Hunting Ghislaine

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The enormous cowpat has had the last laugh: Sweeney is very proud of Hunting Ghislaine. “The journalism is solid. We set out points of view and investigate them and get to a conclusion.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

It’s a story both melancholic and macabre; a story arousing pity and disgust; a story of victims and monsters; a story of how some of the richest and entitled people on the planet used their money and power to silence the abused.One female acquaintance recalls a party at Robert Maxwell’s posh “council house”, Headington Hall (rented from the local authority), where Ghislaine organised a game of “guess whose”, in which the men would be blindfolded and the women removed their bras to be fondled and groped. Ghislaine, she says, saw “sex as simply a currency”. Another puts it more bluntly, saying “she was obsessed”. The story of Jeffrey Epstein has been told in many ways over the past two years, but none have given more than a few cursory moments to Ghislaine Maxwell. His girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes against a series of underage women, some as young as 14, 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 earlier this year. For the past six months I have been working on a six-part podcast investigation, Hunting Ghislaine, for LBC, Britain’s biggest commercial news-talk station. I have come away from this deep dive into the life of Ghislaine believing, one, that the evidence against her is damning; two, that sat around the high tables of Manhattan, Palm Beach, London and Windsor sit some pretty disgusting people; and, three, that a part of me feels pity for her.

Sweeney methodically chronicles the steps of grooming; spotting the victim as being vulnerable, unstable, from a broken home; the friendly approach, the offer of a job, advancement or simply ready cash; the seemingly innocent suggestion of giving Epstein a massage; the ensuing abuse and entrapment. In New York, under Epstein’s sway, she would go on hunting expeditions for adolescent girls, ostensibly to audition them as models. “I’ve got to get the nubiles,” she told one of Epstein’s employees. A number of girls subsequently turned up at his house wearing school uniforms and braces on their teeth.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. 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. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Hunting Ghislaine, by the investigative journalist John Sweeney, is based on Sweeney’s popular 2020 podcast of the same name. It’s a story with which we are all familiar – overly familiar, perhaps – but while Sweeney draws copiously on the extensive reporting done by others, his book, carefully researched and written in a breezy journalese, casts new light on the complex character of Ghislaine Maxwell and her fateful relationships with Epstein and her father. In LBC’s new podcast Hunting Ghislaine, investigative reporter John Sweeney (Panorama, Newsnight, The Observer) sets out to tell the strange story of Ghislaine Maxwell. The ages of the women when they say Maxwell helped Epstein sexually abuse them were Jane: 14, Kate: 17, Carolyn: 14 and Annie: 16. You might say there’s a pattern of behaviour by Maxwell and Epstein right there. Sweeney raises the question of whether she has been left to carry the can for these two men who, the evidence suggests, killed themselves (Maxwell herself never believed her father’s death was suicide). As he writes: “The vast majority of Epstein’s Palm Beach victims never meet Ghislaine, never hear her name.”Just so you know, this is fiction: but Heawood and his compadre Kennedy Fisher are played so brilliantly by Barnaby Kay and Jana Carpenter that they’ve started to feel like real people. I find myself rooting for the cynical, intrepid Fisher in particular, despite this series’ dark questions around who she is and what she’s really been up to. This is a new element, and means that our two heroes are not working together as closely as before; Fisher is in a small coastal town in the US, Heawood in Mosul, though there might be a sinister connection between both places… Pity for Ghislaine because her father Robert was such a monster. Robert Maxwell was a war criminal, killing an unarmed man in cold blood, a thief, a liar and a bully. What is certain is that he took a “sadistic pleasure” in humiliating the people who loved him the most, his own family.