Original subtitles

Ghislaine, do you have anything to say

about the allegations... Prince Andrew?

Have you spoken to Prince Andrew?

- Happy New Year. - Happy New Year.

Have you spoken to Prince Andrew?

I made a statement. Thank you.

Have you...

Today we announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell

for helping Jeffrey Epstein

sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls

who were as young as 14 years old.

We've been discretely keeping tabs on Maxwell's whereabouts.

She was hiding out in a remote part of New Hampshire.

FBI agents moved in, arriving in about a dozen cars,

a plane flying above to make sure

the only way she left was in handcuffs.

Who is this Ghee-layne Maxwell?

- Jizayne Maxwell. - Gheelin Maxwell.

Guhleen Mask-- Maxwell.

Gissmell-- Ghiz-layne.

I think it's, um... Ghee-layne.

What do we know about her and that relationship?

Ghislaine Maxwell has been described

as Epstein's ex-girlfriend and assistant.

Identified by multiple Epstein accusers

as being his primary co-conspirator.

His best friend, according to Epstein,

and a socialite who helped connect him

with the wealthy and famous.

Rich and powerful individuals,

including politicians, including celebrities,

are nervous about what Ghislaine Maxwell may say.

I just wish her well, frankly.

I've met her numerous times over the years.

Ghislaine Maxwell will have a lot of time

to think about it in her jail cell.

Trial isn't set to begin until July of next year.

People were beguiled by Ghislaine.

She had this charismatic power over people.

So, who is Ghislaine Maxwell?

Who is the girl beneath all of this?

Nobody knows.

You were daddy's little girl.

Like, you know, you were the youngest.

What do you feel your parents were expecting you to become?

Like all parents, they want their children to be happy.

Are you happy?

I...am happy in the sense

that I have many things to be grateful for.

But if I have a wish for myself,

it's to be able to achieve something.

I followed the story of Ghislaine Maxwell

because she was somebody I knew at university.

She would stand out because I--

and I remember this vividly-- in terms of her dress sense.

She was flashy.

Her clothes were new and modern.

I remember from early dinners I had with Ghislaine

that she was kind of the life of the party.

She ran with a fast crowd, and you'd see, you know,

movie stars and visiting royalty.

Ghislaine was just impossibly fun.

Zinging humor.

She was able to figure out

the comedic potential of everyone at the table.

So she could just have you in stitches.

And I was intrigued

by how... extraordinarily well-connected she was.

Well, Ghislaine was friends with everybody.

She was friends with Andrew and Fergie.

You want the ocean to be sustainably managed,

and that is the message that we...

She was involved in charity work.

She was always, like, jetting around somewhere,

you know, fabulous.

She was quite mysterious in a way.

You just never really knew exactly what she was doing.

She's obviously like a good actress

because there was this whole other, like, dark world

that was going on that was really shocking.

This relationship between

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

was really a partnership

on a sexual level and a financial level.

I worked for Ghislaine and Jeffrey

in his New York mansion.

I asked Ghislaine what her relationship was with Jeffrey,

because she appeared to be more like an employer or a coworker.

She told me they were married,

and then she told me that evening

that they weren't actually married

but that they were dating and he was cheating on her.

Okay, so, what is it?

I think that one of the saddest things actually

that I've read about the whole thing

is in the deposition when she was asked

what her relationship with Epstein was

and was it a relationship,

and she sort of answered, saying she wasn't really sure.

She was you know, part friend, part fixer.

She was the one who-- who would...

satisfy his every whim.

The only boyfriend I've ever heard about was Jeffrey Epstein,

who doesn't strike me as a terribly good choice.

Today, we announce the unsealing

of sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein.

A wealthy money manager whose friends

have included presidents and a prince

is behind bars in Manhattan tonight.

Arrested Saturday night when his private plane

arrived back here in the U.S. from Paris.

He's alleged to have abused dozens of girls,

some as young as 14.

We know that he was flying around globally

and that this was an international

sex-trafficking scheme that he had developed

in countries and cities around the globe.

Ghislaine Maxwell was out in the open

once Jeffrey Epstein was arrested,

and she felt secure enough to travel the world,

and she felt, I think, that her "Teflon Don,"

essentially, would get away

and he would somehow cut a deal and not have any concerns.

