Original subtitles

[Reporter] Just a week after her third requested bail was denied,

ghislaine Maxwell is facing new charges.

Ghislaine Maxwell is accused of finding and grooming underage girls

to be sexually abused by her ex-boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein.

[Anchor] This is on top of six charges

Maxwell was already facing tied

to Epstein's alleged sex trafficking network.

[Vicky] Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite

and one-time lover of disgraced child abuser, Jeffrey Epstein,

is behind bars facing trial.

The charges against her,

finding and grooming young girls for Epstein.

According to indictment, she was allegedly a central figure

in his massive sex trafficking operation.

The government has laid out the cases of four underage girls

the duo is accused of trafficking

over a period spanning more than a decade.

[Anchor 2] Comes here to say not only did Maxwell

recruit young girls for Epstein,

but she actually took part in sexually abusing the teens.

[Vicky] If you find the idea of a privileged, educated woman

doing something like this to other women, completely shocking,

you're not alone.

Many of ghislaine's British friends

have told me privately that they are stunned.

Where had the clever, glittering,

Oxford-educated woman they'd known gone?

My name is Vicky ward.

Vicky ward, everybody.

[Vicky] I'm a journalist in New York,

and I've known ghislaine casually for many years.

In a strange twist of fate,

I was also one of the first reporters

to investigate Jeffrey Epstein.

That was back in 2002.

I spoke to him then for hours,

and I've kept the transcripts of those conversations.

One of the very few interviews

that have ever been done with him.

[Jeffrey] Any girls talked that you haven't told me about?

Seems so much strange that an article about me has no girls in it.

[Vicky] I was also the first journalist

who was trusted by two of Jeffrey's survivors

with on-the-record sexual abuse allegations.

And that would make me an inadvertent part of the story.

I now understand that the root of Jeffrey's ability to cover up his crimes

was his extraordinary skill at manipulation,

as well as the very powerful figures who surrounded him.

When I re-read the transcripts of our conversations,

I saw that Jeffrey had left me breadcrumbs.

The key to understanding Epstein

and the power structures that protected him

had been staring me in the face this entire time.

With Jeffrey Epstein's death,

ghislaine Maxwell may be the last person

who knows the secrets of his criminal enterprise.

[Jeffrey] You know, she's my best friend.

She has been for a very long time.

The mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein in a jail cell

in the summer of 2019

has left ghislaine Maxwell standing almost literally

in his shoes.

She's the one now in jail, facing charges so serious

that it's possible she'll be imprisoned for the rest of her life.

She denies it all.

Ghislaine has been denied bail repeatedly.

Her older brother, Ian, went on television to plead for her release.

She's lost 20 pounds, she's losing her hair.

She can't concentrate.

She has a flashlight shone in her cell every 15 minutes during the night,

so she has no sleep of any real quality.

And that is torture.

[Vicky] It seems that the government wants to find out

what ghislaine knows about Jeffrey Epstein's operations.

Well, so do I.

I've been trying to unravel this mystery for almost 20 years.

And when she was arrested, I decided to try again

for a podcast and now for this documentary.

Of course, with COVID-19, I haven't been able to travel to interview anyone,

so I had to do it by zoom or in a socially distanced office setting.

Keep in mind that even though ghislaine is the focal point,

and is certainly responsible for her own actions,

this at its core is a story about the power of men.

As I come to realize, all the sticky threads of this story

merge together to create a giant web,

a web that is still intact, even after Jeffrey's death.

Now ghislaine, under pressure, threatens to expose it.

While you may think you know the story of Jeffrey Epstein,

ghislaine Maxwell is the gatekeeper

to a tale that is even deeper and darker.

And I've come to realize that if you want to understand ghislaine,

you have to start with her father, Robert Maxwell.

[Interviewer] Now Mr. Maxwell, you're frequently described in the press

as irrepressible,

are you feeling perhaps a little more repressible tonight?

Well, I don't know what being irrepressible or repressible means.

I get on with the job in hand.

I am a doer.

I never give up.

[Vicky] Robert Maxwell was tall, dark and charismatic.

In middle age, he became vastly overweight,

but this didn't dampen his magnetism.

Women, moguls and, obviously, his family craved his attention.

He was an extraordinary man

who Rose from being a poor czechoslovakian immigrant

to a globally famous media mogul.

He came from a very poor family,

Jewish family, in czechoslovakia.

Hoch, that was his surname.

Escaped before most of his family died in the holocaust.

He then got to britain, he got a military cross

for storming a German machine post.

He was part of the rebuilding of western Germany

and began various publishing and print companies.

He started off by buying a small publishing outfit called pergamon press,

which published scientific journals,

those were important because they were useful information

for various national leaders.

And no one has any doubt that pergamon is a sound business.

But Maxwell was a man of huge hunger and appetite.

And I think once he saw what pergamon could do for him

in terms of influence around the world,

he realized that the next step

was to try to own newspapers.

He appears to have decided to get into a battle with Rupert Murdoch,

who is the other great press baron in this country,

partly through the daily mirror,

which he bought along with various other acquisitions.

