Ghislaine Maxwell first met Jeffrey Epstein for tea in his Madison Avenue office. What she remembers most vividly about the encounter, Maxwell told the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, in an interview in late July, which was released last week, is Epstein’s tie. “It had a giant, seemed like a ketchup stain on it,” she said. “I was, like, Wow, O.K.”
It was 1991, and Maxwell had recently called off an engagement and was in the process of moving from London to New York. “And a girlfriend of mine . . . said, ‘I’ve got’—you know, as your girlfriends do—‘I’ve got a guy for you to meet. . . . You’ll love him. He’s looking for a wife,’ ” Maxwell told Blanche at the start of the interview. “I’m edging towards thirty. I don’t need to tell you guys, that’s a very important moment for a girl to, like, think about important things.”
So began a relationship that lasted for decades and was both romantic and professional, with Epstein paying Maxwell—who oversaw the management of his properties—from very early on. According to Maxwell, they were largely out of touch by the time of Epstein’s death, in jail, in 2019. Three years later, she was sentenced to twenty years in prison for trafficking young girls for Epstein and participating in their sexual abuse.
The story of Maxwell’s first meeting with Epstein may sound like an unlikely anecdote for a convicted child-sex trafficker to share with a senior Justice Department official; indeed, the entire Maxwell interview, which took place over two days, is like no legal document most of us ever encountered. To read the three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page transcript—even more, to listen to the audio of Maxwell’s soft voice, her British accent sanded down by decades in the United States—is to be horrified, even enraged, by Maxwell’s brazen airbrushing of her conduct, and by Blanche’s placid acceptance of her rendition of events. The interview had no evident legal purpose. It was a damage-control operation. Blanche was not so much investigating Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes as attempting to exculpate President Donald Trump, who was under fire from his base for his own involvement with Epstein, a man he once described as a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” The Justice Department had once argued that Maxwell should be sentenced to at least thirty years in prison. Now its second-ranking official, who had been Trump’s criminal-defense lawyer, was aligned with a woman whose crimes the department had condemned as “monstrous.” Interrogator and witness shared the same goal—they were both there to make Trump happy—and their exchange reflected this arrangement.
The interview is alternately boring and compelling, offering a glimpse into an insular world of privilege and entitlement. “I’m English, and my close friends are all close friends with Sarah and Andrew,” Maxwell explained at one point, referring to Sarah Ferguson and her former husband, Prince Andrew, who was accused in a civil lawsuit of raping one of Epstein’s underage victims, Virginia Giuffre. (Prince Andrew has denied wrongdoing but reached an out-of-court settlement in the Giuffre case.) Maxwell described meeting Elon Musk when “a bunch of us” gathered at “another friend’s island” for a birthday party for the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; she said that she ran into the Tesla C.E.O. again a few years later, at the Oscars. Maxwell comes off as both pathetic and loathsome. Epstein had encouraged her to think they might get married. “Certainly by the mid-, late nineties, I knew the marriage part was never going to happen,” she said. “But I did think that we might have a child, which is what I had really wanted.” She suggested that she had ruined her own life—but never acknowledged that she had harmed many others in the process.
About her crimes, Maxwell remained utterly lacking in remorse. She allowed that “somebody’s inappropriate”—such as seeing Epstein masturbating on a massage table—“and mine may be different.” She acknowledged that he sexually abused underage girls. “He’s a disgusting guy who did terrible things to young kids,” Maxwell said. But she claimed that she never witnessed or even knew of the abuse when she was involved with Epstein, and denied soliciting underage girls to massage him. “I can categorically state that, had any child said to me that they were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . . I would never have permitted such a thing,” Maxwell told Blanche. She said she never saw any women, of any age, “under any form of duress” or “looking uncomfortable or in any way distressed.” Perhaps some of Epstein’s masseuses performed their jobs topless—“less than normally clad for massage,” as she put it. “Did I ever instruct anyone how to pleasure Mr. Epstein?” Maxwell told Blanche. “No.”
Of course, there is no reason to believe Maxwell. At her trial, four women, all of whom were underage when they met Maxwell and Epstein, provided testimony that convincingly contradicts this account. The jury convicted Maxwell of five counts involving sex trafficking. The judge who presided over her trial and sentenced her concluded that she had “participated in a horrific scheme to entice, transport, and traffic underage girls, some as young as fourteen.”
The pair met one of them, known by the pseudonym Jane, at a summer camp for talented children, when she was fourteen; her father had just died, and her family was struggling financially. The prosecution’s sentencing memo described what happened next: Epstein and Maxwell both sexually abused Jane, and “taught Jane how Epstein liked to be massaged and gave Jane instructions about touching Epstein’s penis.” Maxwell, the memo continued, “tried to make Jane feel like this was ‘very normal’ and ‘not a big deal.’ ” Epstein abused Jane for the next two years, the memo said, and Maxwell “was frequently in the room when the abuse happened.”
Maxwell had this to say about Jane to Blanche: “I only saw her in Palm Beach and I only saw her with her mother.” Blanche didn’t press her on the inconsistency. The last time Maxwell denied that she had witnessed or participated in Epstein’s crimes, in a civil deposition in 2016, she was charged with perjury—by the very Department of Justice that Blanche now helps run. (Prosecutors dropped the perjury charges after securing Maxwell’s conviction on the sex-trafficking counts.)
After the transcript of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche was released, the family of Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, issued a statement denouncing the Justice Department for giving Maxwell a “platform to rewrite history.” Their anger is understandable. The Justice Department took care to redact victims’ names from the transcript but allowed Maxwell’s lies to stand unquestioned. Blanche was there, he told Maxwell at one point, not “to create a kind of a ‘she said, she said’ situation” but, rather, “to hear from you about your conduct.” In this proceeding, fairness to victims was an afterthought.
But the odd encounter—Deputy Attorneys General do not ordinarily spend their time interviewing witnesses—offered the prospect of mutual benefit to Trump and Maxwell. Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, had cannily seized the moment of Trump’s Epstein difficulties to offer up his client’s testimony—provided that she received immunity from having it used against her. Maxwell presented herself in the interview as having been “very keen to talk to anyone” and lamented that “no one from the government . . . has ever spoken to me,” conveniently omitting the fact that she chose not to testify in her own defense.
The Trump team clearly had hoped that the interview would yield allegations about sexual misconduct by prominent Democrats. On that count, the interview was a failure, despite Blanche’s game efforts to elicit information. At one point, Blanche asked whether Senator Ted Kennedy knew Epstein. Maxwell said that they were not acquainted. “But Bobby Kennedy knew him,” she offered, referring to the Health and Human Services Secretary. “Say that again about Bobby Kennedy,” Blanche said. “How do you know that?” Answer: “Dinosaur-bone hunting in the Dakotas.”
Blanche dropped the subject of the Kennedys, but he repeatedly brought up Epstein’s relationship with former President Bill Clinton:
