The Backstory: The Epstein Rosetta Stone: Money, Sex, and Fraud

Jeffrey Epstein, millionaire sex offender and friend to presidents and royalty, is back in the news. It seems his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, holds the key to what went on at Epstein’s private retreats with his powerful friends. Attorney Alan Dershowitz calls her the Epstein Rosetta Stone. But her backstory is just as fascinating. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was cut of the same cloth as Epstein. Ambitious and wildly successful . . until they weren’t. Ghislaine’s father and her lover, both died under mysterious circumstances as their lives were collapsing around them.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The millionaire sex offender and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who died
in prison in twenty nineteen, has been in the news lately.
His friendship with business moguls, powerful politicians, and even royalty
continues to be a topic of discussion six years later,
and taking a lot of the heat originally directed at
him is his former girlfriend turned wingman who's now in

(00:22):
prison as well. What does she know and where did
she come from? I'm Patty Steele, Gilaine Maxwell, and the
two men closest to her were both wildly powerful and
both dead under suspicious circumstances. That's next on the backstory.

(00:42):
The backstory is back. The Jeffrey Epstein story is all
over the news these days. Lots of questions about how
this wealthy, wealthy man managed to hook up some of
the most powerful men in the world with dozens of
underage girls at his homes in New York City, Florida,
and New Mexico, and most especially at his private island

(01:03):
in the US Virgin Islands. Is there a client list,
If so, who's on it? Epstein is silent. In twenty nineteen,
while awaiting trial, he died in prison, allegedly by suicide.
So only one person can answer those questions, Gilaine Maxwell,
and so far she's not talking. Epstein insider attorney Alan

(01:25):
Dershowitz said this week, Gelaine is the Epstein Rosetta Stone.
She knows everything. She arranged every single trip with everybody.
Now the talk is she may be called to testify
before Congress. Dershowitz thinks they should free her from prison
and offer her immunity to get her to talk. Right now.

(01:46):
Gileaene is serving twenty years in prison on a variety
of charges, including child sex trafficking. Through her relationship with Epstein,
she was instrumental in procuring numerous very young girls for
him and his pals. Business associates that she denies all that,
But where did she come from? And who's the other
powerful man in her life who also was involved in

(02:09):
a major scandal and also wound up dying under suspicious circumstances.
It was her father, Robert Maxwell. He was born in
Czechoslovakia in nineteen twenty three. After fleeing Nazi occupation during
World War II, he reinvented himself multiple times, first as
a war hero, later as an ambitious entrepreneur, a politician,

(02:33):
and ultimately as a media publishing mogul who socialized with
prime ministers, presidents and royalty. It's even possible he was
involved in espionage. In the nineteen sixties, he was a
member of Britain's Parliament, but his financial ambitions took over
and he began to build a business empire. By the

(02:53):
nineteen seventies and eighties, it was growing dramatically. Maxwell bought
up major newspaper groups like the companies that owned Britain's
Daily Mirror and New York's Daily News, and he bought
the massive McMillan publishing firm. Maxwell was a powerful, self
made man, at least that's what it looked like from

(03:13):
the outside, But inside it was a whole different story.
Beneath the facade of success were disturbing financial dealings, shady
business practices, and mounting debt. Maxwell was a master of deception.
He regularly used borrowed money to finance his empire, leveraging

(03:34):
all his businesses as collateral from massive loans from banks
around the globe. He owed money he couldn't possibly pay
back to banks and investment companies like Barclays, Golden sacks,
Leyman Brothers and the Swiss Bank corporation. It was kind
of similar to a Ponzi scheme. He borrowed from one
lender to pay off another, creating a continuous, unstable loop

(03:58):
of debt. How did he keep it going Well, he
had a powerful reputation, he was really connected, and he
had incredible charisma. He'd get loans from big players without
a whole lot of scrutiny because these lenders trusted his
public persona and supposed business sense. But it gets worse.
He started siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from his

(04:21):
employee pension funds, stealing directly from his own workers to
keep up his lavish lifestyle and shure up his crumbling empire.
By nineteen ninety one, he was facing not only financial ruin,
but possible criminal charges. As evidence of his extensive fraud
began to come to the surface, investigators and financial institutions

(04:44):
were closing in unraveling his web. In November of nineteen
ninety one, Robert Maxwell took off for a cruise through
the Canary Islands on his lavish one hundred eighty foot
super yacht, Lady Guilain, named after his daughter, and that's
when he mysteriously disappeared. Maxwell's body was later found floating

(05:07):
in the Atlantic Ocean. He was sixty eight years old.
What happened, the official verdict was accidental drowning, but given
that his empire was imploding, there was lots of speculation
and several conspiracy theories about it. Some thought he'd committed
suicide rather than spend the rest of his life in prison.
Others thought he may have been murdered by people he'd defrauded,

(05:30):
or even by Israeli intelligence since he was heavily connected
with them the irony of the murder theory, while Jeffrey Epstein,
Partner's Lash former lover of Maxwell's daughter Delaine, was also
said to have committed suicide. Yet conspiracy types think he
may have been murdered in his prison cell to keep
him from talking, and there are several minutes of footage

(05:53):
missing from security cameras near his cell that night. Anyway,
once Robert Maxwell was dead, his horrifying financial scandal came
to light. Two of his sons took heat because they
worked closely with their father in his financial schemes. They
were finally acquitted after a year's long court battle in
which they claimed to be innocent dupes of their dead father.

(06:15):
They trusted him too, they said. Maxwell's daughter Gilaine, who
had worked for her father while leading a vibrant social
life in London, was never arrested, but all seven of
Maxwell's kids were sort of ruined by their dad's legacy.
Gilaine was just twenty nine years old. She was out
of a job, so she took off for New York City.

(06:36):
Pretty soon, she hooked up with Jeffrey Epstein and they
were a couple for several years. Although they remained partners
for the rest of Epstein's life. Insiders say Epstein referred
to her as his main girlfriend. She was his lover,
but she also ran his household, and since she was
a trained helicopter pilot, she flew him to his island

(06:56):
in the Caribbean. On top of that, she introduced Epstein
to some illustrious pals, like the Queen's son Prince Andrew,
who really got mixed up in the sex scandal. She
also began procuring the young girls at Epstein and his
pals needed. Was Gelaine's involvement with Epstein kind of a
tragic echo of her dad's legacy. It's sure as an

(07:18):
exonerator but the similarities are eerie. It's bizarre that the
two closest men in her life had the same reckless
ambitions and lack of a moral compass, and both died
under circumstances that'll probably never fully come to light. This
tale is all about the dangers of thoughtless greed, desire,

(07:39):
and deception, as well as the darker aspects of wealth,
power and family legacy. I guess we'll see if Gelaine
does eventually tell at least part of the Epstein story,
but it's pretty unlikely we'll ever find out exactly what
happened to her father, Robert Maxwell. Hope you like the
Backstory with Patty Steele. Please slever review and I would

(08:01):
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On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

(08:25):
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is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
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Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the

(08:45):
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.