And it was when he had the means to publicize himself,

the country became aware of him

as this larger-than-life figure.

He was hugely famous in england.

I mean, he and Rupert Murdoch were figures

who loomed really large in the public consciousness.

[Interviewer] You understand that you're a very controversial man

- in this country? - I'm delighted.

[Tom bower] He was a global colossus.

He was a man who had huge media interest,

but also, huge political relationships

with the president of america, Israel, Germany, Russia,

britain, France, everything.

[Vicky] Biographer Tom bower knew him and his family.

They said about Robert Maxwell,

he treated his servants as directors,

and his directors as servants.

[Whistles]

He was ruthless in his relationships,

[bleep] With the people who might have helped him.

But, at the same time, knew as well how to seduce them,

with caviar and krug champagne.

[Man] One of his constant phrases to the minions was,

"who pays your wages, mister?"

There were occasions when I was on the receiving

end of that... and, "okay, it was my turn this morning...

[stuttering] Trusting, "this afternoon,

let's hope it's somebody else's turn."

What you think of this meeting?

It's excellent.

Good that it hasn't started yet.

You wait to see.

[Laughter]

[Vicky] Writer Nicholas Stafford-deitsch

went to school with Maxwell's youngest son, Kevin.

[Nicholas] I had a girlfriend at the time,

and we ran into Kevin somewhere,

and he kindly invited us up to swim,

and we arrived and as we got down for the pool area,

Robert Maxwell was lying sunbathing,

which is quite a substantial sight.

And he said, "who the hell are you?"

And I explained that Kevin had invited us to swim,

and my girlfriend, she was very nervous,

and she pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket

and lit a cigarette.

And he turned on her very viciously,

and he sort of said, "what the hell do you think you're doing?

Don't you realize how stupid you are smoking?"

And I think he reduced her to tears,

and I at the time was big and brave,

so I said, "you don't talk to my girlfriend like that."

And his whole demeanor changed

and he started smirking, as if he thought this was rather funny.

And then became quite charming, and he said,

"oh, yes, Kevin did mention you'd be along too.

Yes, enjoy your swim."

He was a bully, and someone who backed down if you stood up to him.

But I think he was doing it for his own amusement.

[Tim] His wife told me that he had a chip on his shoulder,

because of his background,

he would have been considered too flamboyant, too rich,

and there's a little undercurrent of antisemitism in britain,

certainly, against this successful Jew

who'd come from nothing.

[Vicky] Maxwell's bullying was not confined to outsiders.

He ruled his family with an iron fist as well.

He and his wife, Betty, had nine children.

Ghislaine was the youngest.

[Tim] She told me that she had always set herself goals,

her first job was for her father at 12 years old.

He was interested in computers very early on,

and she was learning how to program on a wang computer.

She and two of her brothers, Kevin and Ian,

all went to marlborough college, in wiltshire.

And then, they went to Oxford.

Ghislaine went to balliol college in Oxford,

which is one of the hardest colleges to get into.

[Tim] Betty said that although Robert had had a chip,

she felt that he had given the children security,

and that they didn't have this feeling of inferiority.

I don't know if that was wishful thinking.

He said he gave them plenty of other complexes, I think.

[Vicky] And what was her relationship with her mother like?

[Tom] I think Betty was a very cold, hostile woman

who had collaborated with Robert Maxwell's brutality

towards his children, never protested.

The thing about the Maxwell children,

from what I could see, there's no weakness.

They're never weak.

They prove themselves by being stubbornly strong.

That is their survival gene.

And they were very disciplined, they had to work hard.

[Vicky] At one point, Maxwell even fired his son, Ian.

I taught them as youngsters,

whenever you have to choose between duty and love,

you must opt for duty.

He chose love, had to pay the penalty.

[Martin Dillon] The guy in many ways was a monster.

- [Vicky] Yeah. - He treated his children

the way he treated the people who would work for him.

The people who'd work for him, he'd take them,

he'd kept files on them.

He treated people appallingly.

[Vicky] Martin Dillon, coauthor of another book on Maxwell,

says the one person who escaped some of this treatment

was ghislaine.

[Martin] Ghislaine was his darling, she's his younger daughter,

and she was pretty and she was very bright.

Well-educated, was also a linguist to some extent,

and he really had her around his life

more than any of his other children.

And you can see in the photographs,

where she's at a football match with him,

as quite apparent that he really loves this young girl.

And he names his yacht the lady ghislaine.

But he was warm with her,

you know, he was very thoughtful, caring.

And he's willing to give her what she wanted.

[Tom] She did have charm, that's why her father liked her so much,

because she did have the charm of a young, the youngest daughter

that knew how to twirl him round her finger as well, to an extent.

And he was very vulnerable to that.

I'd say she did learn how to manipulate him to an extent.

And she knew what he wanted, and gave him what he wanted,

which was ludicrous obedience.

