She gave nothing away (US Attorney's office)
Always young, always blonde. In this story the girls are a selected type, not human beings. They had loose lives that rattled like spare change. Easily discarded, easily lost. Most of these girls had nothing at all, and even that would be taken from them.
They’ll be sitting outside the school gates, or in the resort where they are doing holiday work, or on a bench at a summer camp. Head down in a book. They want to be singers, or anything to get away from home.
The approach is made by a couple, or by an older woman on her own. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: friendly, worldly, wealthy. Ghislaine is armoured with a classy accent, a Yorkshire terrier, and expensive clothes. She plunges into their lives. One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name. But forget that. Ghislaine wants to play the giggly older sister; pal and confidante.
The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.
Ghislaine Maxwell was from a different universe. The question of her trial was whether she, like the girls, is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein too. Ghislaine, daughter of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and variously described as Epstein’s girlfriend, madam, employee, best friend, pimp, and general, was arrested in 2020. She was accused by the US government of gathering up Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Anne over a decade, like a beachcomber, and delivering them to Epstein.
For four weeks, the trial in lower Manhattan has been watched with awe. Outside the courthouse stand placards and protestors and paranoiacs. Three overflow rooms inside contain the world’s press, concerned private citizens, and podcasters. They are drawn there for irresistibly tabloid reasons: the downfall of rich people in heavenly places who did evil things.
Epstein and Maxwell were high society floaters, who bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams, fishing for famous friends. (Taki says she was “not a bad girl” — I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it.) By the time Epstein earned his first conviction for sex crimes in 2008, the couple had collected an entire Met Gala of chintzy brilliancies: actors, publishers, royals, writers, scientists, academics, and politicians. That constellation has blinded many to the couple’s more gothic collection of broken young women. Why care about them, when they are landmines lying in wait for Prince Andrew, Ariana Huffington, Geordie Greig, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton?
These embarrassing links, the dozens of embarrassing photos that accompanied them, and the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his death, transformed Epstein. In the world’s imagination he was no longer a rich bullshit artist and an abuser. He became a popular demon, a supervillain, a Halloween costume. Writers polished their 24 Carat allusions: Epstein was Machiavelli, he was Mephistopheles. He was the ultraviolet scan that illuminated a rotten system of perversion and power. Maxwell’s trial was widely considered to be the last chance at justice for many of the women who claim to have been abused by Epstein.
But Epstein is dead. This was Ghislaine’s trial, and throughout she has been circumspect, almost dignified, and given nothing away. Videos outside the courthouse showed her old and arthritic and beaten down. She does not look like she will ever adjust to thinking of herself as a dangerous criminal. She appeared tired of being herself. Sooner or later, compassion was bound to be felt for the accused. It’s only natural. Old university acquaintances suggested they felt pity for her. Others wondered what went wrong, without ever probing the circumstances of Maxwell’s alleged crimes. Friends anonymously briefed glossy magazines, and said they could never imagine her scoring trailer trash by skulking around outside public schools. It just wasn’t her style, darling. None of them ever took the stand to defend her though. That just wasn’t their style.
These disposable, costless emotions were a perfect echo of the defence put up by Maxwell’s attorneys. They said she had become a bullseye for the limitless greed, pointless anger, and false memories of the accusers. Maxwell was the real victim here. This was whiplash; an acidic backwash from Epstein’s death that mistakenly threatened to dissolve their client, because he could never stand trial. Eternal archetypes were invoked. “Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple,” said one Maxwell lawyer, “women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men”.
The men were Epstein, and at a more distant remove, Robert Maxwell. To believe in the defence, you had to believe that Ghislaine had been without a sense of her own interest for decades. That she was helplessly shaped by these amoral patriarchs. Her father and Epstein were eerily similar, if not the same man. Both escaped obscurity and exchanged it for wealth. Both courted ‘brilliant scientific minds’ with praise and parties. Both were talented at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals they destroyed on their way up. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Hoffenberg might have been describing Maxwell.
