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Ghislaine Maxwell’s billionaire ‘ex’ Ted Waitt’s 240ft superyacht with helicopter and gym docks in CA for cleaning

• Danielle Cinone
• Published : 1:00 ET, Jul 17 2020
• Updated : 1:44 ET, Jul 17 2020

GHISLAINE Maxwell's billionaire "ex-boyfriend" Ted Waitt's 240ft superyacht has been spotted in California for a cleaning.

The Gateway computer co-founder's massive yacht - equipped with a helicopter, helipad, and a gym - docked in Marina Del Rey on Thursday.

Photographs of Waitt's Plan B multi-deck vessel show employees doing a deep clean of the ship.

However, Ted Waitt and his family were not seen on the yacht.

The 240ft yacht was custom built in 2012 by ADM Shipyards and accommodates 12 guests in eight bedrooms.

According to Yacht Charter Fleet , the 73.15 meter custom motor yacht "was built by ADM Shipyards in Germany at their Kiel shipyard. The boat was delivered to her owner in 2012."

Inside the triple-decker yacht there is a jacuzzi, elevator, massage room, and gym.

Special features include a master suite with private balcony, high-volume interior, and elegant styling by H2 Yacht Design.

Other amenities built in the boat are air conditioning, WiFi connection on board, an elevator, and stabilizers underway and at the anchor.

"She is also capable of carrying up to 25 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience," Yacht Charter Fleet states.

The exterior of the boat was designed by Focus Yacht Design.

The YCF website describes the motor yacht "Plan B" as solely a private yacht and unavailable for charter.

Cruising speed for the massive yacht is 13 knots and top speed is 17 knots.

Although the price of the yacht is unknown, similar luxury vessels can be chartered up to $875,000 per week.

According to the New York Times , Maxwell helped Waitt "obtain and renovate, brought her to Croatia and the South of France.

"There was even a submarine put aboard Plan B that Ms. Maxwell knew how to pilot.

"She began deep-sea diving, which she said is how she had discovered human-made debris all over the ocean floor."

Ghislaine Maxwell , the former girlfriend of notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein , is rumored to have been romantically involved with Waitt.

Waitt took Maxwell as his guest to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010.

The pair reportedly started dating in 2005 and split up ways sometime in 2011 or 2012.

Maxwell has been accused of having a role in Epstein's sex trafficking ring of underage girls.

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Epstein, a registered sex offender, was arrested last summer on new federal charges of exploiting dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.

He attempted suicide in custody in late July, and then died after another suicide attempt in early August.

• Ghislaine Maxwell
• Jeffrey Epstein

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The 'Plan B' Superyacht Docked in Downtown Miami Charters For $600K Per Week

via My Yacht Charter

It may not be as robust as the 331-foot, $250-million Attessa IV docked along the same Museum Park slip in Downtown Miami (across from American Airlines Arena), but Plan B is nothing to waltz around. The 240-foot vessel owned by Gateway co-founder Ted Waitt was custom built in 2012 and sleeps 12 in eight staterooms. Among its toys are a jacuzzi, helipad, elevator, massage room and gym. It can be yours to charter for about $604,000 -- per week.

A photo posted by Superior Design (@supdesign) on Jan 14, 2015 at 7:49am PST

A photo posted by Superior Design (@supdesign) on May 26, 2015 at 4:19am PDT

A photo posted by Lucas Lechuga (@miamilucas) on Dec 26, 2015 at 5:37pm PST

· Curbed Yacht Coverage [Curbed Miami] · Plan B Yacht [Yacht Charter Fleet]

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Whatever Happened to Ghislaine Maxwell’s Plan to Save the Oceans?

The philanthropic works of Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-girlfriend never materialized. Now, she’s being sued by one of his victims.

By Jacob Bernstein

In 2014, Ghislaine Maxwell spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, D.C. She was there in her capacity as the founder of the TerraMar Project, an oceanic conservation group she started in 2012, according to a C.F.R. spokeswoman.

The C.F.R. is one of the world’s most prestigious nonprofit think tanks. Among its officers and directors then were David Rockefeller , one of the modern era’s most revered philanthropists; Colin Powell ; and Robert Rubin , the secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

The TerraMar Project was an organization with an opaque website and a founder who happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein , the mysterious money manager who — in addition to being one of the C.F.R.’s “ Chairman’s Circle” donors for at least six years — had pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Mr. Epstein spent the next year in county jail, becoming a symbol of the superrich getting away with crimes that seemed likely to send ordinary people to prison for far longer.

Ms. Maxwell herself would be a party to confidential settlements with at least two other people who said that they were victims of Mr. Epstein and that Ms. Maxwell was responsible for recruiting them.

She has never been charged with any crime, and continues to deny wrongdoing. (Attempts to reach her were not successful.) Even before these lawsuits and the C.F.R. talk, her involvement in Mr. Epstein’s operation was cited frequently in the press.

“We were unaware of the allegations against Ms. Maxwell at the time of the event,” the C.F.R. spokeswoman wrote in an email. The spokeswoman added that Mr. Epstein’s membership was revoked in 2009, because he did not pay his membership dues while in jail.

Mr. Epstein, after facing new charges of sex trafficking this year, died in jail on Aug. 10 from what officials said was suicide . And the TerraMar Project has been disbanded, though, according to The New York Post , an F.B.I. probe of it is underway. In the wake of Mr. Epstein’s death, attention now turns to the woman often accused of being his enabler, the striving socialite daughter of a disgraced billionaire.

Philanthropy as Reputation Management

According to tax filings from 2013 to 2017, the organization gave out no money in grants. A representative for the TerraMar Project said in a statement that the work of the organization included helping organize the March for the Ocean in Washington, a campaign to reduce the number of littered cigarette butts and publication of The Daily Catch, an oceanic conservation newsletter. The TerraMar Project also obtained a partnership with the luxury bedding company Yves Delorme on a collection of “water-inspired” sheets, pillowcases and comforters.

Euan Rellie, a British investment banker and society fixture who encountered Ms. Maxwell at events over decades, thought the charity as she explained it to him sounded at least in part to be a form of “reputation management.”

Christopher Mason, a reporter and a longtime friend of Ms. Maxwell’s, said he wondered if her primary motivation for starting the foundation was oceanic conservation or the conservation of Ghislaine Maxwell — creating a “respectable calling card” for someone “whose reputation was in jeopardy.”

And it was in jeopardy. The day before Mr. Epstein’s death, a trove of documents were released in connection with a defamation suit that Virginia Giuffre filed against Ms. Maxwell. Ms. Giuffre said that, at age 16, she was recruited by Ms. Maxwell and forced into being a “sex slave.” Ms. Maxwell called Ms. Giuffre a liar, was sued and settled.

In a deposition, a former maintenance worker at Mr. Epstein’s home described Ms. Maxwell scouting scores of massage spas and parlors in Florida, from Palm Beach to Jupiter, for Mr. Epstein. A college student said she was scouted by Ms. Maxwell, and that she was punished by Ms. Maxwell when she failed to sexually satisfy Mr. Epstein. Now, Jennifer Araoz has filed suit against Ms. Maxwell and others, saying that she was recruited as a freshman in high school and raped by Mr. Epstein.

A Lack of History of Activism

Ms. Maxwell had negligible experience as an environmental activist. Her preferred method of oceangoing was aboard a luxury yacht, which, according to Mr. Mason, was for her the pre-eminent symbol of “status and freedom.” It was through boating that she drew her inspiration for the foundation.

She spent much of her time in the late 1980s on the Lady Ghislaine, a nearly 200-foot boat owned by her father, the media mogul Robert Maxwell. It had a Jacuzzi, a sauna, a gym and private disco. Deep in debt, he bilked the pensions of thousands of his employees, and his body was discovered in the ocean off the Canary Islands, where he had taken the Lady Ghislaine in 1991.

The death was ruled an accident. The family reportedly lost almost everything, including the boat.

Ms. Maxwell, then living in New York, became known for her romantic relationship with Mr. Epstein, who was an all-purpose adviser for the billionaire Leslie Wexner. (Mr. Wexner said in a letter to the Wexner Foundation that , in 2007, he discovered misappropriation of his funds by Mr. Epstein.)

One of Mr. Epstein’s duties was handling contracts for the Limitless, a mammoth yacht bought by Mr. Wexner and designed by Bannenberg & Rowell. Ms. Maxwell was eager to get aboard when it was finished but never did, according to Craig Tafoya, its former captain.

“Ghislaine would always call me and say, ‘I’m coming down to use the boat with some friends. I would always tell her, ‘I have to call the owner. I can’t just let you on the boat.’ And she would never show up,” said Mr. Tafoya, who took this to mean that she never got permission. “She did that half a dozen times. And in talking to a guy who worked for Bannenberg, he said, ‘she does that all the time. She does it when she’s in front of all her girlfriends and wants to brag that she can go use someone’s yacht.’”