Breaking news out of New York.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead.

The 66-year-old was discovered in his jail cell

early this morning.

Jeffery Epstein went to his grave

taking many secrets with him.

You have to believe people felt a relief

that Jeffery Epstein was dead.

If the public knew the secrets that he knew,

it would be shocking.

The people who are most devastated by this

are the victims because they're not going to be able

to see justice in the way they wanted.

Do I feel his death was an appropriate punishment?

Absolutely not. It gives nobody justice.

Their hope now would be if one of his co-conspirators

was charged with crimes.

He didn't do this alone.

He had people working for him, people working with him,

and he had people that enabled his entire operation.

And number one on that list is Ghislaine Maxwell,

who's accused of finding teenage girls

for Epstein and his friends.

Without Ghislaine, I don't think any of us

would have been there-- or very few of us--

because there was always a woman that made it so we could trust.

I was initially introduced to Ghislaine,

um, and she's who introduced me to Jeffrey Epstein.

Jeffrey had this sickness.

They worked together as a unit.

I was brought in by Ghislaine,

and at that time, she was the main procurer for Jeffrey.

You know, when Jeffrey wanted me,

Ghislaine would call me to his bedroom.

Ghislaine was always on the phone organizing things.

Ghislaine knew every time she called me

I was going to be raped-- every time.

It was a pyramid scheme of sexual abuse

with Jeffrey Epstein at the top.

Ghislaine is accused of hovering outside school gates

grooming these girls, offering them shopping trips,

girly things, presenting herself as the ultimate

kind of mother, protector, and girlfriend.

That's what appalls me the most, actually.

I mean, that is duplicitous to the most horrific degree.

Ghislaine takes a victim

and converts the victim into a co-conspirator

so that they can then go and branch out and get more victims.

Basically creating an organization.

There were lieutenants,

there were schedulers, there were fixers.

The moment Jeffrey Epstein died

Ghislaine Maxwell disappeared.

She went underground.

Ultimately, Ghislaine Maxwell is likely scared

because she holds the same secrets

that Jeffrey Epstein does.

She also knows where the bodies are buried.

I think the crimes she's accused of

are worse than Epstein's because you think, as a woman,

you absolutely betrayed your sex, your gender.

It's-- It's astonishing to me.

I always believe in the end that the truth will out

and that, uh, eventually,

the true story, such as it is, will be--

People will know more than-- than what they currently do.

It-- It'll take time. It'll take time. That's all.

The woman sitting in a New York prison cell

bears absolutely no resemblance

to this very confident, monied, social girl that I knew.

I mean, you sort of think...

how on Earth could you have got to this place?

Robert Maxwell was, quite frankly, a terrifying father.

And all the children would have learned early

that you had to please Daddy

and, no matter what cost, he had to be placated,

he had to be pleased.

So I think to understand Ghislaine Maxwell

you have to start with the father, Robert Maxwell.

Two years ago, the name Maxwell was, like,

"power", "money", everything.

What do you feel right now when you're carrying this name?

I don't know. You tell me what you think.

I'm proud of it.

You don't-- You didn't even think for one second

to change it to something?

No, I love my name.

I was born with it, and I'm proud of it,

and I shall remain proud of it forever.

Once upon a Christmastime in a big house on a hill,

there lived a man, his wife, and their eight children.

And everybody looked up at the hill and said,

"What a super Christmas I'd have

if my father were a millionaire,"

which Robert Maxwell is.

Decorations...

The root of where Ghislaine has ended up today

is all to do with her relationship with her father.

The family filled the house with their excitement,

particularly Ghislaine,

who's 5 and, like the baby of any family,

has Daddy very much under control.

- I'm getting down... - All right.

I think everything about her relationship

with her father led her into her relationship with Epstein

and, from what's alleged,

becoming the ultimate daddy's girl,

socialite, networker, who became the ultimate madame.

Did you get some of Daddy's presents?

Yes.

My sister remembers at a very young age

going to birthday parties at the Maxwell house,

and she remembers the sort of visceral fear

of the figure of Robert Maxwell in the background.

He genuinely was a very difficult,

unpleasant, and terrifying man.