There is one scene in the book,

where you describe this groveling letter

that she had to write to her father

because she'd gone to this dinner

where he was getting an award

and felt she hadn't given him a proper description.

I mean, that to me was amazing.

This is a force of Rob Maxwell's personality,

not only his children, but also politicians and bankers

and the rest also bowed to his astonishing personality.

[Vicky] Ghislaine's friends from Oxford

don't want to speak on the record,

but they have very clear memories of the Maxwell family home,

headington hill hall.

She would often invite her university friends

to come home for the weekend.

And they began to dread that invitation.

And the reason for this was her father,

and she would say, "daddy, daddy, I want to introduce my friends to you",

and he would say, "you know, I'm not interested in meeting your friends,

I just want to go have something to eat."

And one friend remembered how ghislaine was playing chess,

and Robert Maxwell walked up and just moved ghislaine's chess piece,

without saying a word, without asking her,

and then he just walked away.

And the person I know who witnessed this

was completely horrified and said it was such a sort of aggressive power play.

It was quite deliberate, he knew exactly what he was doing,

and ghislaine didn't say anything.

[Nicholas] I met ghislaine fairly soon

after I went back to do my master's,

and she was doing her bachelor's.

It was just some social event,

in which the conversation had suddenly changed direction rather dramatically.

Ghislaine just sort of looked me in the eye and said,

"will you take me out to dinner?"

I remember being rather impressed

and thinking ghislaine was quite sophisticated.

I thought, why not?

Quite soon after sitting down,

ghislaine made a remark to the effect

that she was so proud of who her father was,

that she could always find a story about him in a newspaper,

and on a good day, she could find two stories.

She spoke a great deal about her father, I mean,

I don't remember very much else about the conversation.

I think that there was a great deal of self-confidence on the surface,

but I'm not sure deeper down.

I think her character was very dependent upon who her father was.

[Martin] There's something flawed within that particular personality,

which is ghislaine Maxwell.

And I think a lot of it comes out of that relationship

she had with both her mother and her father,

particularly with her father.

I mean, she adored him, and she must've known

that he was, you know, a really disgusting man in many respects.

But I think a lot of girls, you know, love their fathers

even though their fathers are villains, and he was a villain.

[Reporter] Maxwell invited 1,000 admirers to his Oxford mansion

to celebrate his 65th birthday party.

[Indistinct chatter]

[Vicky] According to all the biographies of Robert Maxwell,

the irony of all the glitz and the trappings, you know,

the yachts and the planes and helicopter,

was that it was all based on a sham.

He kept this media empire afloat

by constantly moving funds around

to appear as if he was much richer than he really was.

[Tom] The whole nature of Robert Maxwell's operation

was to steal money 'cause he didn't have any.

- He was bankrupt. - Yeah.

He, throughout his whole life,

he was condemned as a crook

in one instance after another,

whether it was in 1954 in London real publishing scam,

in 1969, that was another fraud he got away with.

He always got away, he's always talked his way out

and bamboozled and bulldozed the opposition

and the authorities aside

because he was so courageous, purposeful, ruthless,

a gambler and all the rest of it.

[Man] Are you saying there's a witch hunt on against you?

Well, I certainly would say that the city establishment

are running a witch hunt against me.

[Vicky] The publishing business he built served a second purpose.

Access, including to places most people never travelled.

He was using a publishing empire

to get in and out of, you know, parts of Soviet union.

And he was going to the leaders of countries like

in Bulgaria, to todor zhivkov,

the despot there, and saying, you know,

"I would love to sort of have your autobiography published,

'cause people should really know about you."

[Vicky] He had a long-standing relationship with mikhail gorbachev,

dating back to the years after world war ii.

[Tom] The relationship between Maxwell and gorbachev was close,

and there's no doubt he was very, very involved and instrumental

in helping Russian Jews come to Israel.

[Martin] Maxwell did some very bad stuff,

he also did some very good stuff.

I mean, Maxwell got thousands upon thousands of Jews out of the Soviet union.

Maxwell did a lot of business with the kgb,

he did a lot of business with organized crime syndicates.

He also did business with police intelligence

though he didn't agree to work for them full-time.

[Vicky] Martin Dillon believes Maxwell operated

for a third intelligence agency as well.

[Martin] He did a lot of business with Mossad,

particularly beginning in the early 1980s,

until his death in 1991.

[Vicky] Maxwell denied that while he was alive.

But three additional sources tell me he was involved

with Israeli intelligence in the 1980s,

including former Mossad officer, Victor ostrovsky.

Basically, he was gathering information, making contacts,

making connections, using his power base

to change leaders' minds,

give access to people from the agency to other people.

- When you say "the agency", you mean the Mossad? - Yes, yeah.

He was a mossed agent, Robert Maxwell?

I don't think he would ever consider himself an agent.

I don't think he ever thought that he's spying for Israel.

He wasn't, what he was doing is gather information

by being who he was.

And then, giving access, making a lot of money on the side doing that.

He also had a lot of financial help in the beginning

from the shamir group in order to develop his businesses.

So he would get it as a loan and then come the pressure.

