thebigp

Jeffrey Epstein ‘Friend’ Ghislaine Maxwell Has More Skeletons in Her Family Closet Than a House of Horrors
The late p*******e Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion and alleged procurer comes from a clan with a penchant for sex, intrigue, science, and illusions.
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MEYREUIL, France—Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, comes from a family by turns brilliant and accomplished, deceptive and doomed. Her backstory is full of sex and science, money and magical illusions. And today she is the world’s most wanted woman—at least by the media and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
She is the youngest child of the notorious and disgraced British media mogul Robert Maxwell, rumored after his mysterious death in 1991 to have been an Israeli spy. She was the alleged paramour-turned-pimp for Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire p*******e who reportedly committed suicide in his cell on August 10.
But there are no known criminal charges against her, only allegations in a civil suit. Indeed, there is speculation she may be cooperating with federal prosecutors. And while she might have decided to hide out here in Provence at her sister’s house in the shadow of Cézanne’s favorite mountain, she was spotted Thursday in California eating a burger while reading a book about CIA heroes.
Ghislaine Maxwell, in short, is a survivor.
“In moments of greatest adversity, that’s where they’re the coolest; it’s bred into the family,” an executive with one of Robert Maxwell’s media companies said after his drowning upended his media empire and forced his wife and children to clean up the mess. “Maxwell’s whole life was ‘Never panic.’”
As we looked for her in France in recent days, she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. But we did discover enough skeletons in the family closet (including those of her in-laws and their families) to fill a house of horrors.
We searched near her dead mother’s estate east of here—and even at the bottom of a cliff in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a few hours from Meyreuil, where her brother-in-law Al Seckel, giver of TED talks on optical illusions, reportedly fell to his death in 2015 after he was exposed as a swindler in Los Angeles.
We also looked at the family tree of her other brother-in-law, an American astrophysicist whose genius rocket scientist father Frank Malina at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California pioneered what would become NASA before he fled to France with J. Edgar Hoover's G-Men on his heels.
For Ghislaine, presumably, outer space is not an option. But in point of fact, she does know how to operate a lot of exotic machinery. In addition to speaking four languages and holding a degree from Oxford, she’s a trained private helicopter pilot, a submersible pilot and qualified to operate undersea robots. Much was made of the latter qualifications when she was fund-raising for her now defunct TerraMar oceanic environmental project, which shuttered after Epstein’s arrest last month.
Ghislaine, who wanted to be seen as a visionary, liked to hang out with others who cultivate that rep, and was pictured with Elon Musk, whose Space X program is based in Hawthorne, just south of Los Angeles.
Ah, there’s a California connection again.
But France is still where Ghislaine Maxwell’s family history begins. Both she and her mother, the elegant and long-suffering Elisabeth Maxwell, were born here. And while some French officials have called for an investigation into Epstein’s activities in Paris, where he had an opulent apartment, Ghislaine’s French connection goes back decades in the south.
It also grew out of the horrors of Auschwitz, which wiped out Robert Maxwell’s parents and siblings and eventually inspired his French Protestant wife, Elisabeth, to become a renowned Holocaust scholar.
And it includes Ghislaine’s very interesting American in-laws who moved back and forth between Provence, the Dordogne and the United States. Their roots involved the pioneering, often reckless rocket scientists of the 1930s who were called the “Suicide Squad” for their risky work at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Among their circle: L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; and Briton Aleister Crowley, known for black magic and a sex cult.
Maxwell family observers don’t find it strange that Ghislaine and some of her sisters were drawn to larger-than-life, certifiably strange men.
“They attach themselves to bizarre psychopaths like their father,” says a researcher who delved into the family years ago. “Ghislaine wasn’t the only sister to hook up with a weird guy.”
The Father
The daddy issues—and the mysterious death issues—began with Robert Maxwell, born into poverty as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia in 1923. He wanted a big family to recreate, in a way, the siblings he lost to the N**is, and he very much wanted riches and fame. He achieved all of it, including a seat in the British Parliament. But two of his children died young and greed overtook his ambition.
When Robert Maxwell mysteriously disappeared from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and his naked body was retrieved floating in the waters off the Canary Islands in November 1991, he already had been drowning in debt.
His business empire was on the verge of ruin and he’d stolen, Bernie Madoff-style, more than $400 million from his employees’ pension funds to forestall bankruptcy. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh had recently accused him of being a longtime Israeli intelligence agent in a book about Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, The Samson Option.
The conspiracy theories surrounding Robert Maxwell’s death rivaled those of Epstein’s today, although the official take was that he fell off his boat during an early morning walk around the deck.
Epstein, whose pal, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak often crashed at his $77 million Upper East Side apartment in New York, also has been accused of unsavory connections to Israel.
“What are the driving forces that make people do things?’ Ghislaine’s mother Elisabeth asked about her husband in 1995 during a New York Times interview to promote her unusually candid autobiography, A Mind of My Own. In it she admitted Maxwell was a philanderer and often treated her badly—but she said she loved him.
“I hope one day there will be a balance. That time passes, passions fall and eventually some t***hs emerge,” she said. “It was really a Greek tragedy that his path should have finished the way it did.”