The Times - UK (2022-01-01)

the times | Saturday January 1 2022 25

Comment

Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826

Maxwell’s traumatic upbringing is no defence

The newspaper tycoon’s daughter could have reinvented herself as anything but chose to be the helpmate for an abuser

in a string of successes for the US

justice system as it deals with the

notoriously tricky matter of holding

sexual exploiters to account. They

got Weinstein, they got R Kelly, and

now they’ve got her.

It is, though, undeniably

frustrating that in this case the men

who actually raped the girls have so

far slipped the net, while prosecutors

currently have their eye on four

more female co-conspirators.

There is a double standard. Giuffre

names it: one of the things that make

Maxwell seem worse to her than

Epstein is that he was “acting on his

sick urges”, as though for all his

crimes he was ultimately one more

piece of roadkill under the

juggernaut of his libido. A man like

Epstein is acting like a man; a

woman like Maxwell is acting like

a monster.

But he made his choices. When he

violated girls and women, he was a

volunteer. Maxwell volunteered, too.

Out of her longing to be the

favourite, she fashioned herself into

the squalid madam.

Out of her intimate knowledge of

male gluttony and viciousness, she

turned herself into a perfect

helpmeet for the gluttonous and

vicious. The girl she was deserves

pity. The woman she became

deserves her punishment.

Janice Turner is away

part of her defence in a fraud trial.

Maxwell never flipped. Her

lawyers set out to undermine her

victims, and even to undermine the

entire idea that the past can be

reliably recalled, by bringing in

testimony from memory expert

Elizabeth Loftus, but Maxwell never

pitched for the jury’s sympathy.

In the pictures of her and Epstein

together that helped secure her

conviction she looks at him

adoringly, he looks at anything but

her. It’s like a photo feature for

Surrendered Wife Monthly, except

that he never did marry her after all

her efforts.

This was what she was groomed

for: the perfect lieutenant for any

abuser, trained to both meticulously

anticipate desires and deftly blind

herself to anything better left

unseen. People say the problem for

children of the super-rich is that they

never have to acquire a purpose in

life but it seems to me that Maxwell

understood exactly what her

function was: to please daddy at all

costs, even when he’s no longer alive

to bestow his approval.

Maxwell’s conviction is the latest

attached herself to Epstein, and she

could not have found a better daddy

substitute. Like Robert Maxwell,

Epstein was corrupt, power-hungry

and greedy for pleasure. Both

reinvented themselves to fit in

among the upper classes. Both were

slippery in the extreme — and, in the

most remarkable parallel, Epstein

also managed to die in clouded

circumstances just before his crimes

caught up with him.

In 2019, while awaiting trial on

sex-trafficking charges, Epstein

hanged himself — if you believe the

official account, which many don’t.

Some, like the journalist Julie K

Brown, who reported extensively on

his case, think there are still

questions to be answered about his

death. Epstein’s friendships with

powerful men such as Donald

Trump, Bill Clinton and, of course,

Prince Andrew gave rise to febrile

conspiracy theories.

Regardless of how he died, the

fact that he was dead meant there

was only Maxwell left to carry

the can for the abuses. She bore her

burden assiduously. Nothing

could have been easier than to

denounce a corpse and paint

herself as another victim of his

predation: in another courtroom in

America, at the same time, the

disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth

Holmes has claimed coercive

control by her ex-boyfriend as

N

o one knows exactly how
Jeffrey Epstein got all his
money, but we know how
he got his girls. Virginia
Giuffre, the most
persistent and unquiet of his victims
in her demands for justice, calls it a
“pyramid scheme”: Epstein recruited
women, who would recruit more
women to him.
Vulnerable girls. Damaged girls.
Girls who might have flinched at a
middle-aged man asking for a
massage, but who let their guard
down when the request came
through a female intermediary.
And at the top of the pyramid, level
one of the grift, was Ghislaine
Maxwell, found guilty this week of
five charges related to grooming
and trafficking girls for Epstein and
his friends.
Maxwell might not have been the
one committing the ultimate abuses,
but to Giuffre she’s “more evil than
Epstein”, because Maxwell won and
then betrayed her trust: “I’d gone
through so much abuse already,
you’d think I would have had an

amazing radar for these types of

predators. But Ghislaine connected

with me on a different level.”

Still, if familiarity with cruelty

were any guarantee of avoiding it in

future, Maxwell herself should

never have come within a million

miles of Epstein. As the daughter of

Robert Maxwell, she grew up in the

purview of crookedness and

brutality: the family, mother Betty

and children alike, had to fall in line

around his bullying and appetites.

The only reliable thing about his

discipline was that it was

unavoidable.

Being the favourite (her mother

called her “spoilt”) did not save

Ghislaine from the beatings, and

being beaten did not stop her from

being loyal. After her father’s death

in 1991 — when he either jumped,

slipped or (in more fertile

imaginations) was pushed from a

yacht named the Lady Ghislaine, just

before his financial misdeeds caught

up with him — it was Maxwell who

delivered the family’s statement to

the press.

And she stayed loyal. A few years

after her father’s death she had

Corrupt and greedy for

pleasure, Epstein was

a daddy substitute

The men who actually

raped the girls have

so far slipped the net

Sarah

Ditum

@sarahditum