Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

-Now, the contents of Robert Maxwell's home

near Oxford were auctioned today at Sotheby's.

Everything from furniture to family photographs

came under the hammer.

One bidder paid nearly £1,000

for the nameplate that sat on Mr. Maxwell's desk.

-The entire contents of Headington Hill Hall,

Mr. Maxwell's country home near Oxford,

were today knocked down to the public.

-£800. Yours, sir, thank you.

-600 lots took the whole day to sell,

including everything from barbecue forks

to antique paintings.

This one, a view of Jerusalem

from where Maxwell is buried, went for £54,000.

-The place was absolutely packed.

There were no seats available.

People were standing around the back.

Basically, they all wanted the Maxwell memorabilia.

You know, he's a notorious man,

and by then, everyone knew what had happened.

And then I came across this lamp.

But what happened, of course, when I lifted that,

I saw that,

and realised that they were two microphones.

He was recording everything that was said about him.

♪♪

[ Static, phone line beeping ]

♪♪

-This was actually in his own family home.

So he wanted to know exactly what his sons thought of him,

his wife thought of him.

And it tells you the true story of the man.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-The sons of the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell

confirmed just an hour ago that their father is dead.

-It's a particularly sad moment

because this paper has lost its publisher

and its chairman and its saviour.

-Love him or hate him,

he touched the lives of many thousands of people,

many millions of people.

And we are determined to continue in his tradition.

-After disappearing off his yacht,

the Lady Ghislaine, Robert Maxwell's body

is recovered from the sea off the coast of Tenerife.

His family and inner circle gather on the island.

-I was in Tenerife to help the family,

and a couple of journalists appeared on that cay side.

And then Ghislaine Maxwell comes up.

She's wearing a tartan suit

with a long-ish jacket and a short skirt,

and she is really distressed.

She looks very young and very vulnerable.

♪♪

Then her mum comes through and says,

"What are you going to do about the press out there?"

I said, "Well, Mrs. Maxwell,

I don't know how you feel about it,

but it would make things easier if you spoke to them."

♪♪

[ Siren wailing in distance ]

And she said, "I think Ghislaine should do that."

So Ghislaine comes through, and she's in tears.

She's weak and heartbreaking.

Nothing bad had ever happened to her in her life before.

Betty puts to her that she should speak to the press.

And she just sits there very quietly

and she said, you know, "What will I say?"

And it was, "We can get something done.

We can write you a short speech,

we can rehearse you," and we did

and we made amendments and so on, and...

...she burst into tears almost every time she spoke through it.

And terrible tears.

Eventually, after going washing her face

and getting herself tidied up, she said, "I'll do it now."

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

-I want to take this opportunity

to thank all the many hundreds of people

who have sent messages of support to us

at this very, very sad time.

I want also to thank the press

for their courtesy and consideration

to my mother and to us

at this time,

which we appreciate very much.

Gracias a todos, and thank you all very much.

♪♪

♪♪

-It was a cold, windy day on the Mount of Olives.

Robert Maxwell was buried here according to his wish.

Tears from Mr. Maxwell's sons, his wife, and his daughters.

From Mr. Maxwell's eldest son, Philip,

a moving tribute.

-Dear Dad...

soldier...

...publisher and patriot,

warrior and globetrotter,

father of nine children and grandfather of eight,

we salute you.

-After an autopsy, Maxwell's body is buried quickly,

in line with Jewish tradition.

[ Telephone rings ]

-Across his global media empire,

fear and confusion is spreading through his senior executives.

-And it's being secretly recorded

on his elaborate bugging system.

-These calls have been re-voiced to protect identities.

♪♪

-Do you think it's unlikely,

inconceivable that Mr. Maxwell could have committed suicide?

-I cannot imagine any situation that would cause Bob Maxwell

to take his own life.

-The thing he most hated was being bored and left alone.

So the notion of going on the boat on his own

seemed to me so alien, I thought, "Hmm,

I think he probably did go with the intention

of killing himself."