Ghislaine was his youngest child,

and she was a daddy's girl,

but a daddy's girl with a difference

that daddy could turn.

And she learned to navigate a man with a terrible temper.

She learned early to read a powerful man's moods.

She had these strange traits of character

which we all know came from Robert Maxwell.

Insufferable.

Ruthless. Brazen.

Fiery. Humorless.

Impatient. Intolerant. Rude.

To how much of that do you plead guilty?

I plead guilty to all of it.

The beginning of understanding what kind of man he was

is to understand his childhood.

Robert Maxwell's original name was Jan Ludwig Hoch.

He was born in one of the most impoverished

Orthodox Jewish shtetls in one of the most poorest,

impoverished parts of Eastern Europe.

He didn't have shoes of his own.

He shared a pair with one of his sisters.

We lived in one room. It would be about seven children.

We had no fire. We just had nothing.

He had a traumatic beginning to his life as a child.

Most of his family, uh, were wiped out in the Holocaust.

I think the experience of extreme poverty

and great hardship scarred him for life.

Not being poor became an absolute imperative.

He had to have money.

Which meant having to do

all sorts of tricks and crooked business.

Anything to prosper, to profit, to survive.

Robert Maxwell was a huge survivor,

whether from the ghetto in Eastern Europe

or during the Second world war.

He was absolutely determined to come to Britain

to fight the Nazis.

And he was a very brave soldier.

But then, in post-war Berlin,

he was working for British intelligence

and also made links on the other side

of the divided city of Berlin

with the Russian intelligence service, the KGB,

and became a Russian spy, too.

So he always saw the profit of playing every side

because in the end there's only one side-- that was himself.

Here was a man who'd had to invent himself,

who believed that having done it once,

he could do it many times over.

The masquerade had worked.

And so he embraced that

for the rest of his life in the business sphere.

Maxwell, when he came back to England,

renamed himself Robert Maxwell

after the Maxwell coffee brand

and then set about to build up his, uh, crooked business.

Maxwell used links with British intelligence

to profit from a German scientific publishing company

where scientists eager to publish their findings

gave him their work for next to nothing,

and he resold it to the libraries across the world

at a huge profit and kept the money for himself.

That became a scientific publishing company

called Pergamon Press,

which was the foundation of his wealth.

But in 1969, it was discovered

the company was riddled with fraud.

The Department of Trade Inquiry

criticized his accounting methods and his honesty

and branded him unfit to exercise proper stewardship

of a public company.

It was a huge embarrassment.

He faced down investigations and all sorts of prosecutions.

But he was able to get away with it and build up his wealth.

Mr. Maxwell, what's your reaction to the allegations?

I deny them utterly.

The point about a conman is never to admit wrong.

The moment you admit that you've done wrong, you're finished.

The only thing you can do and you must do

if you're a conman and criminal

is always insist on your innocence.

I think that's exactly what Ghislaine is going to do.

She will lie and hope to get away with it.

Anyone's parents have an influential position

on their personality and on their behavior,

but with someone who is as dominant

and as difficult as Robert Maxwell was,

there's no way that he hasn't shaped who she is now.

And, undoubtedly, she was hugely influenced by her father

and learned to survive and tolerate

a domineering ogre and tyrant...

...of clearly dishonest motives and way of life.

You are a billionaire who's got where you are

on the backs of working people.

You got nothing in common with the working class.

You are a fascist. - That's it. Attack...

He was such a bully,

and I saw him berate people over a very small matter...

...dismiss people over a very small matter.

Just give him the message him, please,

and stop giving us a hard time.

He used to slam his hand down on this glass desk

like you thought it was gonna break

and really stare at you, hover in your face,

and you kept thinking, "He is going to hit me now."

It certainly sounds like Ghislaine has a temper, as well,

which I recognize from her father.

The pounding fists on the table is behavior

that's definitely Maxwell territory.

I have a natural instinct for war.

And you better have good lawyers and large resources

and be on your guard.

I think if you're that close to somebody

who was clearly so devious and corrupt,

and you saw what was going on,

that behavior becomes normalized.

In her world, powerful men doing despicable things--

you are able to sort of see it

and equally remove yourself from it.

