Hunting Ghislaine

Product Information

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.

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.Chris Baughen, Managing Editor for Global Player said: “As her story continues to unfold almost daily, John Sweeney’s brilliant dissection of Ghislaine Maxwell’s life so far has gripped listeners. As the podcast industry continues to thrive and experience incredible growth, it’s fantastic to see a Global original podcast adapted into visual content.” Hunting Ghislaine is a new LBC podcast investigating the life of Ghislaine Maxwell. Hosted by reporter John Sweeney ( Panorama, Newsnight, The Observer), the podcast is co-commissioned by Global and The Story Lab, part of dentsu creative. Episodes will be available every Thursday from 19th November on Global Player. Sweeney concludes: “Ghislaine was both the double victim of monsters and, to those without power and money and connections, a monster in her own right.” With Ghislaine Maxwell now confined to a cell in Florida’s Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institute, serving a sentence of 20 years for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors – and with the names of those wealthy and powerful men to whom, it is alleged, Epstein peddled sexual favours still awaiting disclosure – comes yet another chapter in this most horrific saga.

Carolyn said that she gave Epstein about 100 massages, all of them sexual, all of them ending with him masturbating. One of the unexpected pleasures of making the podcast was bumping into old friends from Fleet Street like Kenny Lennox, the great Daily Mirror photographer who ID’d the body of the drowned publisher in 1991 and Noreen Taylor, a feature writer on the paper who recalled Maxwell “dragging people into this nightmarish maze and making demands and then cancelling the demand, then making fresh demands. But not because he could get joy out of it. He was just in his own swirling nightmare as well.” But this is no fairy tale. HUNTING GHISLAINE sets out the other side of the story, and it’s one of the darkest you will ever read.

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.” John Sweeney: ‘biting, morally informed character assessments’. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer 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. Why so much swearing? “Swearing is very much part of me and the mood of the podcast. I want this to be like having a pint with someone in the know.” He thinks his rough-and-ready persona is refreshing. “The public like my stuff. I have that attitude of not being cowed.” Indeed, Sweeney is probably best known for screaming at a Scientology spokesman during a 2007 Panorama. Shawn said of Carolyn, one of three girlfriends he says he pimped out to Maxwell and Epstein: “She was a child”, one who, “only had two jobs ever. She worked at Arby’s [a US fast food combine] and she worked for Jeffrey” [Epstein]. Carolyn’s grandfather raped her when she was four years old. Ten years later, she said she was sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell.

John Sweeney said: “No old school Fleet Street reporter like me who knew what a monster Robert Maxwell was cannot feel some pity for Ghislaine Maxwell on the day he fell off his yacht. But then Ghislaine fled to New York to serve a second monster. This is a dark fairy story of our times, about how power and money and connections can, for a time, blind justice. But not forever.” That is, when 14, 15 or 16, they were invited by Maxwell or her assistants to give Epstein a massage, that they didn’t know that it was going to be sexualised, that they were nearly always white, slender, just post-pubescent, free of tattoos, naïve, each and every one more child than woman. His thesis is that Maxwell’s father was a “monster” (he uses the word repeatedly to establish his case, only occasionally swapping over to “ogre”), and so was Epstein, and in her desire to please these two demanding men, she lost sight of all other meaningful considerations – not least the wellbeing of the young women she lured into Epstein’s corrupting company. So, from one of her father’s greatest enemies in life, for the monster’s daughter, some measure of pity. Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a sadist, a war criminal, a monster. His cruelty deformed Ghislaine Maxwell long before she met Jeffrey Epstein. Her one-time lover was convicted for being a paedophile. So Ghislaine’s life has been spent serving not one monster but two.As for Maxwell, Sweeney muses on the impact of adoring and being adored by her father Robert, who owned and plundered the Daily Mirror. Ghislaine was raised in a life of privilege at the 51-room Headington Hill Hall near Oxford, where her father had himself memorialised in stained glass as Samson bringing down the walls of Gaza. We learn from Hunting Ghislaine that he would urinate from his helipad atop the Daily Mirror building on to people below. He behaved worse in his office. “Maxwell also had the habit, common to megalomaniacs, of crapping in front of people. Perhaps not visibly doing it, but going to the loo with people waiting so would have to listen to him evacuating – whatever you want to call it.” The enormous cowpat has had the last laugh: Sweeney is very proud of Hunting Ghislaine. “The journalism is solid. We set out points of view and investigate them and get to a conclusion.” 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. 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 girls for sex with Epstein and perjury. 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.”