Ted Waitt is the tech billionaire co-founder of Gateway, Inc. who became Ms. Maxwell’s boyfriend after she broke up with Mr. Epstein.

Plan B, the yacht Ms. Maxwell helped him obtain and renovate, brought her to Croatia and the South of France. His check writing helped secure her place at conferences as they replaced benefit galas as the first-tier social gatherings of the late aughts. That was essential to getting the TerraMar Project off the ground.

When he met Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Waitt had a stringy, graying ponytail and wore drab suits. After she became his girlfriend, Mr. Waitt shaved his head, started wearing tinted glasses and became a virtual doppelgänger for Jason Statham.

There was even a submarine put aboard Plan B that Ms. Maxwell knew how to pilot. She began deep-sea diving, which she said is how she had discovered human-made debris all over the ocean floor.

Four people remember Ms. Maxwell talking of journeying to the center of the Pacific Ocean, in an attempt to find, she said, Amelia Earhart’s plane and body .

The conviction of Mr. Epstein and the subsequent bad press for Ms. Maxwell wore on Mr. Waitt, friends said. In 2010, they broke up. But Mr. Waitt had donated at least $10 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation. That helped Ms. Maxwell keep some access to the world of the Clintons. She used connections forged at their summits to help with the 2012 start of the TerraMar Project.

“All the oceans are interconnected and related. It’s all one sea,” Ms. Maxwell said to a reporter for the Mother Nature Network in a 2012 interview. “It’s the one major area of the world where we can be one species with one home and one common destiny.”

The TerraMar website trumpeted the support of well-connected “founding citizens” like Richard Branson and Martine Assouline, a founder of the luxury coffee table books publisher that bears her name.

In 2013, Ms. Maxwell went to Reykjavik and participated in a conference for the Arctic Circle. Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer and a onetime Council on Foreign Relations fellow , also attended. He also appeared with her at the 2014 talk for the C.F.R ., and according to numerous friends of Ms. Maxwell, became her boyfriend. (Three of those friends said she later described him to them as a “Navy SEAL.” Mr. Borgerson declined to comment.)

Around that time, the Clinton Global Initiative announced a “commitment to action” from the TerraMar Project. Little evidence exists that it amounted to much.

The tax returns of the TerraMar Project show that between 2013 and 2017 the organization received $196,000 in public support and paid out, in various expenses, more than $600,000, requiring loans from its president, Ms. Maxwell, totaling $549,093.

The filings do not provide names of the firms or individuals to whom those payments were made; no programs were started for work in the field. No grants were given.

“Over all these returns, not a single dollar,” said Mike Crabtree, a tax partner at Boulay, a C.P.A. firm in Minneapolis. “The returns don’t really show what’s going on, where the money is going and what it’s being used for.”

In 2014 , TerraMar’s accounting and legal fees were more than $50,000, an unusually high number given the size and activity of the organization, according to Mr. Crabtree. “I don’t know if ‘suspicious’ is the word I’d use, but to generate those kinds of fees a lot more would have to be going on than this would reflect,” he said.

As Mr. Epstein at last was charged in July with conducting a sex trafficking operation that investigators say resulted in the sexual assault of dozens of minors, the TerraMar Project shut down. It left a farewell message on its website, saying it had sought to “connect ocean lovers to positive actions, highlight science, and bring conscious change to how to people from across the globe can live, work and enjoy the ocean.”

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article, using information from a photo agency, misidentified the location where Ghislaine Maxwell was shown with the Gyalwang Drukpa. It was at her apartment, not at the Beacon Theater.

How we handle corrections

Jacob Bernstein is a reporter for the Styles desk. In addition to writing profiles of fashion designers, artists and celebrities, he has focused much of his attention on L.G.B.T. issues, philanthropy and the world of furniture design. More about Jacob Bernstein

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Ghislaine Maxwell’s billionaire ‘ex’ Ted Waitt’s 240ft superyacht with helicopter and gym docks in CA for cleaning

• Danielle Cinone
• Published : 6:03, 17 Jul 2020
• Updated : 23:32, 17 Jul 2020

GHISLAINE Maxwell's billionaire "ex-boyfriend" Ted Waitt's 240ft superyacht has been spotted in California for a cleaning.

The Gateway computer co-founder's massive yacht - equipped with a helicopter, helipad, and a gym - docked in Marina Del Rey on Thursday.

Photographs of Waitt's Plan B multi-deck vessel show employees doing a deep clean of the ship.

However, Ted Waitt and his family were not seen on the yacht.

The 240ft yacht was custom built in 2012 by ADM Shipyards and accommodates 12 guests in eight bedrooms.

According to Yacht Charter Fleet , the 73.15 meter custom motor yacht "was built by ADM Shipyards in Germany at their Kiel shipyard. The boat was delivered to her owner in 2012."

Inside the triple-decker yacht there is a jacuzzi, elevator, massage room, and gym.

Special features include a master suite with private balcony, high-volume interior, and elegant styling by H2 Yacht Design.

Other amenities built in the boat are air conditioning, WiFi connection on board, an elevator, and stabilizers underway and at the anchor.

"She is also capable of carrying up to 25 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience," Yacht Charter Fleet states.

The exterior of the boat was designed by Focus Yacht Design.

The YCF website describes the motor yacht "Plan B" as solely a private yacht and unavailable for charter.

Cruising speed for the massive yacht is 13 knots and top speed is 17 knots.

Although the price of the yacht is unknown, similar luxury vessels can be chartered up to $875,000 per week.

According to the New York Times , Maxwell helped Waitt "obtain and renovate, brought her to Croatia and the South of France.

"There was even a submarine put aboard Plan B that Ms. Maxwell knew how to pilot.

"She began deep-sea diving, which she said is how she had discovered human-made debris all over the ocean floor."

Ghislaine Maxwell , the former girlfriend of notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein , is rumored to have been romantically involved with Waitt.

Waitt took Maxwell as his guest to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010.

The pair reportedly started dating in 2005 and split up ways sometime in 2011 or 2012.

Maxwell has been accused of having a role in Epstein's sex trafficking ring of underage girls.

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Epstein, a registered sex offender, was arrested last summer on new federal charges of exploiting dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.

He attempted suicide in custody in late July, and then died after another suicide attempt in early August.

• Ghislaine Maxwell
• Jeffrey Epstein

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Billionaire Waitt on an island getaway

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Billionaire and philanthropist Ted Waitt, the co-founder of Gateway, Inc., is in Palau, confirmed President Whipps Jr. yesterday.

Waitt arrived in his private jet two days ago, and upon landing was picked up by a helicopter and taken to his yacht moored off of Malakal harbor, across from Marina Vita.

As a philanthropist and staunch environmentalist, he is the founder of the Waitt Foundation and Waitt Institute. Both are founding members of the Blue Prosperity Coalition, a network of NGOs that help governments develop sustainable oceans plans through marine spatial planning and scientific processes.

Minister Steven Victor of MAFE confirmed that the Blue Prosperity Coalition–consisting of several NGOs, such as Conservation International (CI), TNC (The Nature Conservancy), Oceans 5, and others–will be working with the Palau government to assess PNMS effectiveness and ensure that environmental and economic benefits are realized.

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Ghislaine Maxwell’s former marine conservation charity was a ‘reputation cleanser’

The terramar project didn’t pay out any grant money between 2013 and 2017 and seemed to exist more to divert attention from maxwell’s association with epstein, friends say, article bookmarked.

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In late 2011, Ghislaine Maxwell was about to turn 50 and, as she described it, was still looking for her “true calling” .

Having grown up holidaying on her late father Robert Maxwell’s superyacht the Lady Ghislaine, and being “mesmerised” by the deepsea explorer Jacque Cousteau, Ms Maxwell wrote about her lifelong affinity with the ocean.

“My love of the sea and adventure took me on an odyssey that eventually led me to ‘flying’ deep worker submersibles, remotely-operated underwater vehicles and helicopters, as well as becoming a certified emergency medical technician,” she wrote in a piece for the High50 wesbite.

In early 2012 she launched a marine conservation non-profit, The TerraMar Project which claimed to have the lofty goal of creating a “global ocean community to give a voice to the least protected, most ignored part of our planet – the high seas.”

Over the next three years Ms Maxwell was invited to give a TED Talk, speak at the United Nations twice and at the prestigious Washington DC thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations.

However, tax filings show the TerraMar Project didn’t pay out a single dollar in grants between 2013 and 2017, ran up high overhead costs for a charity of its size, and produced no tangible examples of successful ocean conservancy projects.

