Ghislaine Maxwell Parents: “In order to retain his love, I was prepared to abandon my own personality completely…analyse why I have not been able to satisfy your material needs in every way.”
Dr Elisabeth Maxwell, A Mind of My Own, 1994.
You can’t write about the Maxwell family without discussing the looming shadow of the monstrous patriarch Robert.
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This is especially relevant when it comes to his wife of 40 years, Dr Elisabeth Maxwell. Because she was devotedly and obsessively in love with her husband, who deserved no such dedication.
Ghislaine Maxwell Parents
The Maxwells & their persistent attempts at myth-making are ripe for examination because they started with Robert and Elisabeth.
The patriarch, who got his name from a coffee tin, was heard many times telling people they were happily married.
But the reality was Elisabeth (aka Betty) was mere window dressing for her husband, who lost interest in her after Ghislaine was born.
Moreover the family still sees itself as the heroes of this epic story. It’s them against the world.
We are pitched a tale of modern-day tragedy. A hero rises from the ashes of war, rises and then falls. Then the hero’s daughter rises and falls.
Ghislaine’s brother Ian Maxwell said in 2021: “as my father is concerned there has been a thread in the whole business, this whole case where they wanted to come up with a rather simplistic view that because my father was considered a bad man, that the rotten apple never falls far from the tree.”
“Therefore they try and make this link between my father and Ghislaine to such an extent that he is given relatively short shrift and she is given a much bigger role than the reality in terms of their relationship.’
Ghislaine Maxwell Parents
Because there is no doubt Robert Maxwell brutalised his own family, emotionally and physically, including his wife.
“I want to live for you, I want to drown my soul in your desires,” Elisabeth wrote to her husband.
But at the same time, her submission might have been a coping mechanism due to living under the iron-fist of a tyrant.
In a beautifully-crafted piece in The Guardian, Libby Brooks wrote of Elisabeth: “It was in the liberated Paris of 1945 that she met the freshly decorated soldier who was to become her life partner.
The daughter of wealthy Huguenots, Elisabeth was studying law at the Sorbonne when she encountered the newly monikered Robert Maxwell, an Allied fighter born into grinding poverty on the Carpathian mountainside.”
The Maxwells had had nine children, two sadly died before reaching adulthood.
Ghislaine Maxwell Parents
In my opinion, Robert Maxwell was a bloated, bubbling mix of various psychological issues: war trauma, sociopathy (the stealing), narcissism (ego) and psychopathy (potential war crimes).
Of Maxwell, Tanya Gold wrote: “It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch.
He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study.
His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child.”
Because Elisabeth said it was her husband’s wish to replicate his large family of origin because almost all of his Czech relatives were murdered by Nazis.
Dr Maxwell was determined to “earn” her husband’s love.
You will only need to say what you want and it will be done, or to express a desire and I will satisfy it. Perhaps you will discover that the half-flayed created you have stripped naked still deserves to be loved.”
Moreover, the Maxwell marriage reads like a nightmare, where she was able to accept his abuse with good nature and blame herself for his shortcomings.
Ghislaine Maxwell Parents
Brooks writes of Elisabeth’s complete subordination to her tyrannical husband:
“Despite his infidelities, despite his manifest cruelties, it was safer not to surrender her love. And her own willingness to be dominated perhaps explains her passive collusion in the treatment of her children,” she wrote.
She wrote how she emulated it when she disciplined her own children.
Ian, at 15, the choice of taking ‘three of the best’ from herself or waiting till his father came home. ‘After momentary reflection, he decided to take the beating from me … I hated doing it and needed all the courage I could muster to perform such a hated punishment with the twins’ riding crop.’
Elisabeth Maxwell, A Mind of My Own
Ghislaine Maxwell Parents
What a bloody mess!
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