How much of their behaviour was for show, and how much was real, and whether they knew the difference, was unclear. A bewildering aura of fantasy surrounds them. They had a curious shared interest in the Marquis de Sade, and they inhabited airlessly Sadean worlds of selfishness, injustice, and misery. In de Sade’s pages nobody ever changes. His characters are glazed and flat; moral development is an impossibility. As one of the libertine monks in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) — a novel Epstein displayed in his home and proudly showed off to a journalist — rhetorically asks: “Can we become anything other than we are?”
Maxwell and Epstein answered that question with an emphatic no. They would forever be outsiders who shredded convention, determined to consume whatever and whoever they found once on the inside. Each was regarded with a mixture of dread, sarcasm, and awe. Their most credulous, generous supporters came from the top. Epstein, as Maxwell did the British establishment of his time, regarded them with contempt. He once told his brother that if the public knew how corrupt his Wall Street friends were, there would be a revolution.
Above all these men lied, unstoppably and uncontrollably. They lied to business associates, mistresses, journalists, judges, creditors, and lawyers. They lied about money to make more money. Their skill was faking and lying uncommonly well enough to create new, unstable realities. Their lies became eight-storey yachts and the largest townhouse in Manhattan. Every new acquisition was honeycombed with surveillance equipment; recording devices and teeny tiny cameras. This is usually considered further evidence of these men’s perfidy. Blackmail gatherers, Epstein and Maxwell, working on another sick angle, preparing a new front in their war on everyone they ever met. But they were not spying on their guests.
The evidence that Epstein blackmailed his friends is thin, and has fallen apart before. Maxwell used his devices to track a secretary who didn’t love him around London, as she slept with one of his underlings. They surveilled their environments because all their lies made their environments, and themselves, insecure. Each was one or two discoveries away from the collapse of their entire world. The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail. It was a form of consolation. It proved that for all their lies, they were still real. One of Epstein’s homes was lined with framed glass eyeballs made for injured English soldiers from a deadlier century. The display was a warning to his guests, and a reminder to himself: watch your every move.
Are we supposed to paint Ghislaine Maxwell on this bleak canvas as the feckless girl next door? A crass ingénue, an Eve who didn’t know any better? It is closer to the truth to say that both men needed her as much as she needed them.
Maxwell family legend has it that Ghislaine was anorexic as a very young child. She was probably abused by her father, as he was by his, when she was an adolescent, with riding crops and shoe horns. But by the time she arrived, fully formed and totally integrated, at Oxford during its woozy Brideshead revival years in the early Eighties, Ghislaine’s dramas of individuation were over.
She was ahead of the pack, imperious from the off. She spoke five languages and was the director of a football club. The beautiful “glamazon” rested a boot on Boris Johnson and parties with Gottfried von Bismarck. She was inadvertently to blame for the creation of George Monbiot. Her father kept one photo of his nine children on his desk — a portrait of Ghislaine. As his mania grew and his business empire fell apart in the later Eighties, she remained good, pure, true. His colleagues thought him “pre-moral”, disconcerting, disgusting, and frightening. And he was fond of saying “I have a beautiful daughter who is just like me.”
Ghislaine was already in New York when her father died in 1991. Supposedly adrift, grieving, and broke, the conventional narrative has Epstein performing a bat-like swoop and winging Ghislaine off into his cave. “He saved her,” one Maxwell friend told Vanity Fair, “Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that, and never will.” In this telling Ghislaine is another picked-up, pitiable woman, ensnared by a master manipulator. Whatever crimes she involved herself in later could almost be excused. They were payments for a debt.
All you have to do to believe that is forget she was Robert Maxwell’s daughter. She had a glittering upbringing. She was skilled at getting what she wanted, at reeling people in, at throwing parties. Epstein was cash rich but class poor. Described in these early years so often as a “schlub”, he needed a charismatic partner to launch his conquest of Manhattan’s charity auction set. Otherwise he was just another nerdy dogsbody who helped plutocrats avoid paying tax. Every bank in the city had a thousand of those.
Ghislaine helped propel his somersault into the ranks of the super wealthy. He valued her as his equal: “Ghislaine is the best at what I need,” he said in 2002. “Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently… She’ll come to a meeting, and not only will she be able to translate what the person’s saying… but she can also give me a sense of is the person telling the truth.” All she received in return were private jets, lavish estates, and vast sums of money.