You mean the prime minister of Israel, shamir.

Yes.

[Vicky] Would loan him money, would loan Robert Maxwell?

[Victor] Well, not him personally, but the...

[Vicky] Loan the businesses.

Yeah, I couldn't give you the details,

but it could be somebody investing in one of his companies

that is buying new newspapers.

Also, enlarging the circle of papers that he had

brought more and more influence to him

on public opinion in many places,

and that is something Israel needs quite often.

[Vicky] Would you say, then, that Robert Maxwell

was part of an influence campaign?

Yeah, there's a name for that today.

Perception-makers.

[Vicky] "Perception-makers."

[Victor] Yeah, perception-maker.

Because what you say, is "okay, if I tell you the Russians are bad,

they're responsible for a, b, c and d"

I can create the perception whether it's true or not.

[Vicky] Three people I interviewed

say Maxwell did other types of work for Israel as well.

There have been claims that Robert Maxwell,

as well as passing information,

was a man who moved money.

Yeah, I would say that's correct.

I'm not suggesting he was actually moving arms,

- but... - Arms? Well... anything.

- So, he could have been. - [Victor] Absolutely.

[Vicky] With that information, I asked Tom bower for his take.

Maxwell had very, very close relations with Israel

for the last three, four years of his life.

Not because he was a Mossad agent,

but because he felt very, very close with rabin to his end,

also his Jewish background,

and because he was a very good link

between the Israelis and the Russians.

You know, he didn't need to be a Mossad agent,

he was a willing informant.

- [Vicky] Yes. - [Tom] I mean, there was nothing secret about it.

The point is that Robert Maxwell was a media tycoon.

- Yeah. - He was not in the arms deal business.

[Vicky] But three sources tell me that Maxwell

was involved in arms dealing,

and they say that during the course of that,

he met a young American, Jeffrey Epstein.

Syrian banker amer pacha was told by an arms dealer

who knew them both that Epstein and Maxwell first met in the '80s.

Although Jeffrey denied to me that he ever met him.

I know that Jeffrey was selling arms.

How do you know that, amer?

Because in 1992, '93,

I had very close ties to some members of the Saudi royal family,

and they would always tell me,

"what do you think of this guy?"

And my understanding that he was a very sophisticated banker,

- and... - They would ask you what you think of Jeffrey Epstein?

[Amer] Yes.

Yes.

Jeffrey is a guy that everybody is...

Terrified of him, but everybody loved and wanted to be around him.

He facilitated things very well.

He was Mr. Fix-it, whether it's a political lobby,

getting with some country's government.

And I don't want to go into names, as I said to you,

but he was the Mr. Fix-it.

He was discrete, sensitive in a certain manner.

He was very careful, eloquent.

He was very intelligent,

he knows exactly if he's going into a trap.

He always thinks that,

"I'm going to be trapped somewhere."

So, he traps you more you trap him.

That's his talent, he traps you.

[Vicky] When I first reported on Jeffrey Epstein back in 2002,

I was focused on his money.

That's still crucial, without the money,

there would have been no alleged sex crimes,

and ghislaine Maxwell would not be facing

the potential of life behind bars.

In fact, how Jeffrey acquired his money

is a question that gets to the heart of his criminal enterprise.

Jeffrey Epstein, who is from coney island,

he was a very good classical pianist,

he was a very good mathematician,

and yet he dropped out of college,

he never finished his degree.

Despite that, he wound up in 1974 as a math teacher at Dalton,

one of the most elite New York private schools,

and whilst he was there, he had wound up giving private tutoring

to a child of ace Greenberg,

who was then the chairman of bear stearns,

and ace Greenberg was so impressed with Jeffrey Epstein

and his mathematical skills that he asked him to come in and join the bank.

I mean, that is not a normal route into an investment bank.

In 2002, I knew that Jeffrey had left bear stearns in 1981

under murky circumstances.

And I spoke to him then about his departure.

[Jeffrey] Yeah, I don't deal well

with people who have narrow-mindedness.

I never had a run-in with anybody,

except people trying to say, "you're a partner here."

I think I was the youngest partner ever there.

[Vicky] Jeffrey wanted me to speak to Jimmy Kane,

who was then the ceo of bear stearns.

He wanted to tell me that Jeffrey Epstein was brilliant,

and that he had been very upset

when Jeffrey had decided to leave after only five years.

So, why did he leave?

Here's what I recently had confirmed.

In 1981, there was an investigation

of possible illegal trading at bear stearns.

Two sources say that Jeffrey was told

to admit his own wrongdoing and resign.

Neither he nor anybody else was charged in the case.

After that, Jeffrey maintained

a close relationship with the bank

until it shut down.

Jimmy Kane wanted to tell me

just how important Jeffrey Epstein was to the bank.

A very important client, that message was very clear.

After leaving bear stearns in 1981,

Jeffrey entered a new world,

one with very few people who are willing to talk.

Someone who worked with Epstein for several years,

Steve hoffenberg, is one of the few.