And after a while, when you grow up with that, it becomes normal.

You lose your moral compass.

I grew up in Oxford,

and everyone in Oxford knew who the Maxwells were,

but they weren't the Oxford intellectuals.

They were a rather more exotic family

because of Robert's wealth.

The house on the hill is an open house,

and the children take their places beside their parents

to greet their 200 guests and to enjoy themselves,

even Ghislaine.

Ghislaine grew up in a very, very wealthy,

comfortable existence.

There was plenty of cash,

and anything that they wanted they could have.

The family lived at this grand country estate.

They had private jets. They had huge parties.

It was the high life.

They epitomized the high life.

But this girl grew up with an abusive father.

Ghislaine's brothers Ian and Kevin told me

that their father was hooked on discipline and on duty.

They were the most important things to him.

And he ran the household almost like you would run a company.

I mean, there were nine children,

and he would almost put them on trial.

He would fire questions at them,

and if they failed to answer them correctly,

he would make them assess

why they had failed to answer them correctly.

And it was-- it was humiliation.

It was like a public dressing-down.

He used to subject them to these grillings

in front of other people at Sunday lunches.

One child would be told to perform, as it were,

and he would tell them, "Speak clearly and concisely!"

And that would only put them under even more pressure.

Chastising them...

and was not above using corporal punishment.

And his wife did not step in to intervene.

She was enthralled to him, as well.

I think it's fascinating that we all know

so little about Betty Maxwell,

and she was very much seen as the mother in the background.

Robert Maxwell had been very close to his mother,

whom he lost in the Holocaust.

And, clearly, he was looking for someone

who would give him comfort and security, which Betty did.

Not only produced an enormous number of children,

but organized the home and put up with his appalling behavior.

When Robert Maxwell was shouting at all of the children

and making them feel awful around the dinner table,

their mother was allowing it to happen.

She was being the good wife. She was playing the role--

She was the enabler, you know? She enabled him.

It's very easy to imagine that this experience

could influence Ghislaine

that this is what the perfect relationship

or the comfortable dynamic is--

that there's a powerful, demanding person

and a woman who helps them.

The kids were a unit.

Ian and Kevin, when I spoke to them,

talked about forming a defensive chest position,

that that's how they survived their father.

It was like a defensive stance that they took.

They interlocked, and that allowed them

to withstand Robert's rages.

Two days after Ghislaine was born,

her eldest brother, Michael,

was involved in a very serious car crash

and he was in a coma for the next seven years.

So the time when she would have been showered

with parental affection,

the family were, in fact, in the middle of an--

of dealing with an enormous crisis.

It meant that the early years of Ghislaine's life

would have been very much eclipsed by this tragedy.

There's a story in her mother, Betty Maxwell's, book,

where Ghislaine sat on her lap and said, "Mummy, I exist."

And she also said that she thinks

that that's the beginning of Ghislaine's eating disorder.

Her mother was convinced that, even as a toddler,

she was already showing signs of anorexia,

and they thought that it was to do with attention,

it was a way of trying to get attention from her parents.

And at that point, Robert and Betty realized

that they had been neglecting their daughter completely

and tried to make up for this terrible beginning to her life

and showered her with love and affection.

And of all the Maxwell children,

Ghislaine is the only one who was spoiled.

They spoiled her as a result of it.

So she had everything she wanted in material terms.

Ghislaine would definitely have realized

at a very early age that money was important to her.

Robert Maxwell was more generous and accommodating

towards her than the older children.

And Ghislaine would definitely

have aligned herself more with her father

because she has definitely seen wealth as protection,

and we saw that very much later on with Epstein.

Ghislaine's story is essentially the story of,

you know, daddy's little girl,

and it all went horribly wrong

when daddy turned out to be a crook.

I was at Oxford with Ghislaine.

It was mid-'80s, so it was the height of Princess Diana.

Thatcher was in power.

It was Gordon Gekko.

Greed is good.

It was the '80s.

Even the clothes were flamboyant.

We all wore massive shoulder pads and puffs of taffeta.

It was a very extravagant era.

We were there with Boris Johnson, David Cameron.

And you were kind of accepted in that social set

if you were from an aristocratic family.

