Ghislaine Maxwell: Becoming a Monster

Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow aired on Peacock's streaming channel on June 24, 2021. The three-part series attempts to explain how the favorite child of media mogul Robert Maxwell fell so far from grace as to end up a vain middle-aged woman who procured underage girls for financier Jeffrey Epstein and his global cronies.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead, the official story being that he committed suicide in his cell at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10, 2019. Ghislaine Maxwell currently resides in the Florida Correctional Institute in Tallahassee, having received a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking a minor and four additional criminal charges in December 2021.

The documentary is expertly produced and fascinating to watch. It takes the viewer through Maxwell’s childhood, the heady days at Balliol College, Oxford University, her glittery years as a social butterfly whose charm smoothed Jeffrey Epstein’s entrée into high society, and her odd attempt to refashion herself as a global humanitarian following the death of her father in November 1991. We see the photogenic Ghislaine cavorting through the years with political figures and celebrities ranging from model Naomi Campbell to Prince Andrew, Duke of York, always smiling and impeccably dressed.

Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of this story that is infuriating, sad, and bewildering all at once. The women who step forward to provide public account of how Maxwell and others in this sordid circle casually ruined lives are intensely moving. Many of those interviewed are astute about how the noxious stew of sociopathology, power, and money enabled a certain class of men to elude censure, let alone justice, aided and abetted by this damaged woman. As the story progresses, Maxwell disappears into a haze of self-indulgence, expensive clothes, and parties. The documentary firmly establishes that Ghislaine Maxwell was a predator and a criminal.

Yet it is difficult to ignore a nagging sense that she is also a victim. This fact does not exonerate her. Maxwell is a willful casualty of her own myopic narcissism, cruelty, and dependence upon rich men. She took her revenge not by burning to the ground the gilded prison she grew up in, but by enticing others into it and facilitating their abuse. Still, the Ghislaine Maxwell presented here is a victim, seemingly caught from childhood in a web of predatory males who warped her identity and moral compass.

In the documentary, the writer Anna Pasternak uses the term “daddy’s girl” in reference to Maxwell so often that it begins to seem like an insult, insinuating that the overwhelming influence of the father ruined the young girl. The father’s attention, when he cares to bestow it, seems entirely too much, vaguely disturbing, as in a gothic fairy tale. He ricochets between neglect and overindulgence and adroitly separates Maxwell from her mother and siblings, setting her up as the special one whose position is insecurely moored by charm and youth. Later in the story, he exploits her coquettish glamour to enable his own schemes and predations.

The documentary is mostly indifferent to the question of her mother, though one intuits that Maxwell learned just as much or more from her than she did from her father. Elisabeth Maxwell appears briefly as the weirdly disengaged wife of a brutal genius. In real-life, she was a respected historian and founder of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal. In 1945, she married Robert Maxwell, who had survived a horrific childhood only to lose most of his family in the Holocaust. Her memoir, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, published in 1994, is an exasperating account of her indestructible (and to the reader, inexplicable) commitment to a deeply flawed man.

The documentary strongly suggests it would have been hard for any child to breathe amidst the suffocating intensity of the parents. In this light, Ghislaine’s purported comment, at age 3, “Mummy, I exist,” seems the skeleton key to much of what followed. Daddy’s girl though she was, Ghislaine seems to have learned from her mother the most enduring lesson of all: powerful men must be deferred to, flattered, and appeased at all costs. This is the only way to stay in the castle. If other women have to suffer, well, that is their problem, because everyone knows there is only room for one princess.

Nothing excuses the crimes that Ghislaine Maxwell committed. Her trauma does not exonerate her or minimize the pain of her accusers, who have had to work very hard and for far too long to find justice. What it does suggest is that Maxwell perfected the strange alchemy whereby a victim becomes a villain and turns against the ones she could and should have protected. Through the lens of Ghislaine Maxwell’s story, we are forced to confront how pain and misogyny can cascade through generations of women, while a certain class of men floats obliviously above the wreckage.