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New documentary reveals sex offender used socialite for access to her famous and rich friends years from the 1980s onwards

Ghislaine Maxwell’s association with Jeffrey Epstein began years earlier than previously understood, according to a documentary investigating the socialite who became an alleged procuress for the paedophile financier.

The new information challenges the common assumption that Epstein stepped into a vacuum in her life after the death of her father, the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was found in the sea near the Canary Islands in 1991.

Researchers working on the documentary have spoken to more than 200 sources over several years to build up a clearer picture of the society fixer. And it has emerged that her famous and rich friends, including Prince Andrew, were being used to build Epstein’s influential network from the 1980s onwards.

“We were able to use court documents which are full of redacted names. There is always a reason for that, and it certainly set us looking into things,” Emma Cooper, executive producer of Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow told the Observer. “Interviews with so many [people] allowed our team to do an amazing amount of cross-referencing of testimony, and so we started to suspect that she had known Epstein longer, right back in the late 1980s when he was doing business in London. Eventually we got to the point where we could assert this fact, although we still don’t know exactly when they met or when their relationship started.”

Maxwell, 59, is now in jail in New York, facing charges as a co-conspirator in the sexual trafficking of young women and underaged girls. Her alleged crimes are said to have been committed with Epstein, her long-term partner and a serial sex offender, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 awaiting trial. Maxwell’s trial is likely to take place in the autumn.

The three-part documentary, to be screened on Sky from 28 June, focuses on Maxwell’s career as the youngest child of a corrupt media mogul. It tracks the heiress from her time at Oxford University to the centre of a high-profile social network in New York and Palm Beach, Florida, where Epstein was visited by a constant stream of young women.

Former staff allege that Maxwell would go out in a limousine in the evenings, looking for what she described as “nubiles” to bring back to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, ostensibly to audition for photographic work. It also covers Maxwell’s later attempts to distance herself from Epstein, when she set up an environmental marine charity and began a discreet new relationship with a tech entrepreneur. A revealing sequence shows Maxwell speaking to a large audience about her now defunct organisation, TerraMar. A socially confident partygoer, she appears an oddly nervous public speaker.

Among other startling elements in the series are scenes from her father’s private 65th birthday party and testimony from his former colleagues, including journalist Peter Jay.

“For the first time, many of the people who knew her at university at Oxford felt they could open up,” said Cooper. “It seemed the right time to ask who this woman really is. We did not find much evidence of other serious relationships with men. Although she was active “on the scene”, we know of no prominent partners she went out with in public until Epstein.”

Telling reminiscences come from two of Maxwell’s former associates, writer Anna Pasternak, who knew her as an undergraduate, and the British aristocrat Lady Victoria Hervey. Many others were not prepared to go in front of the camera.

“Those who chose to speak off the record had different reasons, but often wanted to wait until after the trial. But we did have witnesses all corroborating each other’s memories,” said Cooper.

“One of the things they did confirm is how hard it was to know Ghislaine. She has always been an enigma, even to the people who knew her well, as she puts on a persona for different situations.”

Cooper added that, as one of the few people from Britain working on the documentary, she had the clearest sense of the importance of Maxwell’s background. “The British have followed this family for a long time, and there was a feeling that Ghislaine must have transferred her relationship with her father on to another man who was quite similar in many ways.”

It now seems this is not quite true. Researchers on the documentary believe that, long before Robert Maxwell’s death, Epstein was busily building his high-profile contacts, those names in his notorious “little black book”, from Ghislaine’s own friends and acquaintances.

After Magellan was acquired by Excite, (a competing search engine) in 1996,[5] she went on to co-found Chiliad:[6] a software company involved in the advance of on-demand, massively scalable, intelligent mining of structured and unstructured data through the use of natural language search technologies. The firm's software was behind the data search technology used by the FBI's counterterrorism data warehouse.

Isabel Maxwell is a Technology Pioneer of the World Economic Forum, the President emerita of Commtouch, and the co-founder of Magellan.[1] She is a Director of Israel Venture Network and built up their Social Entrepreneur program in Israel from 2004-2010. Maxwell was also Senior Adviser to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus' not-for-profit microfinance organization Grameen America... ..Maxwell was a co-founder, along with her husband and twin sister, of the company behind early search engine Magellan. Isabel joined sister Christine who was leading a small company called Research on Demand that was online in 1993"[1]". The company changed names to McKinley Group and became a search engine with ratings..

She was like her father and he encouraged her to adopt his worst characteristics — arrogance and rudeness, tempered by an ability to charm when required.

She used it on her boyfriends, who were sometimes vetted by her father but often kept away to prevent his interference...In May 1991, just six months before his death, she and Maxwell flew by Concorde to New York. The two had become noticeably close.

As his escort at glittering dinners with rich and famous figures including statesman Henry Kissinger, she was fatefully introduced to friends of Jeffrey Epstein, already a rising financial star.

Ari Ben-Menashe is an Iranian-born Israeli consultant and former arms dealer who also served as a senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (1977 to 1987). This puts Ben-Menashe in a unique position to know about Epstein and also Ghislaine Maxwell. He met them both 40 years ago, when Ben-Menashe when he worked for Israel alongside Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell...

In the ’80s, Ben-Menashe and Robert Maxwell ran a covert Israeli operation transferring arms to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. That’s how Ben-Menashe says he first met Jeffrey Epstein. According to Ben-Menashe, Maxwell wanted to include Epstein in his arms-dealing operation.