Page 14 QQQ Daily Mail, Monday, August 12, 2019
Continued from page 13
faults and weaknesses, he was said
to have been her favourite child but
indulgence can only stretch so far,
surely. For Andrew not only became
part of the Epstein-Maxwell social
scene in America, he facilitated
their entry into royal circles. On at
least one occasion the Queen was
unwitting hostess to a rapacious
paedophile and the woman who is
alleged to have been his procurer.
In one of the court documents
released last week, an alleged vic-
tim claimed that Miss Maxwell had
‘recruited her under the guise of a
legitimate assistant position, but
asked her to perform sexual mas-
sages for Epstein’.
Elsewhere in the documents, it is
claimed the then underage Virginia
Roberts, Miss Maxwell and Epstein
were ‘all intimate together’ and
Miss Maxwell referred to one of the
young girls as her ‘slave’.
Miss Roberts says in the docu-
ment, a manuscript for a book she
hoped would be published: ‘My
whole life revolved around just pleas-
ing these men and keeping Ghislaine
and Jeffrey happy. Their whole entire
lives revolved around sex.’
It is understood that Miss Max-
well’s lawyers rely on Miss Roberts’s
account as showing that she is
inconsistent and untruthful. She
alleged she was aged 17 and in the
company of Miss Maxwell and
Epstein when she first met Andrew
in London in 2001.
She and the prince danced
together at Tramp nightclub before
going back to Miss Maxwell’s house.
There she and the prince had a bath
together, she claimed. Then they
‘retired to my bedchamber for the
longest ten minutes of my life’. She
claims a second encounter took
place months later in New York,
while a third was on Epstein’s Car-
ibbean island.S
hE was paid $10,000 follow-
ing her encounter with Prince
Andrew, she said, which she
used to buy a car. The prince
has always denied the allegations
which were struck from a court
record in 2015 when a judge
described them as ‘immaterial and
impertinent’.
Ghislaine Maxwell denies all such
allegations. In a deposition unsealed
last Friday, it was recorded that she
banged the table in frustration
when asked about the claims by
Miss Roberts.
‘It’s borne out of years of feeling
the pressure of this entire lie that
she has perpetrated,’ she said.
‘That terrible story has been told
and retold and rehashed when I
know it to be 100 per cent false.’
Yesterday former friends and
acquaintances spoke of Miss Max-
well’s enigmatic personality and
the similarities between her rela-
tionships with her fraudster father
and Epstein. At Marlborough pub-
lic school and later at Oxford she
was a member of a powerful clique.‘She was her Daddy’s girl,’ recalls
one school contemporary. ‘But you
could not quite work out what
made her tick.’
After her father’s death when the
extent of his corruption was exposed,
Miss Maxwell retreated to America
where ‘she grew a second skin and
an icy resolve’, says a friend. There
she met Epstein, eight years her sen-
ior, whose fabulous wealth was mir-
rored by the obscurity of its origins
and current business dealings.
‘The moment you saw them
together you could see Epstein was
her father substitute,’ says one
friend. ‘A powerful older man. A
second Robert Maxwell.’T
OGEThER they partied with
the Kennedys and the Clin-
tons and Ghislaine boasted
that she was particularly close
to President Bill.
In February 2000, Andrew and
Miss Maxwell flew from New York
to Florida on a private jet belonging
to one Donald Trump. They stayed
at the future president’s resort,
Mar-a-Lago. The prince danced the
night away at a club, flirting with a
number of women and buying a
£300 bottle of champagne. Then he
flew back to New York with Miss
Maxwell, where they attended a
Ralph Lauren fashion show.
Soon it was time for Andrew to
repay their hospitality. In June 2000,
both Epstein and Miss Maxwell were
among guests at a lavish party at
Windsor Castle hosted by the Queen.
The Dance of the Decades was to
mark Andrew’s recent 40th birth-
day, Princess Anne’s 50th and Prin-
cess Margaret’s impending 70th, as
well as Prince William’s 18th.
Months later, Miss Maxwell and
the prince attended a very different
calibre of event in Manhattan that
autumn – a ‘hookers and bondage’
party for which Ghislaine dressed
as a streetwalker. The prince simply
looked dishevelled in a suit.
The closeness of the relationship
was confirmed when, in December,
Andrew threw a ‘surprise’ 40th
birthday party for Miss Maxwell at
Sandringham. Epstein was in
attendance. Within a matter of
months he and Miss Maxwell
appeared to have become the
prince’s closest friends. It was a
catastrophic error of judgment.
his ex-wife and the palace were by
then voicing concerns which grew
when Andrew left the Royal Family’s
Christmas gathering at Sandring-
ham to join Miss Maxwell and
Epstein in Phuket, Thailand, for New
Year. There he was photographed
sunbathing on a luxury yacht sur-
rounded by topless young women.
how far Ghislaine Maxwell was
prepared to go to help Epstein, the
man who bankrolled her fabulous
lifestyle, is now a criminal matter.
Today for the second time in her life
she faces hard questions about the
‘father figure’ who died amid scan-
dal. Buckingham Palace must
quake at the prospect.Andrew with Ghislaine Maxwell, centre, and model Heidi Klum at a Halloween party in 2000. The prince with Epstein in New York’s Central Park in 2011DEATH OF A PREDATOR