Ghislaine wasn't from that background,

but she would've been accepted in that social circle

because of her father's notoriety,

and wealth and power spoke volumes in the mid-'80s.

Have you got drinks?

She really enjoyed being social and having dinner parties.

She was very much into the whole social scene.

As soon as I met her,

what really was striking about her was

she was somebody who would kiss you hello

and then look over your shoulder

to see if there was someone more interesting,

more useful, more powerful, more famous to talk to.

There's a feeling always of stepping up a league,

going to the next influential person,

going to the next head of state, the party, the boat, whatever.

You absolutely had the sense

that she wasn't really present to you

and she wasn't really going to connect with you.

It was a sense of scanning always

to see who could be more influential or useful to her.

Ghislaine Maxwell was very happy to be photographed

and sometimes would ask me to take pictures of her

with someone,

in particular if there was a famous person she was with.

I lived in Oxford, and I'd started photographing

some of the exclusive student parties

for a few years in the early '80s.

It was high society.

Ghislaine Maxwell would tend to be at nightclub openings

and charity events that you paid to buy a ticket,

but she was moving gradually more into a higher society role.

I think she seemed very animated.

She seemed to be enjoying herself every time I saw her.

She seemed to have a very nice life.

Probably some people disapproved of her.

Her father already had a bad reputation.

I first met Ghislaine

shortly after I'd returned to do my master's degree,

and I remember being at some sort of a party.

I think it was probably a drinks party.

As soon as I'm introduced, I'd barely spoken to her,

and she said, "Will you take me out to dinner?"

And I found that quite surprising.

Ghislaine certainly wasn't my type,

and I wouldn't have asked her on a date myself,

but she was interesting.

The way she asked me to take her out

was unexpected and different.

And I thought, "What have I got to lose?"

Oxford was a very small town,

and I didn't particularly want people to know

who I was going out to dinner with,

so I picked a restaurant seven miles outside Oxford.

If I was there for one reason,

it probably was to get to know her a bit,

and one would have hoped vice versa,

but the only subject she really had to talk about

was her father,

how proud she was being her father's daughter,

how she could pick up any national newspaper on any day

and find at least one story about him in it.

The impression I got from Ghislaine at that dinner

was someone who's actually rather insecure.

I felt there was a veneer of confidence and maturity

but that a great deal of her persona

was wrapped up in being Robert Maxwell's daughter.

Robert Maxwell wanted wealth,

but he also wanted power and influence,

and owning newspapers was a way of wielding power.

So he bought Mirror Group.

And that included Britain's most popular newspaper

at that time, the "Daily Mirror."

The "Mirror" newspapers are at a disadvantage at present,

owing to the lack of the dynamic leadership

of the kind that I believe that I could provide.

Maxwell was an extraordinarily difficult person to work for.

I didn't sleep much during the year I worked for him.

He liked to interfere. - Good job.

He tried to have his name as often in the paper as possible.

It was also he could use the newspaper for blackmail.

I mean, very often, he would threaten people,

that if they didn't do what he wanted,

he would then publish an exposé in his newspaper.

That was a favorite tactic of his.

When I worked at the "Daily Mirror,"

we had a strange man who was the in-house detective...

...and he admitted to me

that many of the phones were bugged,

including the editor's phone.

Ghislaine saw that if you kept the patriarchy happy,

you were protected, and she was reared to please Daddy.

Ghislaine wasn't a businesswoman,

but Ghislaine's job was to represent Robert Maxwell

when he was in different parts of the globe.

I don't know what she would've said her job was.

The other children actually had jobs within the empire,

like, proper jobs, especially Ian and Kevin,

whereas she seems to have occupied

this strange social/business role

that's quite hard to define even for her father.

He bought her a football club, for crying out loud.

I think, because he lived in Oxford,

Maxwell thought, "Oh, well, I'll buy Oxford Football Club,"

because it was for sale.

And then he put Ghislaine in charge of the football club.

I don't imagine for a moment she was interested in football.

I take the job of director very seriously.

I don't think I would have accepted the job

if it was just a matter of being a figurehead.

The football league's first elected lady director

is still, in fact, a student.

She's at Balliol College in Oxford

studying French and history.

With her father having taken control of the matter,

her place on the Oxford board was confirmed

at the recent annual meeting.