♪♪

-We hear now that he probably died of

a heart attack before he fell in the water.

But nonetheless, the question remains,

how did you fall off the boat? -You can inject someone

to pretend or make it look like someone's had a heart attack.

And there's going to be a lot of speculation about that.

♪♪

-Will he ask the Prime Minister,

as head of the Security and Intelligence Services,

to order an immediate enquiry into the alleged relationship

between the Israeli intelligence service and Robert Maxwell?

-It was flying around it could be Mossad,

but, you know, it could have easily been anyone

that he had defaulted on payment on

or maybe was even putting pressure on to give him money.

It could have been anyone.

♪♪

[ Telephone rings ]

-But as the outside world

speculates about Maxwell's death,

inside his empire, there's another mystery.

-Huge problems have been discovered

with the company's finances.

-The whole empire could be facing collapse.

And one young reporter is about to break the story.

-I'm joined by Bronwen Maddox, who's a former media analyst

and is now a journalist on the Financial Times.

How much do we really know

about the state of the Maxwell financial empire?

-I'd always wanted to be a journalist.

I got sidetracked into the city

because it was a very lively thing to do

when I was leaving university,

and it came with a lot of adventures,

actually, more than I would have got in journalism,

I think, starting out.

I was working for a bank, an investment house,

writing reports for investors about media companies.

And I had enjoyed going to company chairmen

or chief executives and challenging

what they were saying.

BSB, I think, was an inappropriate investment

for bond.

The Guardianneeds a re-launch.

It's lost about 13% of its readers.

The mess they're in is trying to reduce salaries

and manning levels very quickly,

and the blame does lie with the management.

I'd been following Robert Maxwell and his companies

as part of that job, and indeed, travelling round to see them

and talking to Robert Maxwell.

I actually saw him when he had the annual results.

He was full of apparent confidence.

Remember noticing his tie, which had a giant green

soup stain on it, and I was looking at it.

I'm afraid it was about my height, as I'm smaller.

Maxwell was bigger.

I was wondering, "Has no one dared to tell him?"

♪♪

I was 28 when I started at the Financial Times

in August of the year that Maxwell died, 1991,

and immediately began looking into Maxwell as a journalist

because the signs that something was going wrong

had begun pitching up in the public domain.

And specifically, there were signs that he had mortgaged

a lot of things in his companies.

I knew that if he was mortgaging that many things,

it was trying to raise money. So it was out of confidence

of being a financial analyst in the city,

it gave me a grounding in the numbers

and a sense that the story is often in the numbers,

and the numbers are often public.

I started by saying to the editor,

"Look, I'd like to get a few company house reports

so that I can look in more detail

about what's really going on."

And then a few turned into a couple of dozen

and then a couple of dozen turned into,

well, really quite a few more dozen.

And this piled up, and at some point he said,

"Look, just get everything."

♪♪

Each company would have probably 30 pages.

I got all these and spread them out

slowly on the floor of the newsroom to try

and add up how much debt the company had.

♪♪

We had to work out what was owned by what

because only then could you work out

how the debt was represented.

Many of them with peculiar share ownership structures.

I would say like Russian dolls, but that makes it too neat.

These were all over the place.

It's like someone has tidied up a toddler's room

and just put the toys randomly into different drawers

in order to clear things up really quickly.

It was such an odd patchwork,

but then at the top were constructions that were,

I think, we can assume, done very carefully

that really made it very, very hard

to work out what was going on financially.

This really was not a conventional business empire.

Everyone knew about Maxwell Communications,

all the bombast Maxwell brought to that

and Mirror Group Newspapers, which had just floated.

But behind that was this web of 800 private companies.

And I knew I had to get the numbers right,

mapping and then re-mapping all these companies

and then adding up the debt.

♪♪

But what became clear very quickly

was that I was looking at numbers

that implied the real possibility

that the whole lot was going to go down.

And then it flushed up that Maxwell missing at sea.

