big ships?