The project was kept afloat with hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans from Ms Maxwell, public filings in the US and the United Kingdom show.

Ms Maxwell is on trial for child-sex-trafficking charges, and is spending her 60th birthday in jail as a jury decides her fate. She has denied all the charges.

Prosecutors said Epstein paid the socialite $30.7 million which funded her luxurious lifestyle in return for helping to procure and groom young girls for him to sexually abuse.

At the time Ms Maxwell launched the non-profit, her association with former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein was coming under close scrutiny.

Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, and Ms Maxwell was later named in civil lawsuits as having allegedly helped procure and groom girls for him.

Friends and associates of Ms Maxwell told The New York Times in 2019 that the charity appeared to be an attempt by the socialite to cleanse her reputation.

They noted that Ms Maxwell love for the ocean primarily came from having spent much of the late 1980s onboard her father’s sumptuously appointed 200-foot superyacht the Lady Ghislaine, which boasted a disco, jacuzzi, and spa.

Mr Maxwell mysteriously fell to his death from the yacht in 1991 – just before he was revealed to have stolen nearly $1billion from his employees’ pension funds.

While dating Epstein in the 1990s, Ms Maxwell sought to make use of his client Les Wexner’s superyacht, Limitless, its former captain Craig Tafoya told The Times.

“Ghislaine would always call me and say, ‘I’m coming down to use the boat with some friends. I would always tell her, ‘I have to call the owner. I can’t just let you on the boat.’ And she would never show up,” Mr Tafoya said.

Friends said Ms Maxwell saw superyachts as a symbol of “status and freedom”.

Ms Maxwell dated the founder of tech company Gateway, billionaire Ted Waitt, for several years in the 2000s.

She oversaw the purchase and renovation of Mr Waitt’s yacht, Plan B, and the couple regularly travelled around Europe on it.

Mr Waitt enjoyed close ties to Bill Clinton, donating $10 million to the William J Clinton Foundation and taking Ms Maxwell as his date to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010.

Mr Waitt’s philanthropic donations were “essential” to the TerraMar Project’s getting established, the Times reported.

The Clinton Global Initiative formed a “commitment to action” with Terramar around 2014, however there was little to show for the partnership.

Mr Waitt has formed his own marine conservancy organisation, the Waitt Foundation, which says it has invested over $70 million in various ocean conservation initiatives over the past nine years.

The Independent has sought comment from the Clinton Global Initiative and from Mr Waitt.

Ms Maxwell reportedly married Scott Borgenson in 2016, the former CEO of shipping data analytics company CargoMetrics.

Mr Borgenson was also involved in the TerraMar Project, attending a Council on Foreign Relations talk Ms Maxwell gave in 2014, according to The Times.

Reuters reported Ms Maxwell appeared at a press conference to promote Terramar at the United Nation with with Stuart Beck, the then-ambassador of Palau to the UN, in June 2013.

On February 4, 2014, she spoke at an event hosted by the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, the governments of Italy and Palau, and the Global Partnerships Forum.

A UN spokesman told Reuters that speaking “at” the UN was not the same as speaking “to” the UN.

After Epstein was charged with child sex trafficking in 2019, the FBI began investigating TerraMar for possible links to the paedophile, the New York Post reported.

Epstein died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial for sex trafficking in August 2019.

The charity was disbanded in both the US and Britain soon afterwards.

In a statement to The New York Times , a Terramar Project representative said the non-profit had run a campaign to reduce cigarette butts thrown into the ocean, and the publication of a marine conservation newsletter.

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“Ghislaine, Is That You?”: Inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s Life on the Lam

“Ghislaine, is that you ?” The woman making her way into the first-class cabin of a commercial flight from Miami to New York City was almost unrecognizable. Her attire, once stylish and attention grabbing, now seemed designed to deflect notice; her face, usually painted to perfection, was devoid of makeup. There was a hint of gray in her signature black bob, and her days of starvation diets and charity-circuit appearances seemed far behind her. Wearing no traces of her glamorous New York life, much of it once provided by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell could have been anybody. Or nobody.

It was the spring of 2018, and it had been a decade since Maxwell’s former best friend and lover had served 13 months in a Palm Beach jail, with time free on work release, after pleading guilty to two charges, including soliciting a minor for prostitution. Maxwell, who had sold her Manhattan home—a five-story, 7,000-square-foot town house on East 65th Street—was essentially homeless. “No fixed address,” someone claiming firsthand knowledge of her situation would later say. She might have spent the flight in anonymity had she not been spotted by a friend from New York who was sitting just behind her in the second row. “I was so shocked by her look,” the friend recalls. “I didn’t recognize her.”

The friend had known all the incarnations of Ghislaine Maxwell: the cherished youngest daughter of the British media baron Robert Maxwell, who died during a voyage on his yacht , Lady Ghislaine, under mysterious circumstances in 1991; the “broken bird” who returned to New York to move into a smaller apartment and launch a new life as a business consultant; the boldface-name Ghislaine, who seemed to be everywhere at once, so socially connected and sexually self-assured that she once hosted a dinner for East Side socialites on the fine art of giving a blow job, with dildos at each place setting; and the longtime companion of Epstein, a man even richer and more mysterious than her father. She had served him for years, maintaining his homes, ranch, and private island, all the while allegedly recruiting and grooming a steady stream of girls for him and his powerful friends. Sometimes, federal prosecutors say, Maxwell herself took part in the sexual abuse.

By the time the friend ran into her on the plane, Maxwell and one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, had settled a lawsuit in which Giuffre accused Maxwell of recruiting her as a “sex slave” for Epstein and Prince Andrew, among others, when she was only 17. Now Maxwell was in the process of quietly withdrawing from the life she had made for herself. She shuttered the ocean-protection charity she had founded, the TerraMar Project, which left her with debts of $549,093. She even gave up her name, sometimes introducing herself to new acquaintances only as “G.” Yet here she was, on a commercial flight from Miami to New York.

For a moment, as the two friends chatted, the old Maxwell burst through: the Oxford-educated, knows-everybody-and-everything Maxwell, the woman who wanted to save the oceans but couldn’t seem to save herself from the men in her life. “Where are you living, Ghislaine?” the friend asked. “I lost touch with you.”

Maxwell suddenly went blank. “Oh,” she replied, “a little bit everywhere.”

“But where ?” her friend pressed. Maxwell wouldn’t answer.

“Looking back,” the friend says now, “I personally think she knew that the shit was really about to go down.”

It went down quickly. Within a year, Epstein was exposed as one of history’s most notorious sexual predators, arrested on July 6, 2019, and found dead in a Manhattan jail cell five weeks later. After Epstein’s death, Maxwell disappeared from view entirely, leaving the courts, the media, his victims, and a transfixed and horrified public focused on a single question: Where in the world was Ghislaine Maxwell? Everyone, it seemed, had a theory, each wilder than the last. She was said to be hiding deep beneath the sea in a submarine, which she was licensed to pilot. Or she was lying low in Israel, under the protection of the Mossad, the powerful intelligence agency with whom her late father supposedly tangled. Or she was in the FBI witness protection program, or ensconced in luxury in a villa in the South of France, or sunning herself naked on the coast of Spain, or holed up in a high-security doomsday bunker belonging to rich and powerful friends whose lives might implode should Maxwell ever reveal what she knows—all the dirty secrets of the dirty world that she and Epstein shared.

“Maxwell is not gonna be able to hide,” David Boies, the powerful superlawyer who represents several victims who are suing her, declared confidently a few days after Epstein’s death, in August 2019. “There’s no place in the civilized world where she can go and not be found. And unlike Epstein, she does not have the massive resources that would be required to carve out a new life in some obscure place where she cannot be extradited from.”

But it’s a big planet for a citizen of three nations—the United States, Great Britain, and France—who speaks four languages fluently and has a world of connections. Almost a year after Boies’s statement, Maxwell remained at large, beyond the reach of attorneys, tabloid reporters, and a 10,000-pound reward from The Sun in London. “It’s a little bit like Elvis—you get lots of reports but they’re hard to verify,” Boies said in May.

“You have made efforts to locate her and have been unable to do so?” Judge Debra Freeman asked an attorney representing several Epstein victims in a crowded Manhattan courtroom on February 11. The attorneys were seeking a court order to serve Maxwell via alternative service, including email, after their attempts to find her had turned into what one of them called “a cat-and-mouse chase.”

“Yes, your honor,” replied the attorney.

The judge granted the request. But while the complaint apparently reached Maxwell, it provided no clue to her location. In late June, the tabloids placed her in Paris, where she was reportedly residing in a luxury apartment and walking the streets near the Israeli embassy with a “large patterned blanket” draped around her face and head—a scenario a friend of hers described as “drivel.”

