Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell ( ghee-LEN; born 25 December 1961) is a British convicted child sex trafficker and former socialite. In 2021, she was convicted of child sex trafficking, and in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Born in France and raised in Oxford, England, she attended Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1980s and became a prominent member of London's social scene. She is a naturalised American citizen and retains both French and British citizenship. She worked for her father, the media proprietor Robert Maxwell, until his death in 1991; she then moved to New York City, where she continued living as a socialite and developed a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Alongside Epstein, Maxwell maintained an extensive social network of prominent elites. Maxwell maintained friendships with Naomi Campbell, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Kerry Kennedy.
In July 2020, Maxwell was arrested by the FBI in the United States following a federal indictment charging her with multiple offences, including conspiracy to entice minors and sex trafficking of minors to Jeffrey Epstein. She was denied bail. Her trial ran from 29 November until 29 December 2021 when she was convicted on five out of six counts, including one of sex trafficking of a minor.
Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell was born on 25 December 1961 in Maisons-Laffitte, a commune in the department of Seine-et-Oise, Île-de-France, France. Her first middle name ‘Noelle’ refers to the fact she was born on Christmas Day, and her second ‘Marion’ refers to her childhood nanny named Marion Sloane. She is the ninth and youngest child of Elisabeth (née Meynard), a French-born scholar of Huguenot descent, and Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), a Czechoslovak-born Jewish British media proprietor. She was born two days before a car accident that left her 15-year-old brother Michael in a prolonged coma until his death in 1968. Elisabeth later reflected that the accident had an effect on the entire family, and surmised that Maxwell had shown signs of anorexia as a toddler; Maxwell said at age three, "Mummy, I exist." According to her lawyers, when she was 13, Maxwell tacked a poster of a pony, and Robert hit the hammer on her hand, which was bruised for weeks.
Throughout childhood, Maxwell lived with her family at Headington Hill Hall, a 53-room mansion in Oxford, England, where the offices of Pergamon Press, a publishing company run by Robert, were also located. Elisabeth later said that all her children were raised as Anglicans. Maxwell first attended Oxford High School for Girls and then, at age nine, was enrolled at Edgarley Hall, followed by Headington School at age 13. She attended Marlborough College to study for A-Levels, before earning a degree in Modern History with Languages in 1985 from Balliol College of the University of Oxford. While at Balliol, she fraternised with future prime minister Boris Johnson and author Anna Pasternak.
Maxwell had a close relationship with Robert and was reportedly his favourite. The Times reported that he did not permit her to bring her boyfriends home, or to be seen with them publicly, after she started attending Oxford.
Maxwell was a prominent figure in the London social scene of the 1980s. She founded a women's club named after the original Kit-Cat Club and was a director of Oxford United Football Club during her father's ownership. She also worked at The European, a publication her father had established. According to Tom Bower, writing for The Sunday Times, in 1986 Robert invited her to the naming in her honour of his new yacht the Lady Ghislaine, at a shipyard in the Netherlands. She spent a large amount of time in the late 1980s aboard the yacht, which was equipped with a jacuzzi, sauna, gym, and disco. The Scotsman said Robert had also "tailor-made a New York company for her". The company, called Maxwell’s corporate gifts, was not profitable.
The Sunday Times reported that Maxwell flew to New York City on 5 November 1990 to deliver an envelope on her father's behalf that, unbeknownst to her, was part of "a plot initiated by her father to steal $200m" from Berlitz shareholders. After Robert purchased the New York Daily News in January 1991, he sent Ghislaine to New York City to act as his emissary. This furnished her entry to the Manhattan social scene. In May 1991 Maxwell and her father took the Concorde on business to New York, from where he soon departed for Moscow and left her to represent his interests at an event honouring Simon Wiesenthal.
In November 1991 Robert's body was found floating in the sea near the Canary Islands and Lady Ghislaine. Soon afterwards, Ghislaine flew to Tenerife, where the yacht was berthed, to attend to his business paperwork. She attended her father's funeral in Jerusalem alongside Israeli intelligence figures, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who delivered the eulogy. Although a verdict of death by accidental drowning was recorded, Maxwell has since said she believes her father was murdered, commenting in 1997: "He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered."
After his death, Robert was found to have fraudulently appropriated the pension assets of Mirror Group Newspapers, a company that he ran and in which he held a large share of ownership, to support its share price. Pension funds over £400m were said to be missing, and 32,000 people were affected. Two of Maxwell's brothers, Ian and Kevin, who were the most involved with their father in daily business dealings, were arrested on 19 June 1992 and charged with fraud related to the Mirror Group pension scandal. The brothers were acquitted three and a half years later in January 1996.
Maxwell moved to the United States in 1991, shortly after her father's death. It is reported that, owing to social discomfort she experienced in the wake of the pension fraud perpetrated by her father, she purchased a one-way Concorde ticket to New York in November 1992. Maxwell was provided with an annual income of £80,000 (equivalent to £183,997 in 2025) from a trust fund established in Liechtenstein by her father. By 1992 she had moved to an apartment of an Iranian friend overlooking Central Park. At the time, Maxwell worked at a real estate office on Madison Avenue and was reported to be socialising with celebrities. She quickly rose to wider prominence as a New York City socialite. In 1996, Maxwell made headlines when she was arrested in West London for drink-driving; the media reported her occupation as "internet operator".
Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
Accounts differ on when Maxwell first met the American financier Jeffrey Epstein. According to Epstein's former business partner Steven Hoffenberg, Robert Maxwell introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s. The Times reported that Maxwell met Epstein in the early 1990s at a New York party following "a difficult break-up with Count Gianfranco Cicogna" (1962–2012) of the CIGA Hotels clan. Maxwell and Epstein were associated with each other by February 1993. In 1995, Maxwell and Epstein were guests of honour on a cruise organised by Lindsay Fox who had invited Rodney Adler and wife Lindi as well as James Packer and then-girlfriend Deni Hines.
Maxwell had a romantic relationship with Epstein for several years in the early 1990s and remained closely associated with him for more than 25 years until his death in 2019. The nature of their relationship remains unclear, although at Maxwell's trial, prosecutors said that from 1994 to 1997 they were engaged in an intimate relationship.
A January 2001 article by Nigel Rosser of the Evening Standard reported that friends of Epstein said Maxwell "remains desperate to marry Epstein", further elaborating: "You could say she was pretty much entirely dependent on him. She loves him. He sometimes treats her well, sometimes off-handedly. You could say she sees something of a father in him."
In a 2009 deposition, several of Epstein's household employees testified that Epstein referred to her as his "main girlfriend" who also hired, fired, and supervised his staff, starting around 1992. She has also been referred to as the "Lady of the House" by Epstein's staff and as his "aggressive assistant". In 1995 Epstein renamed one of his companies the Ghislaine Corporation; based in Palm Beach, Florida, US, the company was dissolved in 1998.