When Jeffrey Met Ghislaine: The Story of Sex-Trafficking Lovers Epstein and Maxwell

Lovers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell once moved in the highest social circles — until he was jailed for procuring underage girls for sex, while she was tried for sex-trafficking to feed his perverted lusts.

The heiress to the squandered fortune of her spy-turned-media magnate father Robert Maxwell is due to be sentenced on Tuesday following her conviction on five counts, with a possible jail term of 55 years for the 60-year-old.

But how did the notorious partners in sex-crime meet?

Maxwell reportedly met Epstein in 1991, shortly after her father died in mysterious circumstances while cruising off the Canary Islands in his superyacht the Lady Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell had just been exposed as for embezzling hundreds of millions from the pension fund of the Mirror Group of newspapers he had bought in 1984.

“Her relationship with Epstein began at a moment of extreme vulnerability [in] Ghislaine’s life after the tragic death of our father,” Maxwell's siblings wrote in a court submission pleading for leniency a fortnight before her sentencing.

“He, our father, was a powerful and dominant figure," they wrote. "And as elder siblings, we witnessed our father taking Ghislaine under his wing, whereby she became over-dependent on his approval and vulnerable to his frequent, rapid mood swings, huge rages and rejections."

"This led her to becoming very vulnerable to abusive and powerful men who would be able to take advantage of her innate good nature," the siblings argued. "She had a difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic and demanding father. It made her vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met right after her father’s death."

Epstein was a Wall Street financier who founded his own uber-exclusive investment firm in 1988 — claiming to only accept clients worth more than $1 billion. His social circle included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Peter Mandelson, the former British cabinet minister and MP for the Labour Party which Robert Maxwell's newspaper the Mirror has long supported.

The elder Maxwell was also well-connected in high places, having worked for British intelligence — and as a suspected double agent for the KGB and allegedly Israel's Mossad. Another point in common between Epstein and Maxwell was that they both came from Jewish families.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Maxwell began grooming young girls to be abused by her lover as early as 1994, when she lured 16-year-old Annie Farmer to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico.

Farmer said in a written deposition that Maxwell gave her a massage, before Epstein tried to restrain and sexually assault her. She insisted that Maxwell "was a really important part of the grooming process" and said the couple "worked as a team".

Farmer sued Epstein's estate after his death and accepted compensation from the fund set up for his victims — in return for dropping her allegations.

The most famous accusation against Maxwell is that she groomed Virginia Giuffre Roberts, then brought her to London in 2001, when she was 17 years old, to meet none other than royal Prince Andrew.

The teenager was working at property tycoon Trump's Florida Mar-a-Lago resort at the age of 16 when she said Maxwell approached her. Giuffre Roberts said the older woman introduced her to Epstein, and from then on she was "groomed by the two for his pleasure, including lessons in Epstein's preferences during oral sex."

Giuffre sued Prince Andrew in a New York court in late 2021. The two parties settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money in February 2022.

Epstein died under contested circumstances while awaiting trial in a New York prison 2019. His death was ruled suicide, but some contend he was murdered. Maxwell has now been placed on suicide watch herself.