I went to see Steve hoffenberg in jail,

in devens, Massachusetts, in the fall of 2002.

Hoffenberg was sentenced to 20 years in prison

for committing the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history

prior to Bernie madoff.

And, in the judge's sentencing memorandum,

the fact that Steve hoffenberg had told so many lies to the government

was a factor in giving him such a very long sentence.

But many of the things hoffenberg told me

about Jeffrey Epstein in 2002 have checked out,

so I do take what he says seriously.

I decided to do a follow-up interview with him,

but as a journalist, I've done my best to confirm

everything that he says with another source.

Hoffenberg tells me about another businessman

Jeffrey was connected to at the time.

Douglas leese.

Douglas leese was a fascinating individual,

very much like Robert Maxwell was.

[Vicky] Leese was a British defense contractor

and an international Mr. Fix-it.

Sound familiar?

Jeffrey provided marketing, presentations.

He used the Douglas leese network

and expanded his abilities around the world to countries

throughout the middle east and other areas of the world,

and Epstein loved the opportunity,

and was very successful at it.

[Vicky] Arms deals means money moving around the world,

sometimes invisibly.

Amer pacha told me that Epstein developed

a reputation for money laundering.

What did you understand to be the main source of his money?

[Amer] He was initiating very sophisticated financial instruments

that is able to laundry massive amount of money.

So, how does that exactly work?

What kind of money is he washing

and how does he do that?

Banks, real state, all kind of financial instrument that he can put in place,

using many of his off-shore holdings and off-shore accounts.

And then, he would legitimize them

by actually real assets in real estate in New York, or Paris, or London.

Assets that can be turned easily into liquid.

[Vicky] Jeffrey learned how to move money off-shore.

And that's the skillset that he then starts to use

with very wealthy private individuals.

[Amer] He wasn't an art connoisseur.

But he dealt with very high-end art pieces.

What do you mean by that? I don't understand that.

One way to laundry money is art.

Yes.

Everybody that knew Jeffrey knew that he bought

at auctions a lot of pieces,

but everybody knew that Jeffrey was not... "Into" art.

[Vicky] Another service that Jeffrey offered to private clients

was recovering stolen monies for them,

as he told me in 2002.

[Jeffrey] Most people who have their money,

if they're defrauded prefer not to go to the police.

They prefer to get their money back.

The police usually don't get your money back,

the person goes to jail, but you don't get your money.

The first scam that we know about that he did on his own,

there was a big criminal fraud case

in the southern district of New York.

This group of Spanish families had lost a lot of money,

Jeffrey worked with their attorney

and actually found quite a large chunk of it,

he flew into the Cayman Islands,

picked up a suitcase of bearer bonds worth about $40 million.

He then flew to Switzerland, deposited the bearer bonds in two Swiss banks.

Jeffrey then conned the Spanish families

into giving him power of attorney over these bearer bonds.

The Spanish families never saw their money again.

So, that was the first example of what I call

Jeffrey's three-pronged strategy, charm, control, con.

You charm the people, you then take control of their money,

and then you steal it.

Steve hoffenberg says he knew that Jeffrey

had stolen money from other clients,

but nonetheless, he still hired him as a consultant

for his company towers financial.

Jeffrey could build towers financial substantially,

in funding, selling securities and doing business illegally.

[Vicky] And in the years that followed,

Jeffrey told Steve a great deal about his business dealings.

Why do you think Jeffrey confided in you?

I mean, was it because he had to brag?

He had to brag to overcome his insecurity.

And he wanted to be important to me,

and important to anybody in the room.

As an investment banker, and a serious,

growing powerful businessman on wall street.

He was crazy.

As Jeffrey is rising in prominence

in what is a relatively small world,

it's not unlikely that he would have bumped into Robert Maxwell,

that is what some people say they have direct knowledge did happen.

Now, at the time

Robert Maxwell would have been very powerful,

Jeffrey Epstein would have been the guy in the shadows.

But there was a use for a guy in the shadows.

Jeffrey Epstein advised Robert Maxwell

on how to reposition his debt

in order to get out of the financial bind

he was stuck in at that time.

[Vicky] Hoffenberg says both Jeffrey and Douglas leese

told him about intelligence work they did with Maxwell.

And there's another source

who says that Maxwell and Epstein worked together.

One of the people who claims that there was this connection

is this man, Ari Ben-menashe.

Ben-menashe was involved in arms dealing

in the middle east in the 1980s.

A us jury acquitted Ari Ben-menashe around 1989,

because the jurors believed that he was a member

of Israeli military intelligence.

The difficulty is that he has told certain stories to academics,

to journalists, that can't be corroborated by anybody else,

and that have turned out to be fantasies.

I've gone out of my way to try to corroborate whatever he said.

Ben-menashe tells me that Maxwell brought Jeffrey Epstein

to Israel in the 1980s to meet with his contacts.

[Ari] Maxwell took him there.

And you have firsthand knowledge of that?

Yes.

[Vicky] So, why did Robert Maxwell

bring Jeffrey Epstein to Israel?