Her photograph will fill the space on the boardroom wall

before the start of the new season.

It's Ghislaine's particular responsibility

to generate further interest in the club among young supporters,

and any suggestion that her appointment is a gimmick

doesn't carry much favor.

I really do hope to contribute something positive

to the club,

both in terms of improving the social events, maybe,

between the players and the supporters

and in helping in whatever small way that I can

in bringing a more sort of family atmosphere to the club.

That's fantastic!

I think there was a sense of impunity

among certain members of the family,

definitely Robert Maxwell himself.

And it's there, evident, too, in Ghislaine--

that sense that,

"Rules are for other people.

We do what we want to do,

and let the devil take the hindmost."

And it's quite easy to see why Ghislaine,

who had this father fixation, who was a daddy's girl,

would then move on to this other,

equally satanic father figure

and do his bidding at whatever the cost.

There's a similarity between Ghislaine's affection,

love for her father, and Jeffrey Epstein.

They have a lot in common.

Both of them show strains of character

in which there is very little empathy and very little warmth,

and there is an absolute survival instinct.

They were both men who were manipulators

and who were out to get what they needed

and what they wanted at any cost.

Like Robert Maxwell, Jeffrey dreamed of riches

from the little two-bedroom apartment

he grew up in, in Coney Island.

Jeffrey Epstein came from a family

that was working-class.

They didn't really have much money.

He had to hustle his way in

to the life that he ended up having.

Jeffrey was a nerdy kid

who told classmates back at Lafayette High School,

"I'm going to be rich when I grow up."

And, you know, they all kind of laughed at him.

But Jeffrey had a mind

that kind of worked like a computer.

You know, he was determined to make money,

and he was going to accomplish that on Wall Street.

It was a time when Wall Street was huge.

And Jeffrey was seemingly on the fringes of it,

but there was no computer on his desk.

There was no back room where people traded.

It wasn't clear what the source of the money was.

The big question is, where did Jeffery's money come from?

I think you have to go back to Bear Stearns,

which is really where he received

his first taste of money.

Bear Stearns saw this potential

in a guy who didn't know a stock from a bond

but thought he was a brilliant mathematician

and would do extremely well.

But he was thrown out at Bear Stearns

based on his violations of the rules for misconduct,

and he was kind of blackballed in the United States.

But it actually turned out to be a windfall for Jeffery

to leave there because, you know,

the riches that awaited him exceeded well beyond anything

that he could have gained on Wall Street.

Jeffery then dashed over to London,

where he met Douglas Leese.

Douglas Leese was an international arms merchant,

and he was able to mold Jeffery into this world of arms dealing.

This was an area of the financial world

that was very shady.

And the money, at this point, was pouring in.

I met Jeffrey Epstein.

He was a young, rather good-looking Jewish boy

from New York

that somehow appeared in Robert Maxwell's office.

And I used to see him quite often in the office.

Jeffrey Epstein presented himself to Robert Maxwell

as a financial expert.

Jeffrey Epstein was charming.

He was charismatic

and could read the person he's dealing with

and understand what that person wants to hear.

He was a mastermind

of how to manipulate and seduce people.

So Robert Maxwell

entered into a deep relationship in business

with Jeffrey Epstein.

At that particular time,

Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein

met in London

at the introduction by Robert Maxwell.

I mean, no one knew who he was at the time,

but in England, they knew who she was.

Epstein appreciated that she gave him

a veneer of respectability and introduced him

to the upper echelons of English society.

I think she chose someone very like her father,

but then, equally, it makes you wonder

how much, their conversations in the early days,

he might've been figuring out how her father operated

and doing many of the same tricks back.

It looked like they were a couple.

At least, she thought they were a couple.

But Jeffrey Epstein was a multiple philanderer.

I saw him in London with other women, as well.

And Jeffrey Epstein used Ghislaine Maxwell

to get further into Robert Maxwell's empire.

And Robert was busy trying to build up his empire.

He wanted everything.

He wanted to be the biggest, the best. It was unstoppable.

He always looked for ways in which

assets would help him build up not only his fortune,

but also his profile and personality.

And once Rupert Murdoch had the "New York Post,"

he became quite famous in America,

and Maxwell wanted to do the same.

