Hunting Ghislaine

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The life of Ghislaine Maxwell is a dark fairy story, one that plays out in reverse, of how a clever and beautiful woman ends up serving a monster while too many of her powerful friends look away. It’s a mirror, that shows poor and vulnerable victims to be heroic truth-tellers and some of the biggest movers and hitters on earth to be corrupt or at best, complacent, while evil stared them in the face.

Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein. 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. Now, though, Sweeney seems professionally rejuvenated. He recently published Murder on the Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? – an investigation into the murder of the Mediterranean island’s leading journalist. He is writing a fifth novel. His fourth, The Useful Idiot, was set in Stalinist Russia and included a diabolical character called Cornelius Aubyn. As the first and last three letters of the name suggest, this was a dig at the former Labour leader. 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.” Launched in November 2020, written and presented by award-winning investigative journalist and author John Sweeney ( BBC Panorama, The Observer), the six-part podcast co-commissioned by Global and The Story Lab, part of dentsu, tells the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of disgraced billionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell and former partner of notorious convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.In a sense they were made for each other. He was the powerful male figure, and key to a life of luxury, that she had lost when Robert Maxwell went overboard. She had a Rolodex of connections – not least Prince Andrew, who could provide the shady financier with a veneer of social respectability and cachet.

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…By making his podcast for LBC, Sweeney has been able to tell a story that had been niggling away at him for decades. “I’d always wanted to investigate Robert Maxwell,” he says. After his death, he suggested as much to Donald Trelford, then the editor of the Observer, where Sweeney worked until 2001. “He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat.” As such, it’s a perfectly sensible proposition, which may well be true, but as Maxwell herself has never really spoken about any of it – she elected not to give evidence at her own trial – it’s hard to know how damaged she was before she began damaging. 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.

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. Sweeney’s strengths as a reporter show themselves in his account of Maxwell’s trial, forensically detailing the abuse that occurred at Epstein’s numerous properties, the degree of her complicity in the crimes, and the cruelty in her denials – effectively making the victims suffer twice over, in having to relive their abuse in court.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. 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. When Robert Maxwell drowned, some speculated that he was pushed, others that he killed himself, and yet others that he was simply peeing overboard and lost his balance. “I think he was murdered,” Ghislaine told reporters. That theory was based on the idea that Robert was bumped off by Mossad because he knew too much. 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. 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.”

Sweeney theorises that, like a cult victim, just as Ghislaine could never bring herself to believe her father was the monster he palpably was, so she “blinded” herself to Epstein’s depravity, even as she became a willing accomplice to it. A former acquaintance sees it differently, observing that Ghislaine would not be the first woman who “possesses a sexual pecadillo of sharing women with her boyfriend. Underlying all of this was her libertarian sexual appetite.” So Pagliuca made the same mistake of helping anyone in court with half an eye work out the true identity of anonymised witnesses, twice. 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 young girls for sex with Epstein and perjury. 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. Hunting Ghislaine, a Global Original podcast, begins on November 19th. On Global Player or wherever you find your podcasts.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.