He brought him there because he felt

that this guy could help the Israelis.

Who did they meet with in Israel?

Robert Maxwell was ehud barak's friend,

who was at the time director of military intelligence.

Do you think ehud barak, who was obviously very busy fighting in the 1980s,

would have known Robert Maxwell?

Oh, I don't know,

almost everybody in Israel knew Maxwell.

[Vicky] Ehud barak would later become prime minister of Israel.

He says now that he didn't meet Jeffrey until 2003.

These are obviously huge allegations

that is very difficult to prove.

[Ari] Yeah, I know they are very difficult to prove,

but there's one thing that is clear, yes?

He was working with Israelis,

for the Israelis at some point, yes?

- Some point. - Yes.

And he was introduced to the Israelis

by Robert Maxwell.

[Vicky] Ben-menashe claims that, like Maxwell,

Epstein was brought on

to conduct influence campaigns,

but in a very different style.

When you met Jeffrey Epstein through Robert Maxwell,

you thought he was a thief and a con man

and didn't want to hire him for those reasons.

Is that correct?

That's right.

But somebody did hire him.

To who was Jeffrey working for?

A military intelligence, another group of people that hired him,

to go after people and try to blackmail them.

How was he going to blackmail him?

He taped people having sex with underage girls.

He taped, he photographed it, all that.

And underage girls was his forte.

[Vicky] Was the idea that Jeffrey

was blackmailing people for Israel

one of Ben-menashe's wild conspiracy theories?

It's not clear,

I couldn't get confirmation from other sources of a blackmail operation.

If it's true, though,

it raises some interesting question.

Did Jeffrey develop an interest in underage girls

because of a blackmail campaign?

Or did he come up with the blackmail idea because of his own interests?

And how in earth did ghislaine allegedly become involved?

When did Jeffrey really meet ghislaine Maxwell?

That is a topic of peculiar confusion.

There are many different stories,

but we have four people

who say they know that they met in the 1980s through her father,

Robert Maxwell, who very much wanted them to become a couple.

When as far as you know did ghislaine and Jeffrey

actually become romantically involved?

In the '80s.

So, long before her father died.

Oh, yeah.

[Vicky] Why did Robert Maxwell

introduce ghislaine to Jeffrey?

I think that Robert wanted to have this guy

as a son-in-law.

Funny enough, he really... That's what I think.

[Vicky] Maxwell biographer, Tom bower

doesn't believe any of it.

Jeffrey Epstein would have featured

in some of Robert Maxwell's New York contacts,

and I've got all those private papers,

and he wasn't listed.

Someone like Jeffrey Epstein would have been totally irrelevant.

[Vicky] Jeffrey's social life in the 1980s would have been

the complete antithesis of ghislaine's.

As the daughter of one of the most prominent,

powerful media moguls in england,

ghislaine would have been a very glittering figure in London.

She would have been somebody who was very sought after

at cocktail parties and dinners.

She moved with a very, very far set after Oxford.

Up all night, very expensive clubs,

champagne and so on.

She certainly used to appear in the gossip columns.

She made friends with prince Andrew.

She was very, very skilled at moving into the kind of social circles

and political circles.

And you could say, "well, okay, that was because

she had a certain amount of money", no.

She had something else, she had learned a lot from her father.

[Vicky] Everybody I've spoken to who was in ghislaine's circle

had a very clear idea of who ghislaine wanted to be.

She wanted to be "somebody."

She wanted to be somebody who mattered in the world

in her own right.

The great irony is she wanted to be like her father.

There was talk of one serious boyfriend at the time.

[Tim] She was liked to gianfranco cicogna,

who was an Italian count, part of the ciga hotel empire.

I'm told she was very upset when that ended,

I don't know.

[Vicky laughs]

[Vicky] My friend Christopher Mason

first met ghislaine during this time,

when she was visiting New York.

[Christopher] One of the things I remember about ghislaine

was that she had short, spiky hair

that was very kind of pixie-like.

She was that kind of fireball of energy, a real livewire

that it felt exciting to be in her company.

She told fantastically funny stories.

She had quite a raucous sense of humor,

lots of self-deprecating humor.

And her conversation was sort of peppered

with famous names of, you know,

extraordinarily powerful people.

Did she talk about her father or her family in any meaningful way?

She kept referring to her father.

I mean, he was kind of the big, swaggering publisher,

and she seemed to be, you know,

very much her, a father's daughter.

[Vicky] As ghislaine traveled in these glittering circles,

Jeffrey Epstein was socializing in a very different realm.

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein, no relation,

met him at a party in New York in 1987.

Jeffrey would take people to dinner at the regency,

but it wasn't the regency hotel where the power meals were,

it was a regency delicatessen,

and he'd order everyone a hot dog.

[Vicky] He told me he had lived in a penthouse.

He lived in the middle of the building,

but the roof of the building was open to all the tenants,

so he would tell people he lived in the penthouse,

and he would order takeout food from the Chinese restaurant.

It was all pretty amusing.