He wanted to rival Murdoch

in the most important city in the world, New York,

and buying the "New York Daily News"

gave him that chance.

Mr. Maxwell comes to town.

Maxwell is Robert Maxwell, a flamboyant British press lord,

and the reason he's come is to take over the "Daily News."

He said he bought it for the challenge

of turning a loser into a winner.

In the context of the "New York Daily News" takeover,

the advanced guard, as it were,

was for Robert Maxwell to send Ghislaine.

He uses her, sends her out first to charm people.

And she railed against that.

"Well, you know, Kevin's got a proper job.

Ian's got a proper job. Why can't I have a proper job?"

I ran into her at a party, and she told me

that she was working for her father,

and it seemed like she was a kind of connecter

for her father

of people with power and influence in the city

who it would be useful for him to know.

She would be somebody who could be used in social terms.

It's like using the woman that's closest to you

for your own ends.

And he preferred to have her on his arm than he did Betty.

He pulls away from Betty,

and now Ghislaine is his right-hand person

and is a very good companion.

She fits that role very well for him.

You get the sense that, in psychological terms,

that she was the Oedipal winner.

She was the most important figure in his life.

I think it's really telling that he named his boat after her.

From Ghislaine's point of view, buying the "Daily News"

was infinitely more important than for Robert Maxwell.

He already had access to the White House.

He already had access to all sorts of--

all the bankers and the rest.

But Ghislaine was able to use that advantage

to her own success.

She could then use that newspaper to promote herself

in the city and meet everybody.

She was the tycoon's daughter.

That's when her world fell apart.

That's when everything she thought she could rely on--

her structure, her security, her protection--

absolutely fell apart.

You know, the bottom fell out of her world.

The Board of Mirror Group Newspapers

announces with deep regret

that Robert Maxwell is missing at sea,

feared lost overboard

from his motor yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.

The gathering of Robert Maxwell's family

was completed with the arrival

of the daughter after whom he had named his fateful yacht.

For Ghislaine, that was the most seismic event of her life.

His body was found floating in the water.

There were three postmortems,

and no one could agree on what the cause of death was,

so there's a lot of conspiracy

about the circumstances of his death.

He committed suicide...

he was rubbed out by assassins from a two-man submarine...

poisoning, strangling, even overwork.

Suddenly, Ghislaine is dealing with the media.

I mean, again, that shows Ghislaine's status

in the family pecking order,

that she was very much like

the sort of wife and heir apparent.

She is like the bereaved widow going to see what had happened.

There were reports that she arrived on the boat

and had personal documents

and important documents shredded.

...thankful to many...

A very reliable "Daily Mirror" reporter

said that he saw Ghislaine shredding documents.

That shows that she would've had quite an involvement

with the business, to have known what documents to shred.

I want also to thank the press...

So, you have the public face,

in which she's handling the press and inquiries very well,

and then you have the private shredding of documents.

This was a loyal daughter

ensuring that whatever fate her father had befallen,

she wasn't willing to let light in on the darkness.

Undoubtedly, they didn't want other people to know

what the papers revealed about Maxwell's business.

Miss Maxwell, may we ask you something?

On behalf of the family, about what conclusions

the family feel about what's happened on this boat?

Well, all-- all these things will be revealed, so just--

That was the statement. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

There was suspicion and rumors

around Robert Maxwell's business dealings.

A lot of people hated him.

He would have picked up a lot of enemies along the way.

You know, in an interview Ghislaine gave

about seven years after his death,

she said she thought it was murder.

But there's never been any evidence to back that up.

What do you feel? What happened to him?

You'll never know, so...

You'll never be 100% sure of exactly what took place.

The only thing I'm sure of is that he did not commit suicide.

Would you agree with somebody that he might commit suicide?

Because most of the people say he would.

Never. Never.

It's never entered my mind.

He wasn't suicidal at all?

No. It is not possible.

He would never have done that. - Mm-hmm.

He's a fighter. He's a totally born fighter.

No way.

Robert Maxwell, who paid little attention

to his Jewish origins until near the end of his life,

asked to be buried in Jerusalem,

and the entire Israeli establishment

came to pay tribute.