“She could be anywhere,” said one person familiar with the lengths people went to track her down. “Russia, China, Singapore, the Middle East, England. She’s in some friend’s castle in the middle of nowhere. Or in a tent somewhere deep in some desert. Wherever she is, she’s on the down low.”

Maxwell’s year on the run came to an abrupt end in the early hours of July 2, when the FBI and New York Police Department arrested her in the small New England town of Bradford, New Hampshire. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York charged her with four counts in connection with the sexual abuse of minors and two counts of perjury for lying under oath. Between 1994 and 1997, the years of her “intimate relationship with Epstein,” the indictment charged, she “assisted, facilitated, and contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls.” One of the three unnamed victims was “as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by Maxwell and Epstein, both of whom knew that certain victims were in fact under the age of 18.”

The indictment paints Maxwell as Epstein’s partner in crime, adept at the art of grooming victims for him. Her methods, prosecutors said, involved befriending “some of Epstein’s minor victims prior to their abuse, including by asking the victims about their lives, their schools, and their families. Maxwell and Epstein would spend time building friendships with minor victims by, for example, taking minor victims to the movies or shopping.”

Maxwell “delivered them into the trap,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said at a press conference the day of Maxwell’s arrest. “She pretended to be a woman they could trust. All the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and, in some cases, by Maxwell herself.”

Once the trap was laid and rapport established, Maxwell would then “try to normalize sexual abuse for a minor victim by, among other things, discussing sexual topics, undressing in front of the victim, being present when a minor victim was undressed, and/or being present for sex acts involving the minor victim and Epstein,” all of which “helped put the victims at ease because an adult woman was present,” according to the indictment.

Maxwell knew full well what Epstein planned to do, the indictment continued, “knowing that he had a sexual preference for underage girls,” and she sometimes “was present for and participated in the sexual abuse of minor victims.” Some of the acts of abuse, prosecutors say, took place at Maxwell’s London residence.

When Maxwell was finally brought in for a deposition under oath, in 2016, in the defamation case against her by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, she “repeatedly lied when questioned about her conduct.”

She did so, said Strauss, “because the truth, as alleged, was almost unspeakable.”

At the press conference, FBI assistant director William F. Sweeney Jr. described Maxwell as “one of the villains of this investigation,” who had “slithered away to a gorgeous property” in New Hampshire, where she was “continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago.”

It was not the first time in her life Ghislaine Maxwell went to ground. Her process of disappearing began, really, on a dreadful day almost 30 years ago, with a dead body floating in the sea.

Arms splayed out, face staring into the sky, enormous belly bobbing in the Atlantic just off the coast of Tenerife in the Canary Islands: That’s how Spanish police discovered the “naked, stiff, and floating” corpse of the British media baron Robert Maxwell on November 5, 1991. A helicopter hovered overhead, lowering its cable and straining to recover the cadaver, which weighed 310 pounds. Fifteen miles away was Maxwell’s 180-foot yacht—from which, according to various theories, he either jumped, fell, or was pushed—named Lady Ghislaine, after his 29-year-old daughter. She had been his miracle baby, born on Christmas Day 1961. Two days after her birth, Maxwell’s eldest son suffered a car accident that would turn out to be fatal. “I’ve been told it means ray of sunshine,” Ghislaine once said of the origins of her French first name. The morning after the police helicopter lifted the bloated body from the sea, she flew in from London to be at her beloved father’s side.

To Ghislaine, her mother, three brothers, and three sisters, Robert Maxwell was Samson, tearing down the gates of Gaza, as he was depicted in a stained-glass window in their 51-room Oxford mansion: a titan of luck, impossible achievement, and unlimited wealth. “If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him,” Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock would say. Born Jan Ludvik Hoch into a Hasidic family in a tiny village in Czechoslovakia, he was so poor that he and his six siblings had to wear shoes in shifts. He evolved into a warrior, surviving the Holocaust, in which 300 of his immediate and extended family members perished, to join the Czech resistance. When his country fell to the Nazis, he fled to France and joined the British Army, fighting in bloody battles from Normandy to Germany. After the war, he married the daughter of a prosperous British silk merchant, christened himself Robert Maxwell, and bought Pergamon Press, a publisher of scientific journals. It became the anchor of an empire that would, at the time of his death, include hundreds of companies, among them the publishing giant Macmillan and newspapers from The Mirror in London to the New York Daily News . As big as or maybe even big-ger than his rival, Rupert Murdoch, Maxwell was a bombastic, demanding patriarch who dined with kings and presidents and exhibited a bottomless appetite for family, food, fortune, and fame.

Now he was dead, and it wasn’t long before the mighty house of Maxwell was exposed as a house of cards. Maxwell, it turned out, had pledged millions from his company’s pension funds to shore up his tottering empire, exposing his 32,000 employees to retirement ruin and racking up debts of nearly $5 billion. The conspiracy theories multiplied: He committed suicide rather than face his financial crimes; he died aboard his yacht while engaged in sex with a mistress; he fell overboard during his regular postmidnight piss over the railings; he was murdered by British security agents panicked that he had taken possession of tapes that could incriminate the MI6 intelligence service in crime and espionage; he was injected with a poisonous syringe by frogmen sent by his Mossad spymasters to silence him from revealing their secret arms deals.

No one was more shocked and distraught at the revelations than Ghislaine Maxwell. She had always been, as a friend told The Times of London, “the life and soul of the party wherever she wanted to go in the world and never had to worry about money.” Now she was the shattered child of a man described as a monster, his name forever equated to scandal. “She was catatonic,” the friend said. “It hit her in a way that scared people.”

She was weeping when she boarded her father’s yacht, weeping when her mother asked her to address the media throngs, weeping as she rehearsed her speech over and over. Every time she came to the words my daddy, she began to shake and tremble. “I felt sorry for her because she was daddy’s girl,” recalls former Mirror photographer Ken Lennox, who was aboard the Lady Ghislaine that morning and who helped draft Maxwell’s remarks. “She obviously adored her dad.”

But when she finally stepped before the reporters, she had somehow collected herself. “She raised her hand, an imperious gesture she had seen her father use to quieten a media frenzy,” according to an account in Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy. “How did your father die?” a journalist shouted at Maxwell. She looked down at the mob and “in a loud and clear voice she spoke. ‘I think he was murdered.’ ”

After Robert Maxwell’s burial on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the family returned to London, where they faced a frenzy in the press. The British tabloids, which once enriched the Maxwell family, now seemed intent on destroying it. Maxwell’s widow grew “numb from the savage public battering,” Vanity Fair reported at the time. “People were calling her husband ‘rogue,’ ‘crook,’ ‘bully,’ ‘thief,’ ‘megalomaniac,’ ‘gangster.’ They told lurid tales of his sex orgies.… They painted a portrait of an erratic and cruel tyrant, one who used Turkish towels for toilet paper.” Maxwell’s widow, the elegant and erudite Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard Maxwell, went underground, moving surreptitiously from lawyer to lawyer. “I’ve had to live by night and sleep by day to avoid the reptiles,” she said.

Ghislaine Maxwell was hunted by the tabloids too. “There’s a story that the Maxwell name was so detested in London that she had to walk around in a blond wig so people wouldn’t recognize her,” an unnamed “prominent New York socialite” who knew Ghislaine reportedly told the New York Post . Hoping to launch a new life, she returned to New York City, where she had served as her father’s ambassador to America in the days when he hoped his daughter might marry her friend John F. Kennedy Jr., binding two great dynasties into one. Now, forced to vacate her spacious company-provided residence, she moved into a small apartment. When a friend came to visit, Ghislaine told her, “They took everything—everything—even the cutlery.”

“She was broke, the family was broke,” the friend recalls. “This girl who was brought up in luxury, and— bang —everything was taken from them, and she came to the United States to begin again.”

Ghislaine Maxwell’s reinvention didn’t take long. In November 1992, one year after the death of her father, she was reportedly seen boarding the Concorde from London to New York. “Unnoticed by almost everybody, traveling with her was a greying, plumpish, middle-aged American businessman who managed to avoid the photographers,” reported the Mail on Sunday, one of her father’s rival newspapers. “It is to this man that 30-year-old Ghislaine has turned to ease the heartache of her father’s shame.

“His name is Jeffrey Epstein.”

At first, Ghislaine seemed to keep quiet about her new romance, even with friends. One day she invited someone who had known her during her London days to visit her in New York. He was shocked when she met him at the door of the largest private residence in the city, a gilded seven-story town house on East 71st Street.

“Whose house is this, Ghislaine?” the friend asked. “Who lives here?”

“My friend,” Maxwell replied.

“Well, is he banging you?” the friend demanded. “What’s the scoop here?”

