Ghislaine Maxwell has blamed childhood abuse suffered at the hands of her father Robert Maxwell in a plea for clemency days ahead of her sentencing for child sex trafficking convictions.
Far from the glamourous lifestyle typically associated with her privileged upbringing, Maxwell’s attorney described a youth punctuated by negligence, beatings and ritual humiliation in front of her father’s powerful friends.
“She had a difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father,” her attorney Bobbi Sternheim wrote in the sentencing submission.
The childhood scars made her “vulnerable to (Jeffrey) Epstein”, who she met for the first time just after Maxwell’s death in 1991, they said.
“It is the biggest mistake she made in her life and one that she has not and never will repeat.”
Maxwell was convicted of five counts of child sex-trafficking on 29 December after a month-long trial. She is due to be sentenced on 28 June, and is appealing for a much lighter prison term than the maximum of 65 years.
Robert Maxwell, a flamboyant, Czechoslovakian-born World War II hero, built a large publishing empire in the United Kingdom while cultivating a larger-than-life public image, frequently bending the rules and suing anyone who dared to challenge him.
It was his election as a Member of Parliament in 1964 when Ghislaine was just two years that her lawyers cited as a turning point in their relationship.
“Despite Mr Maxwell’s professed love for his children, his relationship with them began to change soon after he became a Member of Parliament,” her attorneys wrote.
Maxwell senior would only see the children on Sundays, when authors and businesspeople would gather at the family’s stately home in Oxfordshire.
The children would “be put on trial, and the ‘Maxwellian Drama’ would begin”, according to the filing.
During these weekly gatherings, Mr Maxwell would select one of the seven children (two had earlier died) for intensive questioning in front of his guests.
“If the child stumbled, didn’t speak on point, or gave a wrong answer, Mr Maxwell would demand them to answer which of the principles they had forgotten to apply and the reason for that failure,” Maxwell’s attorneys claimed.
“The dressing down was always painful in the extreme with everyone around the table feeling uncomfortable. Mr Maxwell, a man of large physical stature with a booming voice, would explode, threaten, and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp.”
Punishment would then be doled out, leaving the entire family in “utter distress”.
On one occasion, Mr Maxwell hit his daughter’s hand with a hammer after she tried to mount a poster onto a freshly-painted wall, “leaving it severely bruised and painful for weeks to come”.
Her attempts to chart her own course in life were repeatedly stymied by her over-bearing father, according to the court filing.
Her first serious relationship was “quashed by her father’s disapproval”.
A successful gifting business established by Maxwell while she was a student at Oxford University was merged into the family’s business holdings “at her father’s insistence”.
And despite their obvious wealth, the Maxwell children were told they wouldn’t receive a cent of inheritance from their father’s fortune.
By the time his body was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991 after falling off his luxury yacht Lady Ghislaine, Maxwell had relocated to New York where she was launching a magazine for the family business.
It was subsequently revealed that Mr Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from the pension fund of his Mirror Group newspaper business.
Her brothers were charged and acquitted of any involvement in the scam, and Ghislaine was “left to fend for herself”, the filing stated.
Her lawyers produced a letter from psychotherapist and family friend James Martin Hollomon who had observed Robert Maxwell over many years.
“Their father was narcissistic, demanding and highly controlling,” Mr Hollomon wrote.
A recent documentary, House of Maxwell, claimed that Robert Maxwell had placed eavesdropping devices around the family home as he looked for evidence of family disloyalty.
Her eldest siblings Anne Halve and Philip Maxwell wrote in a sentencing submission that Ghislaine Maxwell was dependent on her father’s approval “and vulnerable to his frequent rapid mood swings, huge rages and rejections”.
“This led her to becoming very vulnerable to abusive and powerful men who would be able to take advantage of her innate good nature.”