Prime Minister Shamir, Defense Minister Arens,

Housing Minister Sharon.

By 1991, Robert Maxwell was a major personality in Israel.

He was very close to the Israeli government.

He rediscovered his Jewish roots,

and he felt very at home there.

So it was natural for them to want to bury him

in the most sacred place in Jerusalem.

After his death, the pilot of the personal jet told me

that on the way back as they left Jerusalem

and flew back to England,

some of them were unbelievably relieved and happy.

Was a brief moment of freedom for them.

They thought, "Finally we've got control of our own lives."

Of course they were mistaken.

The mystery of Robert Maxwell multiplied today

with the collapse of his publishing empire.

His crumbling empire is missing $1.2 billion.

That's billion.

Employees of the "Mirror" newspapers learned

that more than a billion dollars

had been siphoned off from their pension fund.

When Robert Maxwell died

and the financial mismanagement of Mirror Group

became apparent, it became one of the biggest stories

in British modern history.

British newspapers are now having a field day

reporting the scandal.

In the lead, Maxwell's own "Daily Mirror"

desperately trying to solve the mystery

of what its publisher did with the money.

He had taken 400 million pounds

from the pensioners at the Mirror Group.

Maxwell stole not just the pension fund,

but he stole lots of other companies'.

His total takings were at least 2 billion pounds in 1991,

so, in current terms, they talk of a fraud

of at least 5 to 10 billion pound sterling.

And the Maxwell name was dirt and synonymous with fraud.

For Ivy Needham, this is one memory

she would rather not have--

her former boss, Robert Maxwell, and family.

Robert Maxwell robbed us.

He took our bank books, took the money out,

and that was it.

At the time, there were accusations

that Ghislaine's brothers were somehow involved

with the financial malfeasance because they were

Robert Maxwell's lieutenants in the business,

and it was unclear at that point whether Ghislaine knew of it

or had been involved in any way.

But it was a highly stressful situation

for Ghislaine.

Kevin and Ian Maxwell were targeted by the police.

- I am about to call the police. - We are the police.

Will you open the door, please? Thank you.

Within minutes, more police arrived,

and then Kevin Maxwell appeared,

flanked by officers from the City of London police.

- Morning, Kevin. - Morning.

The Maxwell family became completely

ostracized and vilified,

totally persona non grata.

Maxwell's sons handed over their bankrupt inheritance today

to administrators who will sell off the empire.

Clearly we didn't know everything,

and clearly he had a, uh...

style of business

where probably he ran on need-to-know

as opposed to sharing information all the time.

A large part of the scandal is what the press has made of it.

So stupid. It has nothing to do with the man.

The man was a totally exceptional man.

Most people who say the most appalling things about him

have never met him in their life.

They don't know who they're talking about.

It was bizarre to hear her talking about her late husband.

She said, "He was such a wonderful husband,

such a wonderful father," which seemed very different

from all the reports we'd been reading in the papers.

It must have been a devastating shock to Ghislaine.

One moment, she's at the very top of the society,

and the next moment, the Maxwell name is mud.

You don't feel that she retreated

to the bosom of her family, to her siblings, to her mother,

who was still alive, to support her.

It's like almost she was orphaned from that moment,

because she didn't have

the all-powerful daddy watching her back.

The rug was pulled from underneath her,

and she's wondering, "How am I going to stand up?

How am I going to get through life?"

Survival means many different things to different people.

Survival in my case means getting up in the morning

and figuring out a new life.

Life is sad.

It's always very sad when you lose a parent,

but you have to go on.

Where better to go than a place

where you're not really suffering from your name

in the same way that a Maxwell would suffer back in Britain?

And so she invents Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite,

and heads off to New York.

She had this tremendous survival instinct,

which clearly kicked in, and she went to New York,

where she set her sights on finding a daddy replacement.

And that is a crucial moment in why we then see her

get involved to the degree that she did with Epstein.

I think we'd all have to conclude

that, sadly, she sold her soul to the devil.

Don't you feel insecure, scared for the future?

No, I'm lucky. I get to start again.

I'm extremely sad that my father is no longer here

and for all the difficult times

for everybody that's been involved,

but I don't feel in any way

smaller or lesser than what I was before.

I'm me.