This world melted away, like her father’s did. The trial came long after the deluge. It was mind-numbing. There were endless examinations of flight logs, property portfolios, and financial transactions. The accusers were tortured on the stand by Maxwell’s lawyers. To save their Eve, they had to destroy the credibility of four others. The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”
If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom. You had to look for it elsewhere. The dozen pictures of her and Epstein released during the trial are a good place to start. She has the same face in every photo. A greying man and his partner, affluent and easy, sitting in a grass field with a dog; as perfectly self-possessed and unreal as a couple in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.
This was the only reveal from the trial. There were no big prizes, no doomily grim revelations about paedophile rings operating at high altitude, among the jet set, that the placards outside the courthouse prayed for. The apocalypse never arrived because the apocalypse had already happened: it was the afterlife of the four accusers. There was no final answer to the mystery of Epstein’s death. Only the look Maxwell gives him in each image, taken over the span of their eleven-year relationship. Love. Nothing could be guiltier.
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SubscribeA quality article and analysis, but the title is too “click-bait” for its contents. My compliments to the author!
Regarding the topic under discussion, I concur, and definitely suggest that retaining key industries, such as steel and machinery manufacturing, chip production, medicine and chemistry, etc., are essential to national security and as such should NEVER be subcontracted out to a third-party country, and especially an unfriendly country, such as China. “Cheap stuff” doesn’t compensate when your country lacks essential equipment, and can’t get it, either because of supply chain disruption, international tension, or war.
Our financial system unfortunately is based on a 30-90 minute phone call every three months; the quarterly earnings call tells analysts what they should “predict” for the next quarter, and for the bond market to adjust accordingly. THAT, coupled with many top-tier universities scrapping much of their engineering and STEM capabilities over the last 45 years in favor of finance, economics and “quant” subjects, has moved the U.S. into a weakened state. Making money in the short term was the poison apple that allowed us to snatch defeat from the jaws of post-WWII victory.
I had a similar reaction: I was expecting an entirely different kind of article. This is rather good.
The domestic equivalent of multilateral development banks (MDBs) sounds like a very bad idea as a solution to a problem that government may have contributed to, if not created. Obviously governments aren’t really capable of coming up with a plan for the country then implementing it. It may be the system itself that’s at fault, but whatever, the idea of a government financial institution, like the writer suggests, looks like the government going into business against the private sector, with huge resources and very little accountability. That looks like the perfect tool to destroy capitalism, if not with intent then through sheer stupidity.
Seems to me this pretty much already happened but in an even worse way. Quantitative Easing after 2008 and 2020 produced a huge amount of liquidity for banks and non-bank financial institutions. Because the speculative financial industry has direct access to this wealth they will do what they do best: producing financial bubbles and sit on it. This creates a situation where wealth becomes extremely concentrated leaving behind the real economy where things only deteriorate further and further. So in a way it is precisely the government outcompeting a large part of the market by supporting the financialized part, which was made dominant after the late 70s because they believed in supply-side- and trickle down economics back then.
The problem for America is that , comparatively, it is in the best position of any country in the world. That is, it can always get by, if only sub optimally.
At the moment it’s rather like a battered but unsinkable ship.
England’s administrative genius was what made the difference for its colonies, as compared to the colonies of Holland, France, and Spain. The Judeo-Christian heritage combined with Anglo-Saxon sense made a perfect combination of a just and morally upright people, well-managed.
Sure, tell that to the Tasmanian aborigines (if you can find any surviving).
Innovation and adoption on a wider scale can only happen in societies with high levels of trust and confidence. This can only happen in homogeneous societies where you can implicitly trust your neighbours and institutions. Once that is lost there is invariably a circling of the wagons (or the gated communities) and the instinct is to hoard what you can. This why China will win in the end. Japan had the chance but lacked the resolution to follow through.
What Japan lacked was the political independence required to break free from the suffocating grip of the USA. China has it, and that is why China is the target of America, the Tonya Harding of the world economy.