Maxwell wouldn’t say. “She would never bloody let on,” the friend recalls. “I didn’t get further than the drawing room. She was very, very cagey about me being there. I didn’t have an affair with her, but I certainly chased her for a bit. She was sexy and fun. I guess if Epstein had seen me there, he would have been really pissed off to have some young dude who was trying to shag his friend.”

Maxwell didn’t mention the relationship to Hello! magazine when it featured her on its cover in February 1997, in her first interview since her father’s death. She was now “far from the ever watchful eye of the British press,” the magazine reported, and had become a “business consultant,” living and working out of her East Side apartment with Max, a Yorkshire terrier named after her father. “She is proud of the fact that her new life is all down to her own hard work and has her elegant apartment to show for it,” the magazine added. One day, Maxwell said, she would “get married and have kids. But it has never been a focus: My focus is my business.”

Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”

Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)

Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”

She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”

Maxwell was expected to drop everything to serve Epstein. “Ghislaine was one of the first people in New York to walk around with a cellular phone, and she would very ostentatiously put it on the table at lunch,” says Christopher Mason, the British writer and TV host. One day, the phone rang while Maxwell was hosting a friend for tea in her apartment.

“That was Jeffrey,” she told her friend. “He has the flu, and he wants me to go and get the best chicken soup in New York and take it to his house.’

“Ghislaine, he has people on staff!” the friend said. “Can’t he send one of them?”

“No, no,” Maxwell said. “It has to be me.”

Every few days, it seemed, Maxwell’s phone would ring and Epstein would inquire about the weather in Palm Beach, New Mexico, the Virgin Islands, or Paris. Ever-efficient Maxwell would spring into action, consulting the forecast, then alerting the pilots to ready the plane to fly to wherever skies were clearest. Then they were off: Maxwell organizing armies of staff in the various locations, coordinating everything, almost as demanding and bombastic as her father. “She would call people her minion, piglet, polyp,” says one victim. “So you felt like you were nothing.”

She had to keep everyone in line, because one misstep would unleash the wrath of Epstein, one of the few people who could make Maxwell cry. “He would be screaming over the phone,” recalls a victim, “and she would burst into tears.” The woman who once had everything money could buy, only to lose it all because of a man, was once again living a life of luxury. All she had to do to keep it was to give the monster what he wanted. And what he increasingly wanted were women—“on the younger side,” as Donald Trump would say—for whom Maxwell is said to have searched everywhere: spas, massage parlors, parties. Once she found them, she would invite them to “tea” at Epstein’s mansion.

“She was his gatekeeper into civilized society,” says Rellie. “Every 20- to 30-year-old interesting pretty new girl that showed up in New York, Ghislaine would get to know them and invite them to tea with Jeffrey.”

The teas soon grew into dinners, and the guests rose in stature. “It all felt very frenzied and frothy,” recalls Mason. “It seemed like everyone I knew knew her. Ghislaine was always on her way to have a meeting with someone like Bill Clinton. Everything was with the idea that she was staggeringly well connected.”

Her New York town house became a social nexus; one dinner party’s 80 guests included members of the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans, “along with the requisite sprinkling of countesses and billionaires,” reported The Times of London in 2011. Maxwell had become “a modern-day geisha” in a “domain filled with the richest people in the world—some of whom are good guys, and some of whom are bad—and who think they are above the law. It’s a world frequented by young half naked girls in bikinis, billionaires and lavish lifestyles, but it borders on the grotesque. You are never really sure what is going on behind closed doors.”

One Christmas, a very big billionaire threw a very big party in his very big apartment. Maxwell swept in and scanned the room, her eyes falling on two young sisters.

“Oh, my God, look at those girls!” Maxwell exclaimed, according to a friend. “I didn’t realize that they’re so beautiful! Can you introduce me to them?”

“Ghislaine, why would you want to meet them?” the friend asked. “Wouldn’t you rather meet their parents?”

“I’d like to meet them because I know Jeffrey would like to meet them,” Maxwell explained.

“And that,” the friend recalls, “is when I realized something was very strange.”

Maxwell consistently denied ever soliciting underage girls for Epstein. And she began trying to distance herself from him long before he went to jail. In the early 2000s, she spent time in California with a man many times richer than Epstein: Ted Waitt. He lived in a seven-bedroom, 14-bath mansion in La Jolla, and they sailed aboard the 240-foot mega-yacht she helped him purchase, the Plan B. It was equipped with a helipad, Jacuzzi, elevator, gym, and onboard submarine, which Maxwell was soon licensed to pilot. “After she became his girlfriend,” according to the New York Times, “Mr. Waitt shaved his head, started wearing tinted glasses, and became a virtual doppelgänger for Jason Statham.” (Waitt could not be reached for comment.)

Epstein, who some say felt threatened by the relationship, convinced Maxwell to return to work for him in 2004. In court papers, Maxwell’s attorneys stated, “From approximately 1999 through at least 2006, Maxwell was employed by Epstein individually, and by several of his affiliated businesses.” She reportedly continued to accept rides on Epstein’s plane until at least 2006, along with his money. “In some of the litigation we brought against her in 2015, 2016, and 2017, Epstein was paying her legal fees,” says David Boies. The last known photo of them together is from a benefit for Wall Street Rising in 2005. In the photo, Epstein has his arm around Maxwell’s neck, pulling her close. A broad smile lights up her face.

Away from Epstein, Maxwell was reborn, appearing on CNN, giving a speech at a TED event, and speaking nine times before the United Nations, having refocused her attention to something that she felt desperately needed saving: the crypt of her father, the sea. In September 2012, she founded the Terra-Mar Project “to build a global community to give a voice to the least explored, most ignored part of our planet—the high seas.” Her “founding citizens” included Virgin Group owner Richard Branson.

But process servers were now on her trail, dispatched by an attorney named Bradley Edwards, who was determined to depose her about her relationship with Epstein. In what he would call a 12-year campaign to bring Epstein to justice, Edwards became convinced that Maxwell was “the most important of all,” the key to unlocking Epstein’s secret world, the “one woman, who by all appearances, Epstein treated as his equal.” He hired investigators to track her and succeeded in serving her at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York in September 2009. “To say she was upset about being publicly served at this function is an understatement,” Edwards later wrote.

As the July 2010 date for Maxwell’s deposition approached, her attorney called Edwards to explain that “Maxwell’s mother was very ill, so Maxwell was leaving the country with no plans to return to the United States.” A few weeks later, Edwards opened People magazine to find a photo of Bill Clinton walking his daughter, Chelsea, down the aisle at her July 31 wedding in Rhinebeck, New York.

“Holy shit!” Edwards would later write. “Who was front and center on the aisle? Ghislaine Maxwell.”

It would be six years before attorneys for a different accuser would get the chance to depose Maxwell at last. Virginia Roberts was a 17-year-old changing-room attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club when, she said, Maxwell recruited her as a traveling masseuse for Epstein. She had first told her story to the FBI and the Daily Mail in 2011. In December 2014, using her married name of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, she filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida describing Maxwell as Epstein’s “primary coconspirator and participant in his sexual abuse and sex trafficking scheme.”

Maxwell reacted with fury, issuing an “urgent” statement to the media dismissing Giuffre’s claims as “defamatory” and “obvious lies.” Giuffre, in turn, sued Maxwell for defamation in federal court in New York, a lawsuit “widely viewed as a vessel for Epstein’s victims to expose the scope of Epstein’s crimes,” the Miami Herald would later report.

The depositions took place over several days, led by Roberts’s attorneys David Boies and Sigrid McCawley. Maxwell vociferously proclaimed her innocence, at one point banging her fists on the table. The indictment charges that during these depositions, on April 22 and July 22, 2016, she committed two counts of perjury.

“Did Jeffrey Epstein have a scheme to recruit underage girls for sexual massages?” she was asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied.

“Were you aware of the presence of sex toys or devices used in sexual activities in Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach house?”

“No, not that I recall,” she answered.

She said she was “not aware of anybody that I interacted with, other than obviously [the plaintiff] who was 17 at this point.” She said she “wasn’t aware that [Epstein] was having sexual activities with anyone when I was with him other than myself.” And she said, “I have not given anyone a massage.”

Faced with the same kind of tabloid frenzy that accompanied the death of her father, Maxwell opted for the same escape route: She uprooted herself and tried to start over. After selling her Manhattan town house and disposing of many of her possessions, she moved to Manchester-by-the-Sea, a quiet village 30 miles north of Boston. There she lived for a time in the $3 million, five-bedroom colonial home of Scott Borgerson, a handsome data analyst who focuses on maritime trade. Maxwell and Borgerson had met in 2013, when they were both speaking on panels at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik. (Maxwell appeared on “Climate Change: A Plan for Action,” a panel whose experts included former vice president Al Gore, who called in via video.)

