Maxwell was expected to drop everything to serve Epstein. “Ghislaine was one of the first people in New York to walk around with a cellular phone, and she would very ostentatiously put it on the table at lunch,” says Christopher Mason, the British writer and TV host. One day, the phone rang while Maxwell was hosting a friend for tea in her apartment.
“That was Jeffrey,” she told her friend. “He has the flu, and he wants me to go and get the best chicken soup in New York and take it to his house.’
“Ghislaine, he has people on staff!” the friend said. “Can’t he send one of them?”
“No, no,” Maxwell said. “It has to be me.”
Every few days, it seemed, Maxwell’s phone would ring and Epstein would inquire about the weather in Palm Beach, New Mexico, the Virgin Islands, or Paris. Ever-efficient Maxwell would spring into action, consulting the forecast, then alerting the pilots to ready the plane to fly to wherever skies were clearest. Then they were off: Maxwell organizing armies of staff in the various locations, coordinating everything, almost as demanding and bombastic as her father. “She would call people her minion, piglet, polyp,” says one victim. “So you felt like you were nothing.”
She had to keep everyone in line, because one misstep would unleash the wrath of Epstein, one of the few people who could make Maxwell cry. “He would be screaming over the phone,” recalls a victim, “and she would burst into tears.” The woman who once had everything money could buy, only to lose it all because of a man, was once again living a life of luxury. All she had to do to keep it was to give the monster what he wanted. And what he increasingly wanted were women—“on the younger side,” as Donald Trump would say—for whom Maxwell is said to have searched everywhere: spas, massage parlors, parties. Once she found them, she would invite them to “tea” at Epstein’s mansion.
“She was his gatekeeper into civilized society,” says Rellie. “Every 20- to 30-year-old interesting pretty new girl that showed up in New York, Ghislaine would get to know them and invite them to tea with Jeffrey.”
The teas soon grew into dinners, and the guests rose in stature. “It all felt very frenzied and frothy,” recalls Mason. “It seemed like everyone I knew knew her. Ghislaine was always on her way to have a meeting with someone like Bill Clinton. Everything was with the idea that she was staggeringly well connected.”
Her New York town house became a social nexus; one dinner party’s 80 guests included members of the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans, “along with the requisite sprinkling of countesses and billionaires,” reported The Times of London in 2011. Maxwell had become “a modern-day geisha” in a “domain filled with the richest people in the world—some of whom are good guys, and some of whom are bad—and who think they are above the law. It’s a world frequented by young half naked girls in bikinis, billionaires and lavish lifestyles, but it borders on the grotesque. You are never really sure what is going on behind closed doors.”
One Christmas, a very big billionaire threw a very big party in his very big apartment. Maxwell swept in and scanned the room, her eyes falling on two young sisters.
“Oh, my God, look at those girls!” Maxwell exclaimed, according to a friend. “I didn’t realize that they’re so beautiful! Can you introduce me to them?”
“Ghislaine, why would you want to meet them?” the friend asked. “Wouldn’t you rather meet their parents?”
“I’d like to meet them because I know Jeffrey would like to meet them,” Maxwell explained.
“And that,” the friend recalls, “is when I realized something was very strange.”
Maxwell consistently denied ever soliciting underage girls for Epstein. And she began trying to distance herself from him long before he went to jail. In the early 2000s, she spent time in California with a man many times richer than Epstein: Ted Waitt. He lived in a seven-bedroom, 14-bath mansion in La Jolla, and they sailed aboard the 240-foot mega-yacht she helped him purchase, the Plan B. It was equipped with a helipad, Jacuzzi, elevator, gym, and onboard submarine, which Maxwell was soon licensed to pilot. “After she became his girlfriend,” according to the New York Times, “Mr. Waitt shaved his head, started wearing tinted glasses, and became a virtual doppelgänger for Jason Statham.” (Waitt could not be reached for comment.)