Interesting article in the Times today which seems to suggest Andrew hopes to benefit from the prison interview with Maxwell in some way and thinks it helps his case. It would appear as he stews in isolation apparently binge watching tv he seems to have constructed in his mind another cunning plan to escape his past which is doubling down on the car crash interview he previously did. If he does go to court (and it was televised) it would most certainly be the case of the century and blow the Amber Heard one right out of the water.
Frankly I don't believe that any other royals will be encouraging this indeed it will be the opposite. But in private they may think these were slutty little gold diggers putting their tentacles in to the private entitled lives of the 'great and the good' for their own impecunious ends and is an affront and that Andrew has been hard done by.
One gets the impression that Andrew is a sex addict who probably has had 100s if not thousands of sexual partners which in 99% of the time were willing accomplices paid or otherwise and this insatiable appeteite for sex (and money) led him straight into Epstein's honey trap.
tldr;
The prospect of Andrew challenging the settlement he made last year has been dismissed by many lawyers. Mark Stephens, a partner at Howard Kennedy and expert in defamation management, has long followed this case and talked with Dershowitz.
“The bottom line here is Andrew hasn’t got a prayer of undoing this settlement,” Stephens told me. “He made a decision with the benefit of specialist legal advice to settle this case,” says Stephens, who says only extreme circumstances can challenge this kind of contract.
“He did so because there was a huge amount of opprobrium being heaped upon him . . . the chances of it being reopened are vanishing to infinitesimally small. And I don’t think that this will be troubling Virginia Giuffre or her lawyers or anyone else.”
Will Prince Andrew rue Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘help’?
The former socialite and convicted sex trafficker has given an interview from prison in defence of her old friend — but will it backfire, asks Helen Rumbelow
Monday January 23 2023, 9.30pm GMT, The Times
The camera captures Ghislaine Maxwell in close-up. At 61 she has let her trademark black crop grow out and she fiddles with it frequently, fluffing and rearranging it as she does her memories of her long years as a sex trafficker for Jeffrey Epstein.
She speaks with a light upper-class drawl, often sleepily, as if it’s nearly lights-out time back at Marlborough College. Her khaki shirt peeks into frame, almost a chic summer button-down of the kind Maxwell may have worn when invited with Epstein to holiday at Balmoral by Prince Andrew.
It is actually the regulation baggy shirt and khaki trousers of the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee, Florida, and behind her is a wall painted with a depressingly childish mural of a park, Maxwell’s only taste of freedom in prospect after being sentenced to 20 years in this jail.
There seems to be no sign that her incarceration has led her to reflect on her pattern of blind support for powerful and powerfully amoral men, from her father, the press tycoon Robert Maxwell, to Epstein, both extremely wealthy and disgraced.
This is Maxwell’s interview in defence of Andrew, recorded just over three years after his attempt at self-defence, an encounter on Newsnight with Emily Maitlis, its presenter then, in very different circumstances.
Andrew invited Maitlis into a grand hall in an upper room at Buckingham Palace. He was overly confident that a sit-down with the BBC journalist, ornate chairs pulled up chummily close on a historic rug, would clear up the sorry business of Virginia Giuffre’s allegations of sex offences against him.
Two make-good interviews, one by Andrew in Buckingham Palace in November 2019, and one by Ghislaine Maxwell in the Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee, in December 2022 but shown in an exclusive with the Jeremy Kyle show on Talk TV last night, both covering the tangled web drawn between Maxwell, her friend Andrew, and her lover and partner in crime Epstein. Both backfire.
Maxwell has said that she has been unfairly portrayed as “the cruellest, meanest, most poisonous person” for her involvement with Epstein. Instead of an apology to her victims, she said “time is ticking on” and urged them to “have a productive and free life going forward”.
“I say Epstein has died and they should take their disappointment and upset out on the authorities who allowed that to happen,” she said.
One incontrovertible issue with Andrew has been misjudgments around “who you know”: case in point, the convicted paedophile Epstein. With the weekend’s talk of King Charles’s coronation plans for later this year and whether there was capacity for Andrew to play a greater role in them, the prince may have thought the timing of this Maxwell interview was excellent.
In it Maxwell stays loyal to her royal friend, who said in his Maitlis interview the pair met while she was at Oxford more than 40 years ago. Maxwell insists that the photo of Andrew with Giuffre was a “fake” — “I don’t believe it’s real for a second” — and casts doubt on Giuffre’s account of a sexual encounter with Andrew in London after a visit to the nightclub Tramp. “Her stories have changed so many times,” Maxwell says.
“Certainly I don’t have any memory of going to Tramp [nightclub], certainly not in the house [where the photograph was allegedly taken].”
So here was an Andrew defender, bullish and uncontrite. Would this even embolden Andrew to revisit the terms of his 2022 multimillion-pound settlement with Giuffre? Especially since Giuffre dropped a lawsuit against Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard law professor, accused on similar grounds by Giuffre, late last year. Daphne Barak is the celebrity interviewer who secured this rare interview of Maxwell, and also says she is close to Andrew’s circle. She is asked by Kyle if Andrew is “delighted” at Maxwell’s intervention.
