Ghislaine Maxwell Was More Powerful Than Anyone Knew
So far, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is the only one of the many public figures drawn into the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein to have had his life essentially destroyed as a result. In a disastrous 2019 BBC interview, during which he displayed no contrition or empathy for his late friend’s victims, Andrew said he would forever rue the day he met Epstein. It would have been more accurate for him to have invoked the day he met Ghislaine Maxwell, who led him to Epstein.
In fact, it now emerges that Maxwell was far more than Epstein’s main procurer and accomplice in the trafficking of young women for abuse — the idea that she was merely a useful sidekick rather than an equal. On the contrary, she was also the enabler of his social climbing. It was she who brought to him the skills to entice powerful and celebrated public men into becoming regular guests of his in New York, Palm Beach, and New Mexico and on his private island in the Caribbean.
All this becomes incrementally clear through the narrative of a devastating new biography of Andrew, Entitled, by royal historian Andrew Lownie. And the resulting portrait of Maxwell gives new gravity to her importance as the last keeper of the sex offender’s secrets — a kind of personalized walking-and-(maybe)-talking “Epstein file” that could have enormous potential consequences for many people, including President Donald Trump.
It turns out that the duke played an unwitting role in enhancing Maxwell’s influence. One of her most effective techniques was to dangle the chance of meeting him as bait for people who would be impressed simply by being in the same room as Andrew. (Something apparently true of Woody Allen, who, according to a New York Times report, was wide-eyed at seeing Andrew at Epstein’s New York mansion.)
Lownie cites a friend of Andrew’s warning: “Ghislaine is manipulating him and he’s too naïve to realize it. She’s his social fixer and he’s going along with it — why? Because I think Epstein’s fantastically impressed by it all. It’s all very premeditated.” Lownie himself agrees. Epstein, he tells me, was socially gauche and in awe of Maxwell’s success in landing big fish.
Lownie’s book is the product of prodigious research. He found 300 well-placed sources ready to talk to him. To that he added his own extensive knowledge of the royals, built on two of his previous revelatory biographies: of Windsor family mentor Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina; and, in a book called Traitor King, of the Nazi stooges the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Judging from how the British press has reacted to his new book, he has destroyed any hopes that Andrew might have had to return to public life after his banishment from royal duties in 2019.
Lownie reveals how the relationship between Andrew and Maxwell began and developed. In an interview from his London home, he confirmed that the duke had known Maxwell since she was a student at Oxford in the early 1980s — a time when Andrew was enjoying the glory of having flown a Royal Navy helicopter in the 1982 war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands (Lownie’s book gives full credit to the young prince’s courage under fire).
After that, as Lownie tells it, what began as a casual and occasional affair grew into something bigger: Maxwell, intellectually capable well beyond Andrew’s level, grew into the role of a favorite courtesan who, while enjoying overnight sleepovers at Buckingham Palace, passed on gossip from a politically wider world than the one familiar to the prince.
Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 — the book gives an unforgiving account of the marriage and its excesses — was just a short interruption in the duke’s relationship with Maxwell. By the end of the 1990s, Maxwell had returned as an influencer in Andrew’s life and introduced him to a new friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
The date of Andrew’s first meeting with Epstein is disputed. The duke claims to have first met Epstein early in 1999, but Lownie quotes Andrew’s private secretary, Alastair Watson, saying that they met in “the early 1990s.” Whatever the case, in 1999, with Maxwell’s help, Epstein had a rapidly opening path into the world of the Windsors. In July, Andrew invited Maxwell and Epstein to stay at a lodge on the Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands — a mind-bogglingly inappropriate gesture by Andrew considering that this was his mother’s favorite royal retreat (she was not there at the time).
Balmoral was followed, in December, by Sandringham when Epstein and Maxwell arrived for a two-day shooting party in a plane given access to a Royal Air Force airfield usually reserved for VIPs. Andrew threw a surprise 39th-birthday party for Maxwell. By this time, more people were having misgivings about Maxwell’s influence on Andrew: A friend of his ex-wife warned, “We must break the hold that Ghislaine has on him.” But they didn’t.
Meanwhile, back in Florida, Maxwell was selecting victims for Epstein. Most infamously, she found Virginia Giuffre at the spa at Mar-a-Lago and joined Epstein in sexually assaulting her. That led later to Maxwell’s small townhouse in London, where the picture of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre was taken (even though Andrew denied it ever happened) with Maxwell looking on. Lownie tells me that when Epstein discovered that Maxwell was also sleeping with Andrew, he was far from annoyed and rather turned on. She was very good at spotting who was susceptible, and she had become indispensable to Epstein. In New York and London, she was far better socially connected than he was.
One of the ironies of Maxwell’s social ascent is that she became a consummate insider — something that her tycoon father, Robert Maxwell, had strived to become all his life and never became. His checkered business career ended in scandal and a probable suicide drowning, in 1991, when he was aboard the yacht he had named for her, The Lady Ghislaine. Lownie reports, from bank records, that between 1999 and 2007, Epstein gave her more than $30 million to restore her to the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
Lownie’s book has now delivered the most damning portrait ever made of the harm done to the monarchy that is directly traceable to the hooking up of Maxwell and Andrew. It vividly cements into place the portrait of the Duke of York as a kind of 18th-century debauched, dunderhead Hanoverian prince. However, in Britain, the most controversial part of the indictment is Lownie’s view that Queen Elizabeth’s indulgence of her son’s cupidity and moral carelessness was greater than we previously knew — that she “allowed it to happen.” He tells me that the day before we spoke, he had received a warning from someone in the Windsors’ inner circle: “Be careful. You are going too far bringing the queen into this. The queen is sacred.”
That, of course, is not what matters about this book beyond Britain. There are other people in these inner circles who now have cause to hope that their secrets remain sealed from view, and Ghislaine Maxwell knows who they are.
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