Hunting Ghislaine

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Global Player is Global’s entertainment hub, which allows listeners to enjoy all of Global’s radio brands, award-winning podcasts and expertly curated playlists all together and all for free on mobile via the Global Player app, online and through your smart speaker. Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who suffered a tragedy, the death of her father, a war hero, a philanthropist, a good man, in suspicious circumstances. She fled to New York where she made a new life with a brilliant mathematician. Her name is Ghislaine Maxwell and her lover was Jeffrey Epstein. Through Jeffrey, and her family name, Ghislaine became friends with some of the most powerful people on earth, ex-President Bill Clinton and President-to-be Donald Trump and the second son of the Queen of England, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. I have had a week of listening to different mysteries, and it has been most enjoyable, thanks very much. Absorbing, well-told, what’s-really-going-on? tales unfurling in your ears is a wonderful way to distract yourself from 2020’s killer combo of fear and boredom. Oh, the comfort of stories with a beginning, a middle and an actual, definite end! Plus, when there’s a scary element, even ironing becomes exciting. After bullying the secretary, she blurts out what the Sun editor said: “I don’t want to talk to that fat Czech c**t.” The secretary vanished, never to work at the Mirror again.

Sweeney comes to a weary conclusion. “Power and money can help blind justice around the world,” he says. “But in America it’s normal.” Hunting Ghislaine, a Global Original podcast, begins on November 19th. On Global Player or wherever you find your podcasts.Go to Global Player for exclusive bonus episodes where John offers candid reflections on what he's discovered during each interview, what surprised him and what we can learn from it all. Paula Cuddy, Creative Director and Executive Producer for Eleventh Hour Films, said: “John’s compelling podcast ‘Hunting Ghislaine’ puts Ghislaine Maxwell centre stage, unravels her story and asks what went wrong for the girl who seemingly had it all. Set in a richly glittering international world, dark secrets are revealed and always in the shadows looms the formative relationship between a daughter and her father. It has all the hallmarks of a premium drama - and with John alongside our partners at Global and The Story Lab we look forward to delivering.” Then there was the shared interest in sex. Epstein – as Donald Trump observed – had a widely known enthusiasm for young girls. According to one visitor, there was only one book on view in his home: the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortune of Virtue. A New Weekly Podcast On The Trial Of Ghislaine Maxwell Hosted By Investigative Reporter John Sweeney Available Every Friday Exclusively On Global Player Co-commissioned by Global and The Story Lab, part of dentsu creative John speaks to people like him, who are not prepared to be part of the silent majority. They have put their livelihoods and personal reputations on the line to challenge those who run our governments, lead our industries, control our finances and dictate the way we live. They refused to toe the line, and have found themselves in trouble. Big trouble. Activists, agitators, heroes… or villains. You decide.

With Ghislaine Maxwell now confined to a cell in Florida’s Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institute, serving a sentence of 20 years for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors – and with the names of those wealthy and powerful men to whom, it is alleged, Epstein peddled sexual favours still awaiting disclosure – comes yet another chapter in this most horrific saga. Every now and then, reporters go to hellish places - I’ve stepped unwittingly in other people’s blood from the Romanian revolution in 1989 to the Bataclan in 2015 – but listening to a host of “nubiles” claiming sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was grim indeed. Epstein is dead but Maxwell is very much alive and denies everything. So Pagliuca made the same mistake of helping anyone in court with half an eye work out the true identity of anonymised witnesses, twice.That’s probably a fair assessment, except to say there are many greater monsters active out there. Who’s hunting them? As Epstein’s girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes Ghislaine has remained in the shadows. When Epstein’s life began to unravel, Ghislaine vanished, only to reappear when she was arrested by the FBI last year. She denies six charges of enticing girls for sex with Epstein and perjury. Carolyn said that she gave Epstein about 100 massages, all of them sexual, all of them ending with him masturbating.