Good article. One would think that the reality of “too big to fail” after 2008 and the QE rounds after 2008 and 2020 should have incentivized innovation. However, instead, it seems we only amplified all the pathologies of financialization and cronyism. It seems that big capital is more interested in low hanging fruit or even things that only look innovative on the surface but are essentially mostly PR. Big tech is more vulnerable to this. We see a lot of unprofitable ‘Uber clones’ and even things that appeared to be scams, but still raised millions like Theranos. And it makes some sense. The ‘neoliberal’ system, introduced in the late 70s, is aimed at accumulating capital. So it will look for the path of least resistance to do so. Especially since the economy was flooded with liquidity after 2008 we get a situation where rent seeking and speculation is a better method to protect relative wealth than risky investment into complex technology or bringing back actual production. If one can raise billions with just PR then this is what people will do. Meanwhile the ultra-wealthy and big capital put their wealth into private equity who offer big returns, not rarely by stripping corporations from what makes them productive. Another strategy is simply putting money where others put their money, the result is endless financial bubbles. We get into this persistent situation where the asset economy booms while the real economy stagnates. Real estate is another example, it appreciates beyond the moon but is also completely dysfunction. A problem is that those who profit from this stagnant situation will defend it. We can also understand that symptoms like “labor shortages” are misdiagnoses of the actual problem: a dysfunctional economy.
So in the end it seems vital that we understand the role of the state in stimulating innovation but also in hampering innovation. However, as we can see, it is not as simple as regulation vs. deregulation. Perhaps in an ideal free market under “perfect liberty” – as Adam Smith called it – innovation would be maximized. But this has never been a reality, nor did neoliberalism bring us any closer. In fact, despite its rhetoric, almost the opposite. The truth is that if you open your phone and trace all the components from the semiconductors to GPS; much of it started in public sector, often military (DARPA) funded. Even Bell Labs, as a subsidiary of AT&T, essentially had something of a government guaranteed monopoly, so not precisely the market in action, but of course also not the suffocating control as we saw in the Soviet Union. It was, however, also the competition with that Soviet Union during the arms- and space race that incentivized government to invest in science and – also very important – high quality affordable education. In any case, we really need a serious paradigm shift.
It’s the politicians that have their hands on the controls. If they discourage innovation, intelligent and informed risk taking, and tax rewards, it’s not surprising how it’s turned out.
In addition, they announce the results of R&D before it’s been started, go full ahead with ‘state of the art’ projects without prototyping, controlled staging, or even a credible plan or experienced person in charge. And DEI is more important than making the company’s products.
If it wasn’t so damaging, it would be funny.
Heck, it’s funny, anyway!
There are companies working in the blood testing sector, steadily improving their machines. Such companies, with their experienced scientific staff, are well placed to take advantage of advances in biotechnology. However they will not get the investment. It is simply far more profitable to invest in fraudsters such as Theranos. These pump and dump schemes are enabled by a scientifically illiterate media in thrall to the charlatans.
The author laments the fact that ” policymakers still have not rediscovered how to do it.” while referring to innovation. His illusion is that policymakers EVER did discover innovation. The opposite is true: they are the people actively opposing innovation though the morass of ever expanding laws.
The elephant in the room is the idea that we should live lives deemed “safe” by someone else, and unthreatened by things new. Under the prevailing risk averse mindset, no innovation is safe, and nothing is ever fully proven to be safe. And the bureaucrats and policymakers are quite happy to “protect’ us from ourselves and our ideas that might change anything.
This cancer of the human spirit tells us that the safest thing we can do is just cower in the illusion that we are safe in our current situation and hope things don’t get worse. But of course this is a losing strategy, and not much fun either.
Life is fundamentally all about change. Death is the absence of change, and the death of civilizations can be predicted by the degree of their own self-enforced resistance to change.
The antidote to today’s despicable “safe” mindset is coming, as it came for the ancient Romans when the barbarians sacked Rome. They discovered that truly being “safe” was was not quite what they thought it was.
Just look who’s been in power for 12 of the last 16 years…Enough said!
Responding to the title rather than the article (which is more thoughtful) – capitalism is always flawed. It is a feature, not a failing. Capitalism promotes the ‘winners’ but that means there are also corresponding ‘losers’.