[Vicky] I think you can see in the 1980s that Jeffrey was climbing.

He was very gregarious, very social,

he was definitely trying to build a network of people

who were a lot richer and more important than he was,

but he hadn't got there yet.

You know? In the 1980s, he really didn't have much money to speak of.

Jesse, I can't thank you enough for doing this.

Let me ask you, is this lighting okay for you?

[Vicky] Another journalist I know, Jesse kornbluth,

also met Jeffrey Epstein around the same time.

I met Jeffrey at a corporate party in 1986,

and he was funny, and he was compelling.

He dropped some magic words, finance, bounty hunters.

Who did he say he was bounty hunting for?

He said, "I get money back for aggrieved parties

from African dictators, and on other days,

I'm hired by African dictators to protect their money."

So, you say to him, "let me watch you work"

and he says "yes."

Yeah. "Come and meet me at park Avenue south

and say 39th to 38th street."

And we go up to a law firm

and he presents himself to the receptionist

and she doesn't let him in.

He tries to get another way, he does it.

And I realize he's doing process serving, right?

He's doing messenger work.

Did you ask him, "how does this relate to bounty hunting?"

I didn't because I saw... I made a judgement call,

that this guy was basically full of shit

and that there was no reason to have ever pursued him.

[Edward] This guy's business,

he ran sort of a little charm school,

he charms someone into giving him some money.

Not millions, more like 50,000 or 100,000.

He was a conman, and conmen, you know, are very charming

and they know that there's very little risk

because what people want when they're conned

is they want their money back.

They don't want the embarrassment,

they don't want to get involved in any legal processes.

[Vicky] In 1991, Jeffrey and ghislaine's worlds

intercepted publicly when she moved to New York.

[Tom] When Robert Maxwell bought the New York daily news,

he was immediately a huge personality in New York,

so his daughter was able to exploit that remarkable passport

to the celebrities and used it.

[Christopher] I ran into ghislaine early in 1991,

and she said that she had just moved to New York

and her father is buying the daily news

and she's making introductions for him.

She seemed like the perfect person for that role,

she was already staggeringly well-connected.

[Vicky] Jeffrey, meanwhile, was dating a string of young, mostly blonde women.

[Edward] Jeffrey liked attractive women,

he liked talented women.

He liked spending time with them, and they liked him.

You told me there was one woman,

a very beautiful woman, he asked to go on vacation with him.

Yes. She actually had an arrangement with Jeffrey,

where she had, there was no physical or sexual contact,

but he told her that when he's meeting these masters at the university,

by having a beautiful woman with him,

they assumed he must be important,

he thought it added to his own stature,

where he had very little else to add to his stature.

It seemed to have succeeded.

The women were very impressed with him.

And he was generous towards them.

[Vicky] I think the other sort of really defining characteristic

of Jeffrey's love life back then

was that he was not monogamous.

He was either targeting prominent rich women,

or he was courting models,

very attractive women who he could mold to some degree.

[Speaking foreign language]

[Vicky] Jeffrey's longest relationship was with Eva Anderson,

who dated him for 11 years.

Eva Anderson was a former miss Sweden.

All the sources I've spoken to

say that as far as Jeffrey was capable

of loving anybody other than himself,

because it was quite apparent

that he was an extreme narcissist,

he really loved Eva Anderson.

Jeffrey and Eva stayed very close friends,

he introduced her to a billionaire hedge fund owner

named Glenn dubin, they got married

and Jeffrey was godfather to their eldest child.

In 1991, it didn't seem that ghislaine fit the type that Jeffrey favored.

She is the exact opposite

of the kind of women that Jeffrey typically liked,

in that she didn't need to be molded by him at all.

She was far more worldly,

she had a much more extensive rolodex than he did.

But ghislaine's world was about to change.

[Vicky] With the purchase of the daily news in the spring of 1991,

Robert Maxwell extended his finances beyond breaking point.

Robert Maxwell could not afford to buy the New York daily news,

but he was locked in this battle with Rupert Murdoch,

and buying the New York daily news

would really cement Robert Maxwell as a global media mogul,

not just somebody who operated in britain.

[Tim] There were the beginnings of rumors coming up in the press.

I think he hoped by his force of personality

to keep his business empire together.

[Vicky] The situation seemed untenable,

and then, on November 5th, 1991, tragedy struck.

The millionaire newspaper publisher, Robert Maxwell, is dead.

He disappeared overboard from his private yacht earlier this morning

while cruising off the Canary Islands.

I want to thank all the many hundreds of people

who have sent messages of support to us,

at this very, very sad time.

They recovered the body, it was a very quick inquest,

and he was flown to Israel

and buried on the mount of olives,

as one of the righteous.

It must be assumed that they want to pay tribute to an extraordinary man.

[Vicky] The death was ruled accidental,

but in britain, the speculation went on and on.

[Reporter] The mystery of Robert Maxwell

continues to dominate the front pages of London newspapers.

[Anchor] He committed suicide?

He was rubbed out by assassins

from a two-man submarine.

