When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men?
We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself.
Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at “transparency” for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play.
Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein. (To be fair, Blanche did seem a little shocked that she couldn’t remember the reason for an $18 million payment from the sex trafficker.)
Blanche arranged the meeting after the Wall Street Journal published Trump’s “shared secrets” birthday note. That item is one of many artifacts – mostly photographic – confirming that the two men were close friends for years. The White House reportedly believed the item came from Maxwell’s side.
What else might be stashed in Pandora’s box?
While working on the documentary, we thought Maxwell would eventually trade evidence against untold numbers of powerful men ensnared in Epstein’s surveilled pleasure palace. Alan Dershowitz calls her “the key” to the case.
Anyone who reads the transcript and is familiar with the Maxwell story knows that there are many questions Blanche didn’t ask. But the transcript is filled with Easter eggs nonetheless.
Maxwell said a friend introduced her to Epstein as a potential husband in April 1991. If that’s true, is it just coincidence that it’s the same month Les Wexner mysteriously gave Epstein power of attorney over his entire fortune – a sum that enabled Epstein to catapult into the realm of blackmailable influential rich men. That same month, Epstein got his first private jet. According to flight logs, Maxwell would make 50 flights during the first year he owned it, often to Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived.
When Blanche asked her whether she had ever had any contact with an individual from Mossad, Maxwell replied: “Well not deliberately.”
“Pardon me?” Blanche replied, then moved on.
He was similarly blasé when she said Epstein hosted Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and head of military intelligence. Blanche breezed on to a question about Epstein’s use of testosterone instead.
Blanche worked to deliver backup for the MAGA obsession du jour, baiting his hook with the names of various Democrats – Andrew and Chris Cuomo, Bill Gates, Bobby Kennedy – trawling for evidence to build the elusive “client list” of progressive libertines. But Maxwell stood firm. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.”
Kind of depends on your definition of “inappropriate” of course: in court testimony, numerous women described Maxwell participating in the “massages” – stripping, pulling out sex toys, etc. To Blanche, she added a caveat: “Now, somebody's inappropriate and mine may be different.”
Inquiring minds might ask a follow-up to that. Blanche replied only: “Yep.”
In Maxwell’s memory, the bathrobe is the great leitmotif. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in a bathrobe,” Maxwell replied to a question about whether Dershowitz ever received a massage.
Maxwell used the exposure to settle scores and portray herself as a victim, a rebrand that, if successful, should win a Clio. She blamed her first public accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 16 when she was recruited to service Epstein, for turning Jeff from a regular guy who just liked a daily massage or two, into an insatiable sex monster who always “wanted new,” causing Maxwell to trawl the spas of Palm Beach or the Caribbean for “masseuses” (she never called the victims women or girls). Roberts, Maxwell said, was trained “to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else.”
The transcript ends exactly where it likely began as the stunt was conceived in Washington – the birthday book. Blanche’s final question is the one eating his boss alive: “Do you know -- do you remember being told or knowing where the book is now?” Maxwell said she assumed the Southern District of New York feds had leaked it.
Maxwell knew exactly why she was there: She produced the money quote for Trump right away: “In the time that I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects.” The line made Fox News headlines and allowed MAGA propagandists to crow that Trump was ever honorable.
A week later Ghislaine was moved to finer prison digs, a way station perhaps to a pardon. And so the myth of the orange archangel sent from above to rescue children from pedophile elites lives another day.
AUTHOR NOTE: Readers interested in more about Ghislaine Maxwell, watch my recent Substack Live Sex Lies and Money with director Barbara Shearer and a long talk with Sidney Blumenthal at his Court of History podcast.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