And I felt the kind of rising excitement of realising

that I had a really full picture of this secretive world

that people didn't know about

in Robert Maxwell at just the point

when everyone was demanding to know exactly that.

And I was ready to go public.

♪♪

-How much do we really know

about the state of the Maxwell financial empire?

-It's an extremely complicated empire.

After a long investigation, we've published tomorrow

that we think he has nearly

three quarters of £1 billion of debt

in the private companies on top of the debt

in the public companies.

That means after £1 billion of sales of assets

and businesses this year, the total Maxwell empire

still has over £2 billion of debt.

-The death of Robert Maxwell raises fundamental questions

about the future of his huge empire.

Some city analysts say he was the only person

who knew the ins and outs of his businesses.

The sons who've taken over have been groomed by their father

and, while less flamboyant,

are determined to continue his traditions.

But how will the empire fare under them?

-Members of the Maxwell family

have been meeting financial advisers this morning

to plan the future of the publishing empire.

-Personal business, and the fact is, you know,

I'm clearly immensely saddened.

Some of the events have been extremely shocking.

I lost my father, so I would say that

it's a combination of events that I wouldn't believe

if I read it in a novel.

-Kevin and Ian Maxwell, at that point, were very much seen

as the brave sons trying to cope with this loss.

And everyone was wondering

can the boys manage to turn it around,

can they sell off bits here and there

and just pay down the debt?

And then the full picture

began to emerge of just how bad it was.

[ Siren wailing ]

-Tonight, a police van

pulled out of Maxwell headquarters.

At the end of the day, dramatic even by the standards

of the newspaper world.

♪♪

All day, detectives had crawled through offices

where once Robert Maxwell sat and ran his businesses.

♪♪

-I remember the Serious Fraud Office

coming in very well.

I walked in there one morning, and to my horror,

there were these great big brutes of guys with a huge,

great big screwdriver, biggest screwdriver

I've ever seen, levering open filing cabinets.

And I said to them, "Excuse me, I've got keys."

I was horrified, and they just said to me,

"We won't be needing those," and just carried on opening them up.

They were thugs. They were awful. I hated them.

It was -- the whole thing turned really nasty after that.

♪♪

[ Sirens wailing in distance ]

♪♪

♪♪

-You told me that you love to be anonymous

and you love the fact that not everybody really knows

who you are in New York.

-It's great. I can -- I have my friends

and I can live my life and people don't come up

and say, "So, how you feeling," you know?

"So, you're okay? How you doing?"

It's, I mean, other people's lives

are very interesting, too. I like to have the opportunity

to ask them questions. I don't always like to be

the one that people are asking the questions of.

-Now, there were so many publications about your father.

I saw a picture of you and your father and Queen Elizabeth.

And of course, you know, you were the youngest,

you were the closest one to him.

There is little girl, like, suddenly to go

to another -- a different reality at all.

I mean -- -It's changed.

Nothing's changed.

I don't feel diminished at all.

I'm extremely sad that my father is no longer here,

but I don't feel in any way smaller or lesser

than what I was before.

I'm me.

I'm healthy. I'm very lucky.

And survival means many different things

to different people.

Survival, in my case,

means getting up in the morning and figuring out

a new life, and smiling and being happy

and looking at the positive side of things.

Life is sad. It's always very sad

when you lose a parent, but you have to go on.

I'd like to think that I'll be able to do something positive,

and I can't say what it is right now

because I'm working on it, and until I've done it,

then everything is just words again.

-Don't you feel insecure, scared from the future?

-No. I'm lucky I get to start again.

♪♪

♪♪

-During the '90s, when I was in New York,

a friend invited me to a party

he was having at his house in SoHo downtown,

and there were lots of people there when I arrived,

and I went to sit at this long table and there was Ghislaine.

We looked at each other and we were like,

"Oh, yes, we've met before."

I'd met her a year previously in London.

The thing that marked Ghislaine

was how extraordinarily friendly she was,

how instantly she said her name, said,

"You know, what's your name? I'm Ghislaine."

