Robert Maxwell at a party on his yacht with daughter Ghislaine and wife Elisabeth, 1990
(Picture: Mirrorpix/Getty Images)“There is a world in which the rich and powerful operate and it is a different world,” says producer Colin Barr and after watching his three-part BBC documentary House of Maxwell it’s hard to disagree. The series draws a thread from the schmoozing and corrupt business practices of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who drowned in 1991, to the conviction last year of his socialite daughter Ghislaine for recruiting and grooming women and girls on behalf of her former lover, the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
These people socialised with Prime Ministers, presidents and, notoriously, Prince Andrew, and they operated outside the bounds of decency. With the central programme dedicated to the collapse of the sprawling, impoverished empire inherited by sons Ian and Kevin Maxwell on their father’s death, it’s almost a classic three-act tragedy, of a dynasty brought down by hubris, greed and sex. “The Maxwell story falls into the shape of many Greek or Shakespearean myths,” Barr agrees.
If you think you already know everything there is to know about Ghislaine and her gross father, you’re wrong. In a north London garage, the film-makers found lost footage of the man Private Eye named Cap’n Bob, bobbing in a rubber ring (and apparently without trunks on) in the Atlantic near the yacht he named after his daughter, hours before his death. There are tapes from Maxwell’s own bugging system on which executives fret about the black hole in the empire’s finances. Former employees, former friends, and journalists – including my old Evening Standard colleague Nigel Rosser, who exposed Ghislaine as Andrew’s social ‘fixer’ – shine new light on the story.
Most shocking is the testimony of two of Epstein’s victims, Teresa Helm and Juliette Bryant. The latter, speaking publicly for the first time, talks about being repeatedly abused at the age of 20 by the financier on his private island. “His bedroom was always pitch dark and cold,” she says. “I just checked out of my body and let him do what he wanted.” She was terrified throughout: “There was something about the energy of a girl being scared that he liked.” Helm says the network of abuse was “like a factory”, with Ghislaine recruiting women and girls from around the world and feeing them to Epstein: “She did it very well.”
“We wanted to get across the vastness and complexity of the sex trafficking operation,” says series producer Ceri Isfryn. She was instrumental in gaining the trust of Helm and Bryant and their lawyers Sigrid McCawley and David Boies. The women only felt confident going public after Epstein’s death in prison – ruled as suicide – in 2019.
The series suggests that Epstein knew Robert Maxwell and was possibly helping him squirrel away funds before his death, and that his acquaintance with Ghislaine therefore began earlier than previously believed. Two questions go conclusively unanswered. One is the correct pronunciation of Ghislaine’s name, which is variously rendered as GILL-on, Gill-AYN or ZHIS-lun. The other is what led her down the path that led to a prison cell. “30-year-old women don’t just arbitrarily start abusing girls,” Isfryn says.
In these days of wastage and fraud costing many billions, Robert Maxwell’s pillaging of £426m from the pension funds of Mirror Group Newspapers and other companies sounds almost quaint (it was anything but for the victims of course: the grandfather of Dan Vernon, series director of House of Maxwell, was night editor on the Mirror and went on to work at The People, and though his pension was safe, many of his friends were rendered destitute). Similarly, Maxwell’s tabloid rivalry with Rupert Murdoch now looks almost small-time. But in the Britain of the 80s he cut a huge, if always somewhat absurd, figure.
House of Maxwell briskly mentions his birth in 1923 into a poor Jewish family - his parents and six siblings were later murdered by the Nazis - in a part of Czechoslovakia that is now in Ukraine; his wartime heroism and black market activities in the British Army; and his alleged spying for both MI6 and the KGB. The foundation of Pergamon Press after the war and his time as a Labour MP in the 60s are not covered. The deaths of two of his nine children with his wife Betty are briefly alluded to, his many infidelities not at all.
His rivalry with Rupert Murdoch is the spur, if not the subject of the first programme. Murdoch pipped Maxwell to ownership of The News of the World in 1969 and bought The Sun later that year. Maxwell’s acquisition of the Mirror Group in 1984 was a direct challenge. “I’m not on some ego trip,” he lied. In 1987 – the same year he launched the London Daily News, an extremely short-lived competitor to the Standard - he streamlined several publishing enterprises into the Maxwell Communication Corporation in a bid to rival Murdoch’s global media organization.
When I left journalism school in 1989, Maxwell’s appetite for acquiring businesses and for self-promotion were already legendary. One of my contemporaries got a job for a specialist architectural magazine that was bought as part of a deal by Maxwell, the wider purchase celebrated by a party at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, compered by Bob Monkhouse. Maxwell dabbled in early satellite TV and became Chairman of Oxford United football club in 1983. Months before he drowned in 1991 he paid $60m for the New York Daily News. Bronwen Maddox, who dug into his financial wrongdoing at the FT, says his empire included 800 public companies, their ownership structures chaotically obscure.
Unlike the limelight-shunning Murdoch, Maxwell was all over the TV and his own tabloids, the familiar, slab-like face with its black widow’s peak and cork-smudge eyebrows above a bow tie and a suit flaring over the pear-shaped body. House of Maxwell shows him boasting about the purchase of a Bulgarian media group to a painfully young Jonathan Ross and chuckling as Paul Daniels warning him not to pinch the £1m prize in a TV magic show.
The documentary takes you behind the public smile. We see the lizard stare Maxwell directed at his personal film crew, the dismissal of someone who strays into a meeting: “Unwelcome intruder: f*** off!” He bugged the mansion, Headington Hill Hall, that he rented for 32 years from Oxford Council, his offices; and the garden of his unauthorised biographer, Tom Bower. An employee was scared to paint the fifth floor ladies loos at MGN unless Maxwell approved the colour.
To his family, according to one of his former editors, Eve Pollard, he demonstrated “the kind of love that could get you by the throat as well as the heart”. His secretary, Carol Bragoli, recalls him and his favourite child, Ghislaine, making miaowing noises to one another over the phone. Ian and Kevin are very much in his shadow, even as a jury acquits them of fraud after his death.
In the third episode, damning evidence stacks up against Ghislaine, the glamorous, vivacious fixer who surfed New York society with ease though her job and income remained murky. Former friend Christopher Mason recalls her asking him to compose a song for Epstein’s 40th birthday “roast”, celebrating him as “the subject of many schoolgirl crushes” who has “24-hour erections”. Gossip columnist turned reputation manager Couri Hay says Prince Andrew was “her big card… a rare bird in New York City”. Excerpts from Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview with Emily Mailtis play alongside testimony from Virginia Roberts, the woman he denies assaulting but to whom he has paid an alleged £12m.
The horror isn’t over for the survivors of Epstein’s sexual predations. Ghislaine’s siblings emerged from obscurity to paint her as a victim too, and her legal team sought a retrial on the grounds that one of the original jurors neglected to mention his own experience of sexual abuse (though this has since been denied). Meanwhile, the disgraced Prince Andrew walked the Queen into Prince Philip’s memorial service, further evidence that the rich and powerful play by different rules. Thirty years after debate raged over whether Robert Maxwell died by accident, suicide, or assassination, the makers of this latest documentary know they haven’t had the final word. “More will come out in the next couple of years,” says Colin Barr. “I have no idea where this story will go.”