Much political debate and action has been aimed at minimising the ‘losers’ and it is that which undermines the uncaring dynamic of capitalism.
You can always choose state control of course (socialism or fascism), but that seems historically to be even less effective than flawed capitalism.
What contradiction exists in American capitalism or any other nation’s use of this means of organizing an economy lies in the level of govt intervention that is involved. Bureaucracy and regulation made it financially advantageous for companies to outsource/offshore what was previously done domestically. The consumer didn’t care as the result was a wide range of affordable goods.
It also didn’t help that people who did make things were told in derisive fashion to “learn to code.” Now AI is doing quite a bit of coding, so not great advice from Chocolate Jesus and his minions.
Capitalism is not perfect but it does work better than the other economic isms. Pity we no longer practice it, preferring instead a version of corporatism where business and govt are often in bed together, colluding against the ordinary person. The elected class, which has never made a product or a payroll, has far too much sway over those who make both.
A big part of the white collar rush started back in the 80’s/early 90’s in response to the tech boom. Computers were a HUGE deal at that time, as I’m sure you recall, and with many tech jobs, they do actually require some sort of secondary education (most likely college). Of course, computers still are a big deal, and there is lots of money out there for folks who want jobs in science/tech. Many of these are real jobs, and many of these scientists/engineers/programmers are absolutely necessary for future discovery/manufacturing.
The trouble is, we sort of forgot about the other side of the coin. I picked up CNC machining long ago, because I come from a blue collar family, and I’m good with numbers. It also helped that I could get started on a semester’s worth of courses at the local community college, which cost about 500 dollars at the time. Now I make pretty good money, and I love my career. I won’t ever get rich doing this, but it earns a solid honest living.
The good news is, there has been a recent huge movement to re-emphasize skilled manufacturing careers over the last few years. Hopefully, this syncs up well with a new manufacturing boom here in the states. We already have a bunch of boomers retiring, so we are at a shortage as it is.
I believe it’s simplistic and naive to assume the concept of a free market still applies today. When Adam Smith spoke of “laissez-faire,” he couldn’t have anticipated the rise of technology and its profound impact. In fact, David Bowie seemed closer to predicting how wildly technology would reshape the world. Referring to historical ideas often requires a pragmatic and realistic approach. With today’s advanced technology and other countries being equally capable, it’s unrealistic to think the market can truly remain free. Nothing influenced by humans is ever entirely free—if it were, no one would trust medicine or food! Common sense is still common sense.
That said, the real issue in the U.S. is the lack of a domestic policy to ensure the country has a long-term strategy. If private equity and capital organizations contributed even just 1% of their profits toward national development, we’d be in a much better position. At the most basic level, people need shelter, food, and interaction before they can innovate. Putting large groups of people in survival mode stifles innovation and ultimately leads to a country’s decline.
In the end, it’s Americans being exploited by their own system, and it’s hard for outsiders to fully grasp the severity of the situation.
The authors recommended answer to the problem of more government intervention into the capital market when it has arguably been government intervention and hyper-regulation that is a big part of the problem we are currently experiencing.
There is only one time that the fridge freezer can be invented
Good article, but I am not convinced. Capital will flow where there is a good risk-adjusted rate of return. The problem is that most sectors of the economy now are subject to government intervention or regulation. Western governments have shown, with the financial crisis of 2008, with net-zero, and with Covid, there is almost no limit to their potential intervention. When, today, financial institutions say they are willing to invest in infrastructure, they don’t mean capitalistic investment. They mean corporatist cooperation in government intervention. Elon Musk is a glorious exception.
“Special report: The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust…..Expect that to continue” “American productivity still leads the world.” These are the headlines of two feature articles this week in The Economist….normally seen as pre-eminently having the pulse of economic issues. Has the author of this essay read them I wonder?
If you call a growth rate of 2 percent versus zero “leaving other rich countries in the dust”, well, ok. I note that according to World Bank figures, the contribution of the US economy to global GDP has just fallen below 15 percent for the first time in over a century. The rag you quote is little more than a mouthpiece for neoliberal orthodoxy.