In the spring and early summer of 2019, when the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York reopened the criminal investigation into Epstein, Maxwell was far away and seemingly unconcerned. On June 6, she met with Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace. “She was here doing some rally,” Prince Andrew would later say in a disastrous interview on BBC’s Newsnight. “Some rally” was an understatement. Maxwell had been invited to participate in Cash & Rocket, an annual charity road rally in which 80 women—including Paris Hilton and Topshop heiress Chloe Green—drove 1,500 miles over four days in a caravan of red Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, and Bentleys from London to Paris to Geneva to Monte Carlo. In screaming red jumpsuits, Maxwell and her copilot, Annette Mason, the wife of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, drove car No. 28, a cherry red Alfa Romeo, in shifts, stopping for the rally’s parties and photo ops along the way.

Following a pre-tour Masquerade Ball in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the participants hit the road, and Maxwell could be seen smiling in the party pictures: in white at the Elegant in White dinner at La Reserve in Geneva; in a sparkly red dress and dangly earrings at the Red party at the Yacht Club de Monaco. These party photos would be her last. Cash & Rocket would soon scrub Maxwell’s photo from its website, claiming she had been invited by one of the drivers, not the rally itself.

After the rally, she disappeared.

On July 6, Epstein was arrested by federal agents after his jet landed at Teterboro Airport from Paris. The FBI raided his mansion and charged him with sex trafficking of minors, stemming from incidents between 2002 and 2005. With his arrest, attention began shifting toward Maxwell. “Epstein’s pimp girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, a very well-connected Brit socialite cannot just walk free,” the actress Ellen Barkin tweeted the day after Epstein’s arrest. “This woman is his pimp. She pilots planes to and from the island. I know because she told me.”

Now she was back on the tabloid radar. The Daily Mail would soon dispatch a team to Manchester-by-the-Sea on a tip that Maxwell was living there. Helicopters hovered over the village. Neighbors faced media interrogations. Maxwell’s older sister, Christine, was photographed packing bags into a car, and Scott Borgerson was snapped walking a dog believed to belong to “G”: a vizsla, the aristocratic breed of Hungarian sporting dog Maxwell had once shown at Westminster. (“I’m home alone with my cat,” Borgerson later told the New York Post. “She’s not here, I have no idea where she is.… Nobody wants to be close to this radioactive situation.”)

In the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, several victims claim that Maxwell not only lured them into Epstein’s web, but also fondled or sexually abused them. When asked about Maxwell’s role in his sex crimes during a deposition, Epstein invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 14 times. She doesn’t appear to have visited him during his 13-month stay in the Palm Beach County Jail in 2008 or during his 2019 incarceration in New York.

On the morning of August 10, Epstein was found dead, hanged in his jail cell. Fashioning a noose from his orange prison bedsheet, police said, he tied it around his neck, fell to his knees, bent forward, and strangled himself, along with his secrets. His body was discovered at 6:30 a.m. “Noel [the guard] sent me burnt food,” Epstein reportedly wrote in his suicide note. “Giants bugs crawling over my hands. No fun!!”

Somewhere far away, Maxwell awoke to the news. Her year of no fun was about to begin.

The day before Epstein committed suicide, a federal court unsealed 2,000 pages of evidence from the defamation case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Maxwell strides through the pages, accused of being Epstein’s madam and mistress: allegedly recruiting girls to satiate what Epstein called his required three orgasms a day (“It was biological, like eating,” one of his victims testified); instructing the girls on the fine art of erotic massage (“She was implying that I did not get Jeffrey off, and so she had to do it,” the same victim said); and allegedly even participating in sex acts along with Epstein. Her name appeared on message slips that investigators pulled from Epstein’s trash in Palm Beach, and on the flight manifests of Epstein’s Boeing 727, dubbed “the Lolita Express.”

Now, with Epstein’s arrest followed swiftly by his death, Maxwell was on her way to becoming one of the world’s most wanted women.

Then, the strangest thing happened: She supposedly emerged in broad daylight at, of all places, the In-N-Out hamburger franchise on Cahuenga Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

If ever there were a day for Maxwell to lie low and stay out of sight, it was Monday, August 12, a day when her name was being featured prominently in headlines and news broadcasts worldwide. “The death of Jeffrey Epstein is putting new attention on his alleged coconspirators, who could still face charges,” CBS reported that day. “The number one person on that list is Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s accused of finding teenage girls for Epstein and his friends.”

And yet here was Maxwell—or at least her image—sitting outdoors at a Formica-topped table, in a baby-blue hoodie and capri pants befitting a suburban L.A. housewife. Before her on the table was a hamburger, a shake, and an order of hand-cut fries. She had apparently brought along a friend’s dog and something to read, The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives, by Ted Gup, whose Amazon ranking was about to skyrocket more than 300,000 places, to No. 103 on the best-seller list, because of what was about to occur.

Three days later, photos of this humdrum tableau appeared in the New York Post. According to the accompanying article, a fellow diner had simply recognized Maxwell and taken her picture. Is that really what happened? Were these actual photos of Ghislaine Maxwell eating a burger and reading a book two days after the man she spent much of her life with died in disgrace behind bars? Or were they, as many would contend, photoshopped fakes designed to throw the bloodhounds off her trail? Those arguing against their authenticity cited a poster for the movie Good Boys on a bus stop in the background that records show had never been displayed there, questioned why Maxwell had two trays and two cups if she was eating alone, and pointed out that the metadata in one of the images published on nypost.com suggested that it had been supplied by a Los Angeles–area attorney friend of Maxwell’s—who just so happens to be the owner of the dog.

Nevertheless, people flocked to the In-N-Out to take pictures of the table where Maxwell had supposedly dined. Theories of the deeper meaning behind the photos began circulating. The New Yorker suggested it was a brazen come-find-me message, a taunt to the world on her tail, a real-life version of Where’s Waldo? “There appeared to be, in other words, a distinct possibility that Maxwell was fucking with us,” wrote Naomi Fry. “ ‘Here I am,’ her face seemed to say. ‘Figure this out.’ ”

After that, Maxwell once again disappeared. But where? Was it possible Sky News got it right when it placed her on the southern coast of Brazil, citing an unidentified American former police officer who had allegedly traced phones belonging to Maxwell and the modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, another Epstein associate? Or was she in London, as evidenced by an affidavit she signed in her elaborately indecipherable signature, filled with loops and swirls, on November 22, 2019, listing her location as Half Moon Street in the affluent Mayfair neighborhood? Or did she sign it from afar?

She was “both everywhere and nowhere,” bemoaned The Guardian.

Then something happened that forced Maxwell to take new precautions. “Death threats,” said a friend who claimed knowledge of Maxwell’s situation. They arrived by social media, email, phone, text, and postal service, a chorus of anger intent on revenge. The threats began in earnest with Epstein’s arrest, multiplied with his death, and accelerated in the months that followed. They soon became a routine part of her life.

“It’s not a specific threat,” the friend said. “It’s the volume of threats. These are credible threats. That’s a term that law enforcement uses— credible threats. So you take appropriate action.”

A professional security firm was hired, its plainclothes operatives said to be veterans of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “Maxwell receives regular threats to her life and safety, which required her to hire personal security services and find safe accommodation,” reads the complaint she filed in the Virgin Islands last March, seeking payment of her expenses from Epstein’s estate, reportedly valued at more than $600 million. “These expenses will be ongoing.”

Maxwell’s effort to tap Epstein’s estate to cover her security costs prompted new outrage. “It is absolutely appalling that Ghislaine Maxwell…is seeking to drain funds from the very estate that should be paying the Epstein victims’ claims,” Sigrid McCawley, attorney for Giuffre and other victims, said in a statement.

“We’ve had reports of her being in the South of France, Northern California, in the U.K., Israel, and maybe she’s moved around in all those places, but we don’t really know where she is now,” David Boies said in May. By then, Maxwell had become such a phantom that even some of her own attorneys would contend that they didn’t know her physical location and communicated with her primarily via email.

Imaginations ran rampant; theories multiplied. It was during this time that a friend came forward to Vanity Fair not with a sighting but rather with a description of Maxwell’s lifestyle undercover. It was an incognito existence of revolving residences and long runs on neighborhood roads. But her once-opulent life had been stripped down to the bare essentials: iPhone, iPad, laptop, casual clothing, and an inexpensive pressure cooker with which the friend said she emulated her Cordon Bleu–trained mother’s French recipes: beef bourguignon, red cabbage and apples, leek soup.

Every day, sometimes on public roads and hiking trails, she went for a run. If there was a pool available, she swam laps. Before gyms shut down, she boxed regularly, pounding away at a punching bag.