She made you feel included.

She was very popular because she was charming

and she was opinionated and she was funny.

♪♪

This was a very different Ghislaine.

She was a shrunken version

of the person that I'd met the year previously.

Like she couldn't quite believe what had happened to her.

-I hate to speculate about your father.

What you think? What happened to him?

-You'll never know, so there'll never be any, you know --

It's one of those things. Nobody was there, nobody saw,

so you'll never be 100% sure of exactly what took place.

The only thing I'm sure of is that he did not commit suicide.

-That's your 100% true. -No question.

-I remember her inviting me over to her apartment

and she was talking about her father's death.

She was convinced that he had been murdered.

The perception then, which she seemed to encourage,

was that she was suddenly

extraordinarily well connected, but kind of destitute.

That there was no money,

that everything had been

kind of plunged into chaos with his death.

And she was reading off the names of people she was talking,

including Henry Kissinger, who had been asking about

how she was going, you know, how she was going to make it

through this extraordinary situation.

And she said, "I told Henry, just watch in a year.

Come back, watch this space. See what's happening.

I don't know what it's going to be,

but it's going to be interesting."

♪♪

-Here, the Serious Fraud Office

has begun an investigation into the management

of pension funds at Mirror Group Newspapers.

It's feared that around £300 million

of pensioners' money could be missing.

-Mirror Group workers turned up

at their Holborn offices this morning

not knowing whether the pensions they had contributed to

for years would ever be paid in full or in part.

-This is a major scandal,

and the money will have to be accounted for.

Pensioners have paid for their moneys

and we expect to see it returned to us.

♪♪

-News of the shortfall in the Mirror Group's

pension fund has now pushed the Maxwell Empire

to the very brink of collapse.

Last night, Robert Maxwell's sons Ian and Kevin

resigned from their positions as chairman of the empire's

two pillars, Mirror Group Newspapers

and Maxwell Communications Corporation.

-Within three or four days,

the headline was Maxwell had stolen all the pension money.

The whole thing was just more surreal than surreal.

♪♪

-And what became clear very quickly was that it was a fraud

and that it had happened very, very fast --

really, most of it within the last 10 months

of Maxwell's life.

People wanted to know where the money had gone,

how this could have happened, and who was responsible.

-Now...

ladies and gentlemen,

inside here, no kidding, is exactly

£1 million in cash.

Isn't that nice? [ Applause ]

-The network of Maxwell companies

was very, very complicated,

partly with a view, I think, to keeping the world at bay

and not letting people see what's going on.

The actual fraud was very, very simple.

It's hard to get away from the statement that

Maxwell basically just took the money.

-Choose any package at all you like.

Now, you're happy with that packet?

It's heavy, isn't it?

Now, do you know why that's heavy?

And they put it back.

[ Laughter ]

You've got to watch.

-Maxwell's companies had massive debts,

billions of pounds.

He was really desperate for cash,

selling businesses where he could.

But it wasn't enough.

What he did in the following year

was to just grab big blocks of cash

that were sitting there, or pension fund shares

that could be sold very quickly, or the cash

that was in the bank accounts of his public companies

and take it.

-There it is, £1 million.

And we're going to lower it into this Perspex box here.

-The fact that he had powers to do that is shocking.

But he did have the power at that point

to remove the pension shares and still legally use it

to pay off the bankers of his private companies

who were beginning to panic on the assurance

that the money would come back.

That never happened.

-So what I want to know is this.

How the dickens did we get this

back inside it?

As large as life and still full of the money.

There it is.

Isn't that good? Whoa!

And I've always wanted to do this.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Amazing.

-The problem for a lot of the people dealing with Maxwell,

dealing really closely with Maxwell

for the last year of his life,

was that they were like the blind man and the elephant.

They could see a part of it

or they could feel a part of it, if you like,

but they couldn't see the whole thing.

And those who had their suspicions

were struggling to stop him.

-Lawrence was finance director of Mirror Group Newspapers.

