Ghislaine 'Splainin'

"Well, I mean, I'm talking about the — the — I had had, there was a. . . . —Ghislaine Maxwell

Did you happen to bother reading the transcript of Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview? It’s tough sledding at times — both Ms. Maxwell and Deputy AG Todd Blanche tend to speak in choppy, incomplete sentences (as does, you might have noticed, President Trump) — but altogether the confab reveals that just about everything you think you know about the scandal might not be so, and her story is full of shocking surprises, assuming you can believe her.

For instance, Ms. Maxwell had exactly one night of actual sex with Jeffrey Epstein back in the 1990s, a few months after they met, and that was it. He had problems with straight-up sex, she says. At first, he claimed to have a heart condition. She says he had erectile difficulty “. . . which meant that he didn't have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse,” she added. (We never learn what that condition was, exactly.) Anyway, she never had sex with him again.

Huh. . .? There goes one pillar of the public perception of the scandal: that Ghislaine Maxwell was a sort of nymphomaniac consort of Mr. Epstein, while supposedly acting as chief procurer of his masseuse “victims” and that the whole decades-long saga was a cavalcade of threesomes and orgies. She even claims at one point of being “a prude.”

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So, what was her role in JE’s complicated life? Basically, a property manager, she says. You know, all those houses and compounds: the mansion on East 71^st Street, the Palm Beach place, the ranch in New Mexico, Little St. James Island, a flat in Paris. It was a lot to manage. She had to hire architects, construction crews, interior decorators, servants. There were horses to care for at the ranch. It was a lot. She didn’t even have a key to JE’s New York City townhouse and was there only twice, she told Mr. Blanche.

During that time, JE had other girlfriends while in the early 2000s, Ms. Maxwell hooked up with the billionaire founder of Gateway Computers, Ted Waitt. He bought a big boat for them to start-up an oceanic research venture. The relationship foundered when, she says, a sketchy lawyer named Scott Rothstein, working for a crooked Florida law firm that was under a RICO investigation at the time, attempted to extract $10-million from Waitt to keep Ms. Maxwell’s name out of lawsuits brought by women claiming to be “victims” of Epstein’s massage shenanigans. Ms. Maxwell claims that Epstein’s masseuses, underage or otherwise, were recruited by the original masseuses, not by her (Ms. Maxwell).

Ms. Maxwell was out of Epstein’s life after 2009, when he got out of jail on state of Florida charges of soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution. This was preceded by a sketchy federal case brought in the Southern District of Florida that ended with a peculiar non-prosecution agreement — when US Attorney Alexander Acosta was told to lay off on account of Epstein being an “intel asset.” Ms. Maxwell states in the new deposition that JE was not associated with any intel agency, claiming it would have been in his nature to brag about it. It would help if FBI chief Kash Patel or CIA head John Ratcliffe could clarify that. They would surely know, one way or the other.

Of course, the heart of all the salacious chatter about Epstein is the claim that he worked for Israel’s Mossad intel agency, and that many eminent global persons were recorded having sex with underage masseuses in order to blackmail them (and, supposedly, allow nefarious hidden parties to control world political affairs.)

Ms. Maxwell maintains that this is not so. She says there were no hidden cameras in bedrooms or elsewhere in the many Epstein properties or airplanes, and that she would know because she hired the electricians who installed everything else in them. There were only the usual security cameras on front entrances and gates. . . except for the Palm Beach house where local police installed a camera in JE’s office to catch a thief who was stealing cash stashed there. (Turned out to be JE’s butler, who was fired.)

Another thread at the center of the Epstein rumor mill is the notorious Epstein client list — supposedly of notables alleged to have cavorted with Epstein’s masseuses. Ms. Maxwell claims there was no such list, that a fake list was concocted by attorney Brad Edwards who represented women claiming to be Epstein “victims” in the lawsuit connected with the $10-million Ted Waitt blackmail caper. The list was composed from notes supposedly made off a computer by that same Epstein butler, one Alfredo Rodriguez. When interviewed in 2007, Rodriguez failed to produce the so-called “black book.” In 2009, he offered to sell it to attorney Brad Edwards (representing various “victims”) for $50,000. In 2010, Rodriguez was convicted of obstruction of justice and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He died in 2015.

A lot of monkey business in all this, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps the most astounding point is Ms. Maxwell’s assertion that no government attorney (or any other official, including from the FBI) ever interviewed her, or even called her on the telephone, during all the years of legal wrangling that went on. Say, what. . . ? How could that possibly be? Well, apparently it is so.

One has to wonder exactly how the case against Ghislaine Maxwell for “trafficking” girls back in the 1990s was finally brought in the notoriously corrupt Southern District of New York (federal court) on December 29, 2021. The lead prosecutor was Maurene Comey, daughter of you-know-who. Anything janky in this prosecution? You have seen enough jankiness in the New York courts, federal, state, and local, the past several years to destroy your confidence that they are in any way on-the-level. Just sayin’. . . .

You are correct to observe that this hairball is a very complex, sometimes mystifying skein of stories, episodes, rumors, and, certainly, motives. The big takeaway, of course, is Ms. Maxwell’s repeated statements that Donald Trump was not involved in any salacious activity around Jeffrey Epstein, his properties, his airplanes, or anywhere else. . . and that he “acted like a gentleman” at all times. She even states that she “admires” the president for winning back the White House. Ghislaine Maxwell is rumored to be seeking a pardon from the president. We’ll have to stand by on that. But you also might consider the possibility that, as Mr. Trump has said, in this whole fantastic alleged scandal there is a whole lot less there there than many of us have been led to believe. Except that GM does not believe that JE took his own life. Neither does Mr. Trump. I guess we’ll have to stand by on that, too. In the meantime, read the goshdarn thing yourself. It’s riveting.