“The whole point of security is you don’t set a routine,” said the friend. At the end of the day, she usually exercised again, lifting weights or stretching while she watched the news. Afterward, she turned off the television for the night. Instead, she cooked and read, usually biographies. Her bedtime selections, according to the friend, included The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, by Boris Johnson, and Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, by victims attorney Bradley Edwards, in which she is prominently featured. Then it was lights out for her nightly five hours of sleep.

The only thing predictable about Maxwell’s life was her work, the friend said: speaking each day with her attorneys to hash out her defense in the cases against her. Maxwell had assembled a team of criminal and civil defense lawyers in New York, Colorado, the U.K., and the Virgin Islands, all typically ranging in fees from $500 to $1,500 an hour. “Her life is lawyers,” the friend said. “She speaks to lawyers and blood relatives. That is her universe. Defending all of these cases is a full-time job.”

At least three women have included Maxwell as a defendant in civil suits against Epstein’s estate for damages from sexual abuse. One is Annie Farmer, whose lawsuit states that Maxwell and Epstein subjected her and her sister Maria to “a scheme for manipulation and abuse of young females.” Annie was just 16 in 1995, when Epstein flew her from Arizona to New York. The sexual abuse began there and continued at his New Mexico ranch. Epstein later offered Maria, then 26, an “artist-in-residence” opportunity at a 10,600-square-foot residence in billionaire Les Wexner’s Ohio compound, where she was sexually abused by both Epstein and Maxwell, according to the lawsuit.

On August 27, Annie Farmer appeared alongside 15 other accusers at a federal court hearing in New York. Epstein had died two weeks earlier, and an empty chair sat ominously at the defendant’s table as his accusers poured out their emotions, detailed their abuse, and demanded justice. “Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell not only assaulted [Maria], but as we’ve heard from so many of the brave women here today, they stole her dreams and her livelihood,” Farmer told the crowded courtroom.

“The fact that I will never have a chance to face my predator in court eats away at my soul,” Jennifer Araoz said at the hearing. She accused Epstein of raping her when she was a 14-year-old high school student. “They let this man kill himself and kill the chance for justice for so many others in the process, taking away our ability to speak.” Days after Epstein’s death, she sued Maxwell, Epstein’s estate, and others, claiming that “Defendant Maxwell participated with and assisted Epstein in maintaining and protecting his sex trafficking ring, ensuring that approximately three girls a day were made available to him for his sexual pleasure.”

And now, following her arrest, she faces criminal charges. According to the detention memo filed by the Southern District of New York on July 2, Maxwell began “hiding out in locations in New England” in July 2019 and making “intentional efforts to avoid detection including moving locations at least twice, switching her primary phone number (which she registered under the name ‘G Max’) and email address, and ordering packages for delivery with a different person listed on the shipping label.”

If convicted, Maxwell faces up to 35 years in prison, and prosecutors arguing to deny her bail invoked her history of globe-trotting and apparent access to secret stashes of money. In the last three years, she took at least 15 international flights to “the United Kingdom, Japan, and Qatar,” according to the memo. She also had 15 different bank accounts from 2016 to the present, “and during that same period, the total balances of those accounts have ranged from a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $20 million.” She allegedly made transfers of “hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time.”

They finally found her in a four-bedroom, 4,365-square-foot home on a 156-acre wooded lot that she “acquired through an all-cash purchase in December 2019 (through a carefully anonymized LLC) in Bradford, New Hampshire, an area to which she has no other known connections.” The home is reportedly called Tuckedaway, and an online listing describes it as “an amazing retreat for the nature lover who also wants total privacy.” The sale price was $1,070,750.

Before Maxwell was arrested, I asked the friend who claimed to know her situation a question: “How does she see her future?”

When Maxwell was asked this question by Hello! magazine in 1997, she was 35 years old and starting over again in New York. “I am optimistic about my future,” she said, “and believe things will continue to improve for me as time passes.”

Now that time is gone, along with Jeffrey Epstein.

“I don’t think she sees there is a future,” came the reply.

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FOUNDER & CHAIRMAN

Ted Waitt is the founder and chairman of the Waitt Foundation .  At 22, he co-founded Gateway 2000, Inc., where he helped pioneer the direct marketing of personal computers.  Labeled a maverick by national business publications, he became a Fortune 500 CEO and member of the Forbes 400 by the time he was 30.  Since his retirement from Gateway, Inc. in 2004, he has gone on to form multiple enterprises:   Avalon Capital Group, Inc. , The Waitt Foundation, The Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention , and The Waitt Institute .

Mr. Waitt believes that the depletion of ocean resources is one of the biggest challenges of our generation.  Over the past 9 years, he has dedicated the bulk of his time and resources to the cause of ocean conservation.  Since that time, the Waitt Foundation (WF), a grant making organization, has invested over $70 million in various ocean conservation initiatives.  Primarily focused on the creation of national parks of the sea, or Marine Protected Areas, WF is currently engaged in projects to create over 15 million square kilometers of marine protected areas in over two dozen countries around the world. 

The Waitt Institute is committed to helping small coastal communities develop and implement comprehensive, science-based, community-driven solutions for sustainable ocean management.  The Institute is currently engaged with the governments of Antigua & Barbuda, Curaçao, Montserrat, and Tonga.  Among numerous other ocean conservation endeavors, Mr. Waitt was a founding board member of Oceans 5, a highly successful collaboration of ocean funders working together to protect the oceans.

Additionally, Mr. Waitt is passionate about novel scientific exploration and discovery.  For more than a decade, Mr. Waitt volunteered as a Trustee of both the National Geographic Society (NGS) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (the Salk), serving in various executive capacities on both boards.  In 2007, he established the Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Center with a $20-million dollar grant.  Since inception, the Salk’s Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Center has gained numerous awards and accolades and remains a model interdisciplinary and collaborative core facility at the cutting edge of imaging technology. 

As NGS’s largest living donor, he worked with the Society to establish several historic programs; among them the NGS/Waitt Grants Program, the GENOGRAPHIC Project, and The Gospel of Judas.  Personally, Mr. Waitt has travelled to more than 100 countries in a never-ending search to understand more about our planet, its people, and our history.  He currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the NGS Pristine Seas Initiative, and has sponsored dozens of marine science expeditions, across all 5 oceans and 7 continents.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Waitt is the son of a 4th-generation cattleman.  He attended the Universities of Colorado and Iowa, and has received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Iowa and the University of South Dakota.

Over the years, Mr. Waitt has earned a number of honors, among them:  The Young Entrepreneur of the Year award from the U.S. Small Business Association; two Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards; Marketing Computers Marketer of the Year; and he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Americans (TOYA) by the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce.  He was appointed by Congress to serve on the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce, and has been named one of the top 50 philanthropists by Business Week magazine.

Mr. Waitt has 4 grown children and currently resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife, Michele.

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If those walls could talk! The Hemsworths' lavish white party 'was a send-off for American TV personality Michele Merkin' - whose husband once dated Ghislaine Maxwell

By Monique Friedlander For Daily Mail Australia

Published: 21:09 EDT, 9 May 2021 | Updated: 23:33 EDT, 9 May 2021

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The Hemsworth clan made headlines this month by throwing a star-studded 'white party' in trendy Byron Bay. 

And new details are now emerging about the much-talked-about 'do, with the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on Monday that the bash was actually a send-off for American TV personality and former model Michele Merkin, 45. 

Michele is the wife of Ted Waitt, 58, - a billionaire businessman who once dated British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell following her split from the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein .   

If those walls could talk! The Hemsworths' lavish white party 'was a send-off for American TV personality Michele Merkin'.  Pictured at the 'white party': Far left is personal trainer Luke Zocchi, second right is Matt Damon, far right is Chris Hemsworth, front centre is Michele Merkin

Connection: Michele (left) is the wife of Ted Waitt (right)- a billionaire businessman who once dated British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell following her split from the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein 

Waitt dated Maxwell from around 2005 to 2011, according to Forbes .  

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In 2010, Maxwell famously attended Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea's wedding as Waitt's guest. 

She also helped Waitt purchase and renovate a luxury yacht called Plan B prior to their breakup. 

Glamazon: Michele (pictured) worked as a model for 15 years, appearing in magazines such as Elle, Marie Claire and Vogue 

Fun-loving couple: Ted and Michele enjoy dressing up and posing for quirky Instagram photos together 

History: Maxwell was arrested in July last year on charges of aiding Epstein in the sexual abuse of teenage girls for over a decade, starting in 1994. Pictured: Epstein and Maxwell in 2005 

Maxwell was arrested in July last year on charges of aiding Epstein in the sexual abuse of teenage girls for over a decade, starting in 1994. 

She is accused of grooming and trafficking women for Epstein, who killed himself while incarcerated in 2019 while awaiting trail on sex trafficking charges. 

Daily Mail Australia is are not suggesting that Waitt had any knowledge of, or involvement in, the criminal allegations made against Maxwell or Epstein. 