He was a gentle man.

You couldn't have an argument with him.

He just was not that way inclined.

Some people thought he was shy, very determined, dogged.

There was no way if, you know,

if I asked him to do something and he hadn't planned to do it,

then there was no way it got done.

I think everyone found it very difficult working for Maxwell.

He had everybody at loggerheads

because if if everybody is at loggerheads with each other,

they're not going to threaten him.

-This is for private purposes, not for...

[ Indistinct conversation ]

♪♪

-I heard it described as a bit like the leader of a wolf pack.

♪♪

Lawrence was always wary of Maxwell.

But he began to suspect something was wrong

when the Mirror was floated on the stock market.

-On May 3rd, the Mirror Group will cease

to be a private company of media baron Robert Maxwell

and expects to raise £250 million

by selling its shares to investors and institutions.

-Whilst Maxwell continued his desperate efforts

to raise cash, Finance Director Lawrence Guest

noticed something worrying.

£38 million missing from the accounts.

He shared his concern on late night calls with his wife.

[ Receiver clicks ]

-But what Lawrence didn't know

was Maxwell was already one step ahead of him.

-I was head of security for Maxwell.

He had an expression that trust was like virginity.

You only lost it once.

And certainly, if a person was loyal,

he repaid that loyalty.

And he could be quite ruthless to people that were not giving

their all for him or were disloyal.

And he asked whether or not we could record

the telephone conversations to test to find out

whether or not this person was being disloyal to him.

And he needed to have -- he needed to find out.

As it turned out, the Finance Director,

Lawrence Guest, was one of the targets.

[ Static ]

[ Telephone rings ]

[ Static ]

[ Telephone rings ]

-Maxwell said to Lawrence,

"You don't need to worry anymore because it was out on loan"

and that it would be coming back,

but it didn't ever come back.

And although he mentioned it to auditors and merchant bankers,

nobody would -- didn't want to know, I guess is the answer.

You know, he was told, "We're not to worry.

It's not really your -- not your problem."

But as a finance director for PRC,

he certainly felt, with shareholders to account to,

he certainly felt that it was his responsibility and problem.

Life got very unreal, is about the only thing I can say.

Highly stressful.

And Lawrence was obviously highly stressed

and couldn't and didn't really want to believe,

you know, what was happening

or what he suspected was happening.

And what he suspected was that Maxwell

was taking money out of the Mirror

to pay off debts in his private companies.

But he couldn't prove it.

♪♪

♪♪

-Lawrence kept on knocking on his door

and banging away and saying, you know,

"What's happening to this money?

Belongs to the Mirror."

In the face of, really, you know, a tyrant.

But without success.

He felt time was running out.

So Lawrence wrote a memo to his fellow executives.

-I am now convinced that MGN resources

have been used to support other parts of the group,

but I have no proof.

I think that I frightened the Chairman,

but my main concern must be to get the money back.

I think I am in a situation that nothing more will flow out,

although I don't have the mechanism to stop it.

♪♪

[ Horns honking ]

-But what no one could see was that the missing £38 million

was just the tip of the iceberg.

Maxwell would go on to plunder more than £400 million,

and nobody had the power to stop him.

-The man I was working for told me

that they had had instructions from Maxwell

that the directors were not to meet each other

unless there was a Maxwell present,

i.e. Kevin or Ian or himself.

And so my bosses had these clandestine meetings,

and I knew they were passing notes around and not talking

because I found a few notes in the bin afterwards.

One of them I remember reading said, "He knows that we know."

♪♪

By that time, we all realised

that there was something going on.

He wasn't quite as he used to be.

He looked a bit dishevelled and a bit unkempt.

I noticed a couple of times he had a button off his shirt

and his eating habits

were really, really not very nice.

He just seemed to think he could do what he liked.

He was becoming very suspicious.

He wasn't trusting anyone.

I think it just reflects on how paranoid he was becoming.

