She was the toast of high society in London and New York. Now Ghislaine Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years in jail for grooming and trafficking underage girls.
Ghislaine Maxwell was born on Christmas Day 1961. Three days later, a car carrying her 15-year-old brother Michael crashed into a lorry along a foggy Oxfordshire road. Michael Maxwell would spend the remaining seven years of his life in a coma.
Although she had been born into material abundance - her father was the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell - by every account, Ghislaine Maxwell's earliest years were disfigured by emotional neglect. Betty, her mother, later admitted in her memoir that after Michael's accident the baby "was hardly given a glance" by her devastated parents.
One day in 1965, according to Betty, three-year-old Ghislaine Maxwell stood in front of her and declared: "Mummy, I exist." Betty also believed the toddler developed anorexia. To compensate, from this point both parents went to the opposite extreme and began lavishing affection on their youngest child.
Though she was never spared the abuse and the rages her father would inflict on every one of his offspring, she would soon emerge as his favourite. And, Betty would later write in her 1994 memoir, that favourite daughter "became spoiled, the only one of my children I can truly say that about".
The charges against Maxwell are so shocking - grooming and sex trafficking girls for abuse by the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein - it's tempting to look for an explanation in her dysfunctional childhood.
But just as her crimes are impossible to excuse, Maxwell is a difficult woman to comprehend. For a life lived in public, the fine details of her biography have always been unusually elusive.
Maxwell was raised in Headington Hill Hall, a vast Italianate mansion overlooking Oxford in the UK. Rather than buying it himself, her plutocrat father had somehow persuaded its owner, Oxford City Council, to rent it to him for a minimal sum in return for renovating the property. It was, he said, "the best council house in the country".
Throughout Ghislaine Maxwell's childhood, lavish parties were thrown at Headington Hill Hall, with politicians, celebrities and media grandees in attendance. But after the VIPs had left the building it was a deeply emotionally austere place to grow up.
Robert Maxwell had risen from extreme poverty in a Czechoslovak Jewish settlement - most of his family were murdered in the Holocaust - to become a British Army war hero, then an academic publishing magnate, a Labour MP and eventually owner of the Daily Mirror, one of the UK's biggest-selling newspapers.
As a businessman, he was reviled as a bully. At home, meanwhile, he is depicted in Fall, John Preston's biography, as a "draconian father" who abused his children both physically and verbally.
Robert Maxwell at a party on his yacht with daughter Ghislaine Maxwell and wife Betty, circa 1990
They would be interrogated at the dinner table about geopolitics or their plans for the future and reduced to tears if he considered their answers unsatisfactory. "He would beat us with a belt - girls as well as boys," another of Robert's offspring, Ian, told Preston.
Although his favourite, Ghislaine Maxwell wasn't immune from any of this. But while some of her siblings withdrew or rebelled, she was always anxious to please her father - she told Tatler in 2000 he was an "inspiring" parent - and dedicated herself to keeping him happy. It must have worked, after a fashion - Maxwell Snr later named his private yacht the Lady Ghislaine, rather than after Betty or his three older daughters.
And evidently, he had grand hopes for his youngest daughter - he apparently harboured ambitions of marrying her off to the late John F Kennedy Jnr.
She was educated at Marlborough College and Oxford University, where she studied modern history and languages.
"It was very clear to me even as an undergraduate that she was interested in power and money," says the writer Anna Pasternak, who was a contemporary at Oxford and moved in the same social circles. "She was one of those people at parties who always looked over your shoulder to see if there was somebody more powerful or more interesting while she was air-kissing you."
Rachel Johnson, the UK prime minister's sister and another Oxford contemporary, recently raised eyebrows when she recalled spotting Ghislaine Maxwell across the Balliol junior common room - "a shiny glamazon with naughty eyes holding court astride a table, a high-heeled boot resting on my brother Boris's thigh."
After graduating, Maxwell's father appointed her as a director at Oxford United, the football club he owned and chaired, and also set her up with her own company supplying corporate gifts.
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She looked over your shoulder at parties to see if there was somebody more powerful
But in the pages of Tatler or Nigel Dempster's Daily Mail gossip column, where she was now a regular fixture, she was usually described as a "socialite" rather than a businesswoman. She began dating Count Gianfranco Cicogna, an Italian aristocrat.
She also founded a kind of private member's club exclusively for women. Pasternak attended on a few occasions and, while the idea seemed innovative at the time, she considered Maxwell an unlikely feminist champion.
"My recollection is that she was kind of breezily charming to other women, but I don't remember her being a very close friend of another woman," Pasternak says. "I think that women weren't really important to her - only as a means to get to another powerful man."
In January 1991, after her father acquired the struggling New York Daily News, she was dispatched to its headquarters as his representative. It was her point of entry into the social scene of Manhattan.
But in November that year, her world was upended. Her father vanished from the deck of the Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands and his body was later found floating in the sea.
Ghislaine Maxwell flew straight to Las Palmas, where the yacht had been taken. By every account, she was inconsolable at the loss of her father. The day after his death, she was deputed to deliver an emotional speech to the world's press, who had gathered at the quayside.
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption,
Ghislaine Maxwell, holding a framed photograph of her late father in Jerusalem, 1991
Soon enough it came out that Robert Maxwell had raided the Mirror Group's pension fund of £440m ($583m) as part of a scheme to artificially inflate the company's share price at the expense of 32,000 of his employees.
Now the Maxwell family and the British government were left to pick up the pieces - the latter eventually paying £100m ($132m) towards a bailout of the fund. In June 1992, two of Robert's sons, Ian and Kevin, were arrested and charged with fraud. They were eventually acquitted in January 1996.
While her father's guilt was obvious to most people, Ghislaine Maxwell continued to defend him. "He wasn't a crook," she told Vanity Fair's Edward Klein in early 1992. "A thief to me is somebody who steals money. Do I think that my father did that? No. I don't know what he did. Obviously, something happened. Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run off with the money? No. And that's my definition of a crook."
While the rest of her siblings accepted Robert Maxwell's death was either an accident or suicide, his youngest daughter insisted he must have been murdered.
Despite her protests, the fall-out from the Mirror pension scandal made the UK a less than welcoming place for her. In November 1992 it was reported that she had bought a $4,000 (£3,019) one-way Concorde ticket to New York.
In 2005, Harry Mount was feeling lonely in Manhattan. Aged 33, he'd just been appointed as the Daily Telegraph's New York correspondent but, as yet, knew few people in the city. When a friend asked him if he wanted to tag along with him to a party at Ghislaine Maxwell's house, Mount jumped at the chance. She was, after all, well known as a prominent figure in Manhattan society who'd been photographed with Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and even Pope John Paul II.