Maxwell’s mother: the chilling Sliding Doors Moment
Elisabeth Maxwell: Ghislaine Maxwell’s mother was told her daughter was assessed as having “low intelligence” and needing psychotherapy.
In her book, A Mind of My Own, the wife of media fraudster Robert Maxwell breezily accounts tiny Ghislaine’s disruptive school behaviour.
It’s a chilling tale of an opportunity lost to save the youngster from her fate.
Moreover, the family says she was anorexic because her parents ignored her for the first three years of her life.
In a shocking Sliding Doors moment, Dr Maxwell re-tells the story with all the emotion of a ordering a pizza delivery.
Elisabeth Maxwell|Ghislaine Maxwell’s Mother
What did they do to help her? Nothing, they changed schools to one where she was lauded as a high achiever.
Historian Ben Macintyre said his sister was childhood friends with the now 61 -year-old.
“Ghislaine was envied, admired, teased for her money, and mocked for her slow reading,’ he continued in an article for Air Mail.
And while Ghislaine did attend prestigious Oxford University , the consensus was that father Robert Maxwell had bought her spot.
Moreover, friends reported the convicted sex trafficker had problems with spelling.
Macintyre told how Robert Maxwell, the late newspaper tycoon, would invite school friends to the family’s home of Headington Hill Hall, where he would make them take part in reading competitions with his daughter.
‘However good the other girls were, he declared Ghislaine the winner every time,’ Macintyre wrote.
At nine, she went to Edgarley Hall boarding school in Somerset, but she was back in Oxford at 13 to attend Headington Girls’ School, where she was ‘very sporty at tennis, hockey and athletics’.
After her A-Levels at Marlborough College, a top public school, she joined her father’s Pergamon Press.
Elisabeth Maxwell
According to Oxford Mail, she spent her first years of schooling at Oxford High School for Girls in North Oxford.
The Oxford Mail stated the convicted sex trafficker went to four schools before attending Oxford university with people such as UK PM Boris Johnson.
“At the age of nine, she went to Edgarley Hall boarding school in Somerset, but she was back in Oxford at 13 to attend Headington Girls’ School, where she was “very sporty at tennis, hockey and athletics,” said the newspaper.
Elisabeth Maxwell
After her schooling at Marlborough College, she joined her father’s Pergamon Press at Headington, “doing anything from typing to managing congresses”.
But as much as Maxwell’s legal team protests now, before sentencing on June 28, it’s hard to find anyone now who believes her tale of woe.
“It was very clear to me even as an undergraduate that she was interested in power and money,” says the writer Anna Pasternak, who was a contemporary at Oxford and moved in the same social circles. “She was one of those people at parties who always looked over your shoulder to see if there was somebody more powerful or more interesting while she was air-kissing you.”
Rachel Johnson, the UK prime minister’s sister and another Oxford contemporary, raised eyebrows when she recalled spotting Ghislaine Maxwell across the Balliol junior common room – “a shiny glamazon with naughty eyes holding court astride a table, a high-heeled boot resting on my brother Boris’s thigh.”
But these days even her best friend is avoiding her
The book is out of publication but we managed in 2020 to find a second-hand copy on EBay.
Elisabeth Maxwell Ghislaine Mother
Ghislaine Maxwell Prison
Will Lloyd, a reporter from Unherd, was in the courtroom and offers a reminder of who the trial was really for, the victims seeking justice:
“The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”
If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom – Will Lloyd.
But Lloyd also touches upon Maxwell’s immaturity, or what we describe as something like arrested development:
“The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.”
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