♪♪

[ Applause ]

-At the Labour Party Conference in Brighton that year,

Lawrence was taken aside by one of the joint managing directors

and warned that it was advisable for Lawrence

and not to be travelling on public transport

and to take different routes to the office by car every day,

not to -- not to have a pattern.

♪♪

It was very frightening.

♪♪

And then suddenly,

he disappeared.

♪♪

By the time it came to the 5th of November,

it was Lawrence or it was Maxwell.

That was how I felt.

You know, one or the other of them had to go,

and to this day,

5th of November, when I hear fireworks,

takes me straight back.

Yeah, to the relief.

♪♪

♪♪

-Do you feel there is a terrible hatred

against your family in England?

Because, I mean, people are really being cruel right now.

-I'm not in England, so I don't know exactly.

It's very difficult for me to gauge

what the feelings are there,

but I'm sure that there are people who feel that way.

-Two years ago, the name Maxwell was like

power or money, everything.

-What do you feel right now

when you're carrying this name?

-I don't know. You tell me what you think.

I'm proud of it.

-I think I would still feel like a little bit anger

that my dad didn't even leave me one --

one security on this world.

-He was never going to leave us any money anyway

in the first place.

-I mean, do you really believe

that he didn't intend to leave you money?

-No. -Why is that?

-Just my father believes that

you got to make your own way in life.

♪♪

-These were sort of early days for Ghislaine

living in New York.

The only people I saw her with at the time were

bright Brits,

but by the time I saw her next,

she told me that she had just met someone

staggeringly important.

Jeffrey Epstein.

And they were dating.

And she told me that she was not only dating him,

but she was working for him

and that her job included running all of his properties.

The first thing she wanted you always to know about Jeffrey

was that he managed people's money

and he would not take anyone

who had less than $1 billion.

That was the kind of shorthand to let you know

that he was fantastically brilliant and talented.

♪♪

After the prospect of financial ruin after her father's death,

Jeffery represented

access to private planes and yachts and wealth,

and she would do anything in her power to please him.

But also it seemed like a bizarre echo of the dynamic

between Ghislaine and her father

that she was acting out with Epstein.

-Did she ever tell you about how she met Jeffrey?

-She never told me how she met Jeffrey Epstein.

And of course, we're all kind of dying to know now.

-There is a photo taken,

I believe, in the plaza ballroom

of Ghislaine,

and sitting next to Ghislaine at dinner

is Jeffrey Epstein.

And that picture was taken just under three weeks

after her father died.

Ghislaine is looking at Jeffrey Epstein adoringly.

They don't look like two people who've just met.

And I think they were already friends,

and that, in fact, Ghislaine went to New York

to see Jeffrey Epstein.

I've always thought to myself that there was a reason

why the relationship was kept so secret.

And I think it was in their interests

that this would never get out.

I was working in the city and I had some friends

who worked on Wall Street during that time,

and they heard that Jeffrey Epstein

and Robert Maxwell

had entered into an agreement before Robert Maxwell's death

whereby certain funds had been siphoned off,

because that's what Jeffrey Epstein

was doing at the time.

He was helping very rich people

park their money offshore to avoid tax.

When Robert Maxwell died,

Ghislaine was on the boat in Tenerife,

and I was told that she found some papers in his bedroom

where the name Jeffrey Epstein came up.

Ghislaine gave an instruction to the crew to shred all papers

which mentioned Jeffrey Epstein

and her father's connection to him.

♪♪

♪♪

-Here, the Serious Fraud Office

is investigating the movement of funds

out of the Maxwell pension funds

after the death of Robert Maxwell.

-What do you say about reports that some of the funds

from the Mirror pension went missing

after your father's death? -I have no comments on that.

-Can you comment on reports

in the paper this morning that moneys were still leaving

the Mirror pension fund after your father died?

-I can't comment on that. Thank you, goodnight.

-As the fraud investigation began to focus on Kevin and Ian,

my concern was more whether we were keeping up

fast enough with what was happening.

There was a sense of drama and momentum.

