Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell (born December 25, 1961, Maisons-Laffitte, France) is a former British and American socialite who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking of underage girls for the American financier Jeffrey Epstein. According to prosecutors, Maxwell and her hired assistants enticed hundreds of girls to visit Epstein’s homes and nearby locations in New York City, Florida, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as Maxwell’s own residence in London. There they were groomed for sex acts with Epstein and other individuals. In 2019, two years before Maxwell’s conviction, Epstein was arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking of underage girls. While awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein killed himself by hanging. Maxwell, who had already left the city, was arrested in New Hampshire in 2020.

The Epstein Files: A Timeline

Family, childhood, and education

Ghislaine Maxwell, born on Christmas Day in 1961, was the youngest child of Czechoslovak-born Robert Maxwell (originally Jan Ludvik Hoch), a British publishing magnate, and Elisabeth (née Meynard) Maxwell, a French researcher of the Holocaust. Most of Robert’s Jewish family members in Czechoslovakia and Budapest were killed in the Holocaust, but Robert escaped to France and then Britain, where he joined the British army and participated in the Normandy invasion. At about that time he also changed his name. He later served two terms (1964–70) as a Labour Party member of the British Parliament.

A few days after Ghislaine’s birth, her 15-year-old brother was severely injured in a car accident and remained in a coma until his death in 1968. Because of her brother’s injury, Ghislaine was virtually ignored by her parents during the first few years of her life, according to a memoir published by her mother in 1994. While still a toddler, Ghislaine once stood before her mother and declared “Mummy, I exist.” From that point forward she was the focus of her parents’ attention and the favorite child of her father. In 1986 her father christened his new 187-foot (57-meter) yacht the Lady Ghislaine.

Ghislaine’s family became very wealthy and socially prominent through her father’s acquisition of major publishers of journals, books, and newspapers, the last including The Daily Mirror in Britain and the New York Daily News in the United States. The family resided in a 53-room mansion near Oxford, where Robert and Elisabeth (known as Betty) regularly hosted parties attended by national political figures, celebrities, and even royalty. Through her family’s wealth and social status and her charming personality, Ghislaine became a popular figure among the upper classes. After attending private schools in Oxford and Somerset, she entered Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where she earned a degree in modern history and languages in 1985.

Early career and social life

In the 1980s Ghislaine became a director of the Oxford United Football Club, which her father had saved from bankruptcy some years earlier. She was later the head of Maxwell Corporate Gifts, a company she created with her father’s help, and a business manager of the European, her father’s weekly English-language newspaper distributed throughout Europe. In January 1991 she moved to New York City to serve as her father’s representative at the New York Daily News. There she soon became a prominent socialite.

In 1991 Robert Maxwell mysteriously disappeared from the Lady Ghislaine near the Canary Islands, and his nude body was later found floating in the ocean. An autopsy was inconclusive, but the unofficial conclusion was that he had died by suicide. Some investigators, meanwhile, speculated that Maxwell’s death had something to do with his alleged ties to Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency. Some British officials also believed that Maxwell had acted as a triple agent for Mossad, the Soviet KGB, and MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. Ghislaine herself believed that her father had been murdered, whereas her siblings thought he had suffered a heart attack or simply fallen off the yacht.

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Shortly after her father’s death, it was discovered that his publishing empire was collapsing and that he had secretly siphoned some $1.2 billion from two of his flagship public companies and employee pension funds. Two of Ghislaine’s siblings, Ian and Kevin, were charged with fraud in connection with their father’s theft, though they were both acquitted in 1996. The Maxwell family quickly lost its social standing and influence in Britain, even becoming a target of hostility among many people. Now unwelcome at home, Ghislaine returned to New York, where she resided for more than 25 years.

Association with Jeffrey Epstein

Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein in the early 1990s, soon after she joined the New York Daily News. They were romantically involved for at least part of the 1990s and remained close until Epstein’s arrest and imprisonment in 2019. From the beginning, each of them greatly benefited from the relationship, though in different ways: Epstein, who had started a consulting firm that provided money-management services to individuals with a net worth of more than $1 billion, was introduced to wealthy and prominent members of Maxwell’s social circle—their mutual friendships eventually included Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew, duke of York—while Maxwell, whose financial resources had declined significantly following her father’s death, was able to resume a wealthy lifestyle. From the early 1990s Maxwell also served as a professional assistant to Epstein by hiring and managing his household staff.

In 2008, following state and federal investigations of his alleged sexual assault of some 40 underage girls in Florida in the 1990s, Epstein pleaded guilty on state charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting a minor for prostitution. He served 13 months in prison under a plea deal that allowed him to spend six days a week in his office in Palm Beach, Florida. Following his conviction, he and Maxwell no longer appeared in public together, though Maxwell continued her own social life.

Arrest and conviction

Starting in 2015 Maxwell herself faced lawsuits charging her with sex trafficking of underage girls through deceit and false promises; among the plaintiffs was Virginia Giuffre, who had gone public with her story in 2011. Maxwell was also accused of making some of her victims complicit in her crimes by paying them to secure other girls for sexual abuse. In the face of her legal challenges, Maxwell sold her home in New York, and by 2017 she had effectively gone into hiding, as even her lawyers claimed not to know where she lived.

In July 2020, almost one year after Epstein’s suicide, Maxwell was arrested at her home in New Hampshire. It was later revealed that she had been married to Scott Borgerson, the head of a technology company, since 2016. In December 2021 Maxwell was convicted on five federal charges related to sex trafficking of underage girls, and in June 2022 she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In April 2025, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had declined to reverse the lower court’s decision, Maxwell filed an appeal of her conviction with the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 6, at the start of its 2025–26 term, the Court declined to hear her appeal.

Epstein’s “client list”

In 2024, as part of his campaign for a second presidential term, Trump vowed to make public an alleged list of “clients” for whom Epstein and Maxwell had trafficked underage girls. Trump’s ardent supporters in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement had long believed that Epstein had been murdered in his jail cell at the behest of individuals on his client list in order to avoid their own prosecution. Many of Trump’s supporters were also convinced that the client list included Clinton and other leaders of the Democratic Party, as well as Democratic members of the so-called “deep state.”

Soon after his inauguration, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, sparked much anticipation by claiming in an interview that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” However, no such list was released, which greatly angered a large portion of the MAGA movement. In July the FBI further upset MAGA members by claiming that its “exhaustive” and “systematic” review of files related to the Epstein case did not find a client list. Soon afterward Trump lost support within the MAGA movement by criticizing those who demanded the release of the “Epstein files,” claiming that the files had been created by his Democratic opponents.

Later in July, in an apparent effort to resolve the administration’s contradictory claims and to calm the MAGA movement, Trump’s deputy attorney general conducted a two-day interview with Maxwell. Many people believed that she would know which people had been clients of Epstein, but some of Trump’s opponents speculated that the administration was considering a deal with Maxwell whereby her sentence would be reduced, or she would be pardoned altogether, in exchange for testifying that Trump’s name was not on any client list. During the same week, Maxwell was subpoenaed to testify before the House Oversight Committee. In response, her lawyers declared that she would not testify unless she were granted immunity from further prosecution or a commutation of her prison sentence.

In the week after her interview, Maxwell was transferred from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.