All the evidence shows that Maxwell suffered a heart attack.

Right.

They just didn't find any evidence

of murder, let alone assault.

They did find evidence that he had had a heart attack,

and before he hit the water, because there was no seawater in his lungs.

[Vicky] Given the state of Maxwell's business,

suicide was a strong consideration.

And that seemed even more likely after it was revealed

that he had tried to pay off his debts

by stealing from his company's pension fund.

It quickly became clear that he'd been stealing from the pension fund,

so people who'd long had suspicions about Robert,

which they couldn't prove,

felt that they were now justified,

that he was a crook, that it was appalling,

that he'd let down all these workers.

[Vicky] The fraud could also explain

why Maxwell would have been a target for murder.

Books have been written claiming that Robert Maxwell

was murdered by Israeli intelligence,

and the claim is that he had gone

from being an asset in Israeli intelligence

to being a liability.

[Martin] Maxwell had become very unhinged.

He built this massive empire

he wasn't able to really control.

[Victor] His demise, I guess, started,

when he started to need more money

in order to fulfill his needs.

He used the pension funds, he used it like a slush fund.

Then, when he needed it to be refilled,

he was told no.

- No more. - By the Israelis.

Right, no more, because you're endangering the whole thing,

and there's no more.

And he started to make threats,

because he thought he was working with,

you know, like any other company.

He didn't understand that you do not threaten the Mossad.

[Vicky] So, do you think Robert Maxwell was killed by the Mossad?

[Victor] I think so, yeah.

[Vicky] Ghislaine told friends that she thought her father had been murdered.

Other family members disagreed.

[Tom] The family were very keen

to prove that he died of a heart attack,

because that's where they got the insurance money.

Murder was unprovable, and suicide will remove the chance of the payout.

[Vicky] In the end, however,

the family was officially stripped of its money.

[Tim] When one considered the amount he had defrauded,

I think people felt,

"why should they have anything?"

The optics of all this were horrific.

Who is this man and his children,

who had lived high on the hog

with all the trappings of billionaires?

And meanwhile, you had all these people

who'd actually toiled all day in and day out

for Robert Maxwell who were suddenly left with no pensions.

His two sons, Kevin and Ian,

were charged with being their father's accomplice in this,

and they had to then stand trial.

[Reporter] The two Maxwell brothers

were guided out to a waiting police Van.

[Vicky] After a week's long trial,

the jury acquitted both brothers.

[Tom] If anyone had told me at the beginning

of Kevin Maxwell's trial he was going to be acquitted,

I would have bet huge odds in favor of the government, that they convict him.

And yet, he persuaded the jury,

twelve men and women, that he was innocent

because he drove his lawyers to destroy the prosecution's case.

I'm naturally very pleased to have been cleared

of all charges against me.

[Vicky] According to one report,

Robert Maxwell hadn't been above

using his favorite daughter ghislaine

as an unwitting courier to further his schemes.

What was reported in Tom bower's book

about Robert Maxwell is that, I think it was 1990,

ghislaine had boarded the conchord

from London to New York,

and that she had picked up an envelope,

and flown back to London and given her father the envelope.

According to Tom bower, inside the envelope were shares of berlitz stock.

Robert Maxwell then went and sold those shares.

The problem with that is he shouldn't have been able to sell them.

Do you think she understood what she was doing?

Was she complicit,

or was she just doing something for her dad?

Well, she clearly knew what she was doing

was important for the finances of the company,

whether she knew that her father

was actually stealing the berlitz shares

is impossible to know, because she was never asked.

I think that ghislaine was living with a monster,

a very brutal man, and he was a serial crook.

She didn't know the difference between morality and immorality,

in the way of upbringing, in my view.

That was the only way the maxwells knew

how to operate, was by lying.

There was anger and speculation about ghislaine,

who, within a month of her father dying,

had left britain, relocated to New York

and the speculation was that she knew

there was Maxwell money there

that the authorities couldn't get a hold of

and was living off it.

[Vicky] Christopher Mason visited ghislaine in New York

soon after her father's death.

[Christopher] It seemed like a fairly modest place

for someone who's the daughter

of an astonishingly wealthy man.

And the message was that the money was gone.

It was revealed her father was a thief.

Did she ever talk about that?

No.

She didn't speak of her father as dishonest.

She was quite passionate about the innocence of her brothers.

She was fiercely loyal to them.

I remember her describing the funeral in Jerusalem,

and it was very ghislaine to hear her

almost sort of bragging about the splendor of her father's funeral

because he was so powerful, he was such a great man.

And she was telling me about how she had spoken to various people,

and I seem to remember that Henry kissinger was one of them

that she was saying, "let's just see,

let's just see what's happening in a year."

And I didn't know what the hell that meant.

It just seemed to be that somehow,

she was going to figure out how to rise like a Phoenix

from these horrifying ashes.

[Vicky] Did ghislaine know then that Jeffrey Epstein

would be the person to help her rise again?

And did she have any idea what she might be expected to do for him in return?