And then Kevin and Ian were called before

a House of Commons select committee

to answer questions on what they knew

about the missing pension funds.

♪♪

-Could I begin our proceedings in thanking both Kevin Maxwell

and Ian Maxwell in coming?

We begin by our witnesses

identifying themselves for the record.

Kevin Maxwell, will you introduce your table?

-Yes, my name is Kevin Maxwell, by profession a publisher.

On my right is Mr. George Carmen, QC.

-I'm Ian Maxwell.

On my left is my counsel, John Jarvis.

-Could you tell the committee which pension trust funds

you belong to and at what period?

[ Indistinct conversation ]

-I decline to answer.

[ Clears throat ]

-Kevin Maxwell, could I ask you the same question?

-Again, the answer will be given by my counsel.

-Position, Mr. Chairman, is, and I repeat it with force,

that we shall not answer any further questions

touching upon the pension funds,

and that position is made plain.

It will not be altered

however many questions this committee poses

this afternoon.

-Kevin and Ian were the two still left standing.

And I'm at home.

I lived in Chelsea, and I got a phone call,

and it said, "The cops are going to go and arrest Kevin.

You know where he lives?"

And so I got off at the crack of dawn

and went straight to Kevin's gate.

And then the cops arrived, plainclothes boys.

"Morning, gentlemen."

And they walked up the path,

and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on the door.

And Pandora, Kevin's wife, throws open the upstairs window.

[ Window opens ]

-Piss off. He don't get up for an hour.

[ Doorbell ringing ]

I am about to call the police.

-We are the police. Can you open your door?

-[ Laughs ]

So next thing is Kevin's laid out,

you know, and taken away, arrested.

-Hours later at Snow Hill Police Station,

just a few hundred yards from the hub of

the failed Robert Maxwell empire,

the men were charged.

After trial by rumor, a trial by innuendo,

I am really looking forward to being able to

defend myself in a court of law,

where I intend to vigourously

and strenuously contest all and any charges against me.

Thank you.

♪♪

-Enough!

Thank you.

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

[ Indistinct conversation ]

-In the run up to the criminal trial,

Kevin Maxwell, like his father before him, turns to the media.

-30 coming on commercial paper.

-He invites cameras behind the scenes

to tell his side of the story.

-The Gallup poll was commissioned by the defence

to provide evidence

of what the public thought about the defendants.

It was deeply shocking to think

that there were just millions of people out there

who thought I was a complete bastard.

I don't think there's any possibility of finding 12 people

who won't have already made their minds up about my father,

who won't already have decided that he's a crook,

who won't be able to come into the court

and put all that stuff out of their minds.

-[ Speaks indistinctly ]

-And warranted profitability.

Have increased to 2 -- what is it?

-What upsets me the most is this notion that my father and I

and other people would sit around a table plotting

to rob old-age pensioners.

It is the most obscene idea.

Am I guilty of bad business judgement?

Yes. Could we have done things differently?

Yes. Should we have done things differently?

Yes. Was it criminal?

No.

♪♪

-Robert Maxwell's sons Kevin and Ian

have denied conspiring

to defraud their company's pension scheme

at the start of their trial in London.

They're accused of dishonestly using pension fund shares

in an attempt to rescue the indebted Maxwell Group.

-The sheer size of the case was enormous.

I mean, I remember it being portrayed in the media

covering the case at the time as the case of the century.

I felt completely prepared,

and that the allegations we made was entirely sustainable.

-Kevin Maxwell arrived at court to hear himself described

by the prosecution as the man most responsible

for the misuse of pension fund assets.

-The trial was complicated.

And I think the prosecutors were very conscious of the fact

there've been quite a lot of white-collar crime trials

that were perceived to be very, very complicated

and with a lot of worry about whether juries could cope

with the complexity and the length of these trials.

And so they broke it into half a dozen pieces,

different bits of fraud, if you like.

♪♪

A lot of this was going to turn on knowledge

of the whole picture, because at that point,

almost all of the movements of money,

including movements of money and shares out of the pension funds,

those weren't illegal, and were only illegal

if the person doing that

knew that the money couldn't come back.