Accused: Maxwell is accused of grooming and trafficking women for Epstein, who killed himself while incarcerated in 2019 while awaiting trail on sex trafficking charges 

The colourful life of Waitt's ex would surely have made for for an interesting discussion among those lucky enough to attend the Hemsworth family's 'white party'.

Chris Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky sparked envy among fans as they shared a series of photos and videos of themselves dancing and posing in all-white outfits. 

The couple were joined by Chris' brothers Liam and Luke, as well as their respective partners, Gabriella Brooks and Samantha Hemsworth. 

Famous friends: Michele and Ted are long-time friends with the Hemsworth family. Pictured L-R:  Liam Hemsworth, Michele Merkin, Luke Hemsworth, Samantha Hemsworth and Ted Waitt in 2018 

Opening up the ex-files: Michele is also a friend of Liam Hemsworht's ex Miley Cyrus. The pair are pictured together in 2017 

Also attending the bash was Hollywood star Matt Damon, his wife Luciana Barroso, TV personality Lauren Phillips, Chris' personal trainer Luke Zocchi, and Chris' stunt double Bobby Holland Hanton.  

The lavish, marble-floored venue was festooned with white décor, including large balloon garlands, candles, ottomans and faux trees covered in white flowers.

Even the drinks were coloured to fit the theme, with guests sipping cloudy white beverages as they mingled.

At the back of the room were large, white marquee letters that spelled the word 'MAYDAY' - presumably referencing the fact the party took place at the start of May.

Partying up a storm! Chris Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky sparked envy among fans as they shared a series of photos and videos of themselves dancing and posing in all-white outfits 

A-list crowd: A slew of celebrities were in attendance including Chris' brothers Liam and Luke, Hollywood star Matt Damon and Chris' personal trainer Luke Zocchi

Say cheese: Channel Nine presenter Lauren Phillips (left) posed up a storm with TV host Michele Merkin (centre) and Matt Damon's wife Luciana Barroso (right) at the exclusive bash 

Share or comment on this article: Hemsworths' white party 'was a send-off for Michele Merkin' - whose husband dated Ghislaine Maxwell

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Ghislaine Maxwell’s wealthy ex lovers and why they’re suddenly being used in the courtroom

Socialite’s attorneys are trying to rehabilitate her image through her relationships with ted waitt and scott borgerson, article bookmarked.

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Ghislaine Maxwell ’s attorneys are seeking to recast the disgraced British socialite as a devoted stepmother and a loving wife in the lead-up to sentencing for child sex abuse convictions later this month.

Central to this makeover is the portrayal in a 77-page sentencing submission of her relationships with two wealthy, successful men and their children that were ruined by the stigma of her years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein .

In the filing released late on Wednesday, attorney Bobbi Sternheim wrote that Maxwell’s “life after Epstein” in the early 2000s was that of a committed partner to Ted Waitt, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of software company Gateway.

“In 2003, Ms Maxwell began a seven-year romantic relationship with Theodore ‘Ted’ Waitt and developed a strong and loving bond with his four children, ranging in age from six to twelve,” Maxwell’s lawyers wrote.

Maxwell reportedly attended Chelsea Clinton’s 2010 wedding as Mr Waitt’s guest and later helped him obtain and renovate a luxury yacht, the Plan B.

“Her relationship with Waitt was on track for marriage and gave her what she had always hoped for and wanted most – the opportunity for a loving, stable family life and the chance to become stepmother to Waitt’s children.

“But her hopes were destroyed, as was so much of her life, by her previous association with Epstein.”

In 2007, Epstein brokered a controversial plea deal which saw him admit to charges of soliciting an underage prostitute. Maxwell was shielded from criminal prosecution, but could not escape the torrent of negative headlines.

Maxwell’s lawyer alleged that the relationship ended when Mr Waitt was blackmailed by Florida lawyer Scott Rothstein who offered to keep her name out of a civil lawsuit his law firm was preparing to file against Epstein.

The relationship “could not survive the blackmail threats”, Ms Sternheim said.

Mr Waitt, whose fortune has been estimated as high as $1.4bn, did not respond to a request for comment through his sustainable ocean charity The Waitt Foundation.

Rothstein is serving a 50-year prison term for his role in a $1.2bn Ponzi scheme and could not be reached.

Mr Waitt’s name was briefly mentioned during Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, by defence witness Cindy Espinosa, a former executive assistant to the socialite.

In 2012, Maxwell founded The Terramar Project, an environmental non-profit dedicated to creating a “global ocean community” to help protect the world’s ocean.

Maxwell’s lawyers also said she sought to rebuild her life away from the public glare through her marriage to Scott Borgerson, the former CEO of CargoMetrics.

“In 2013, Ms Maxwell began a new relationship with the man she would later marry. She was with her husband for over seven years and became a devoted stepmother to her husband’s two youngsters, who were ages three and four-and-a-half at the start of the relationship,” her attorney wrote.

Maxwell largely disappeared from public view in 2016 after Virginia Giuffre publicly accused her and Epstein of forcing her into a sexual encounter with Prince Andrew.

Maxwell was taken to court for defamation after calling Ms Giuffre a liar, and the case was settled in 2017.

Attention on her and Epstein died down until Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K Brown published a damning expose on Epstein’s so-called “sweetheart deal” in 2007 with the Department of Justice.

Epstein was arrested on child sex-trafficking charges in July 2019 and committed suicide on 10 August while awaiting trial.

Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 at the rural New Hampshire home she purchased for $1m with Mr Borgerson.

The FBI used GPS data from her mobile phone to track her down to the remote location, and she tried to hide as agents searched the property.

“Sadly, the marriage could not survive the negative impact of this case nor a husband’s association with his dishonoured wife,” her lawyers stated.

Maxwell, 60, was held in custody and her relationship with Mr Borgerson ended sometime before her child sex trafficking trial began in New York in November 2021.

She was found guilty after a month-long trial on five charges of recruiting and grooming young girls for her “partner in crime” Epstein on 29 December.

After his death, Maxwell’s lawyers said she became a “caricature of evil” due to a “tsunami of one-sided, overwhelmingly negative coverage”.

“The Court cannot heal the wounds caused by Epstein heaping on Ms Maxwell’s shoulders the pain of every one of his victims, the outrage of society, the public scorn of the community, and then driving her out of the community forever,” Ms Sternheim wrote, calling for a lenient sentence.

The filing stated that Maxwell had tried to protect Mr Waitt’s children, her stepchildren and Terramar from the “onslaught of press and public vilification that come with having been associated with her”.

“Ms Maxwell cannot and should not bear all the punishment for which Epstein should have been held responsible. Ms Maxwell has already experienced hard time during detention under conditions far more onerous and punitive than any experienced by a typical pretrial detainee, and she is preparing to spend significantly more time behind bars,” the filing continued.

“Her life has been ruined. Since Epstein’s death, her life has been threatened and death threats continue while she is incarcerated. It would be a travesty of justice for her to face a sentence that would have been appropriate for Epstein.”

Maxwell faces a maximum of 65 years in prison when she is sentenced on 28 June.

Probation officials have recommended she receive around 20 years.

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Billionaire Ted Waitt puts $20-million price tag on Bird Streets address

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Billionaire philanthropist Ted Waitt, who last month bought a home in Beverly Hills for $10.3 million, has put his home in the celebrity- and mogul-centric Bird Streets area of Hollywood Hills West up for sale at $20 million.

Set on a promontory of more than half an acre, the contemporary-style home has views stretching to downtown L.A. and the ocean.

Interiors done in stone walls and vibrant wood finishes include formal living and dining rooms, a game/media room, an office, four bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms. Set off of the family room, a large wall aquarium lends an exotic touch to a curved wet bar.

Done in zebrawood, the open-space kitchen sports a large center island topped by a freestanding stainless steel hood. A wall fireplace, a large soaking tub and a walk-in closet highlight the master suite.

Designed for indoor-outdoor living, sliding walls of floor-to-ceiling glass seamlessly meld with various terraces, balconies and an expansive patio with an infinity-edge pool. Elsewhere, an outdoor dining area is outfitted with a long fire feature.

Stunning photos, celebrity homes: Get the free weekly Hot Property newsletter >>

Waitt, 52, co-founded the computer hardware giant Gateway Inc. in the 1980s. Considered one of the country’s leading philanthropists, he has a net worth of about $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

He bought the house in 2011 for $11.525 million, records show.

Ryan Davis and Paul Stukin of John Aaroe Group are the listing agents.

Twitter: @NJLeitereg

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Former Los Angeles Times reporter Neal J. Leitereg covered celebrity real estate for the Business section. He graduated from Arizona State and covered real estate news for Realtor.com before joining The Times.

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