And so the prosecutors

were going to need to rely, at some point,

on knowledge of the whole picture realisation

that the money wasn't there.

-Kevin's defence was that he believed

the shares were legitimately owned by the Maxwell companies

because his father had told him so.

The case continues tomorrow.

-Kevin spent 21 days in the witness box.

The ordeal, the pressure of that

is is almost impossible to understand.

But 21 days consecutively of the world's focus

on everything you say, how you say it is a scrutiny

that I would not personally relish.

-Jurors in the trial of Kevin and Ian Maxwell

have retired to consider their verdicts.

They've heard from 70 witnesses over the past eight months.

♪♪

-You hate the sound of the phone ringing

because that's the only -- that's the message

to summon you back to court.

To every call, I think, "Is that the one?"

It's very nerve-racking. You don't know

if you're being convicted and going to prison

or going home.

-The jury were out, I think, for 11 days.

And it's a long, concerning wait.

♪♪

I got a phone call from the law clerk.

The jury had reached verdicts.

♪♪

♪♪

-I am very pleased and relieved by my acquittal.

I gave evidence in this trial over a period of 21 days.

In his summing up,

the judge said he thought no jury

had had a better opportunity

of assessing the honesty of a witness than in my case.

-Kevin and Ian had a horrendous legacy.

Their father always vowed that he would give them nothing.

No doubt they wish their inheritance

had been that benign.

-I think any father-son relationship is a complex one,

and I haven't worked it out yet.

I still think of him with an immense amount of fondness,

irrespective of the problems and irrespective

of the aftermath of the crash.

I find it very difficult to blame him for it.

♪♪

♪♪

-I remember I was at an art opening,

and I ran into Ghislaine, and she seemed very kind of...

...not stressed out exactly, but in a sort of

froth of excitement and purpose.

And she's...

"I'm going to introduce you to Jeffrey,"

as if, you know, "Watch out.

You're about to meet the president of the United States."

So she introduced me to him.

What I noticed was a sort of a permanent smirk,

as if he had access to information

and funds and intelligence

that you could not possibly fathom.

♪♪

And the next time I met him was a deeply weird situation.

Ghislaine hired me to write a song

and perform it for Jeffrey Epstein's 40th birthday.

But Ghislaine was very insistent

I could tell no one about this assignment.

I could only talk to her.

She would provide me with the information.

But it had to have these lines.

It had to -- One of them had to be that

Ghislaine claims he has 24-hour erections.

One of the verses had to be something about

when he was a schoolteacher at Dalton School,

he was the subject of many schoolgirl crushes,

and she seemed to know that that would amuse him tremendously

and that it would also resonate with his friends

who would be there for this party.

♪♪

So I arrived at this house,

this giant house, that seemed deeply mysterious.

I was ushered into the kitchen.

I think there was six guys wearing black tie.

And it was just a power group

who were Epstein's closest associates.

And it was after dinner and they were smoking cigars

and drinking brandy.

And I had to do this sort of roast of Epstein.

♪♪

♪♪

Everyone sort of roared with laughter

because they seemed to know him extremely well.

But there was a strange rumour going around the room.

He likes younger women,

and Ghislaine introduces him to younger women.

It seemed, I mean,

profoundly weird.

At the time, I have to say that it just seemed deeply weird,

but not -- it didn't seem sinister at the time.

I guess we were being very naive, extremely naive,

and in retrospect, horrifyingly naive.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested by the FBI,

charged with grooming girls as young as 14.

-The scale of the sex trafficking operation

is astronomical.

-It was just like a factory.

He was running a machine, and she was the one

operating it.

-This is the trial of the century.

-Our sister is presumed innocent

until a verdict comes in.

-We're not gonna answer any questions.

-Ghislaine knew what was going to happen to me.

The world shifted for me that day.

-What do you know, Ghislaine Maxwell?

What do you know?

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