“I wouldn’t say delighted, I would say relieved,” Barak replies. “Somebody is supporting his truth, someone with knowledge, someone who was there,” she says.
When asked why Maxwell had given this rare interview, Barak responded: “The fact that it will help Prince Andrew.”
“I am very close to the most close people to him,” Barak says. “There is a feeling right now that he settled too quickly, he might have misunderstood that when he gave up the titles that they would not be given back to him. It’s a tough reality for him. If indeed he was forced to settle for something he didn’t do . . . is something that is being considered legally right now, that is something I can definitely confirm.”
Let’s pass quickly over the “tough reality” that Andrew has to endure to see that again: misjudgment about “who you know” is a problem here. We know that Maxwell is a convicted sex trafficker. The victims who gave evidence at her trial will no doubt question the taste of a prison interview in which she fails again to show remorse. It is hard to hear Maxwell whinge about the “meat-free” menu options, “the tofu has no seasoning”, Maxwell says.
Rather than bolster Andrew’s bid to wear the full tassel of military dress uniform again, King Charles may notice that Maxwell’s interview serves to remind his subjects of a painful subject. Prince Harry’s recent revelations had provided something of a distraction: Andrew being defended on the Jeremy Kyle show brings everyone back up to speed.
However, there is a deeper problem with Maxwell. The entire modus operandi of her life has been in servicing men with powerful reputations. What is interesting is how this method persists, even when the financial or emotional quid pro quo have vanished.
First, the prospect of Andrew challenging the settlement he made last year has been dismissed by many lawyers. Mark Stephens, a partner at Howard Kennedy and expert in defamation management, has long followed this case and talked with Dershowitz.
“The bottom line here is Andrew hasn’t got a prayer of undoing this settlement,” Stephens told me. “He made a decision with the benefit of specialist legal advice to settle this case,” says Stephens, who says only extreme circumstances can challenge this kind of contract.
“He did so because there was a huge amount of opprobrium being heaped upon him . . . the chances of it being reopened are vanishing to infinitesimally small. And I don’t think that this will be troubling Virginia Giuffre or her lawyers or anyone else.”
Why would Maxwell continue to press the case for Andrew? Barak says Maxwell hopes to appeal her conviction at the end of this month, although according to reports she is struggling to pay her legal team. Stephens believes that the “obvious thing” is she “may feel she is rehabilitating” her reputation by rehabilitating Andrew’s.
Yet when Maxwell talks in these interviews, it is in slow, vague terms. When talking of Andrew she does not use his name, despite their association going back decades.
When talking about Epstein she also avoids saying his name, and if forced uses his surname. When Barak presses Maxwell on her mistakes, she says her mistake was to meet Epstein, as if beyond that point she was powerless or unaccountable.
It is psychologically revealing that she says, “I feel completely divorced from the person that people reference and talk about.”
In December 2021 Maxwell’s brother Ian wrote in her defence in The Spectator, “Ghislaine was born to tragedy”, describing how, 48 hours after her birth, her oldest brother, Michael, then aged 15, was hit by a lorry and “all but killed”. He remained in a coma before dying seven years later. She was, said Ian, “hardly given a glance so profound” was their parents’ grief. “One day when she was about three, she planted herself in front of our mother and said simply ‘Mummy, I exist’.”
Her father, the owner of the Daily Mirror, was a bully at home, at the 51-room Headington Hill Hall near Oxford, and at work. John Sweeney has followed Maxwell’s story for years through his Hunting Ghislaine podcast and book: he reveals Robert Maxwell urinated from his helipad atop the Daily Mirror building onto people below.
The other children rebelled or retreated but her strategy was to wheedle her way into his affections. It required becoming a sponge to soak up behaviour. Ghislaine was rewarded by becoming her father’s favourite: the private yacht from which Robert Maxwell would make his fatal fall was named Lady Ghislaine.
“Her father was a monster,” Sweeney told me. “A horrible human being who abused her psychologically and emotionally. Therefore she’s a victim. But she has never wanted to join the dots and say, ‘Although I was a victim, I did wrong’.”
So what she ends up saying is, ‘I have done no wrong’. And the problem is the evidence,” Sweeney says. It was shown in court that she received about $30 million from Epstein for services rendered. “That’s a lot of money to be a PA,” Sweeney says.
“Her denial of her guilt is at this point baffling,” Sweeney says. “What was awful about the trial was she also got her fancy and expensive lawyers to monster these women who were quietly but devastatingly accusing of her.”
Sweeney says she learnt her approach to exposure from her father. “Her father had a fundamentally dishonest and disconnected approach to reality when he was accused of lying, he would repeatedly tell lie upon lie, in a way that made no sense. She’s doing the same thing. She talks from her prison cell about going to Ukraine, which makes no sense.”
“Why is she in prison? Because she’s utterly denied the fact that the man she loved and the man she worked for who gave her 30 million dollars was a paedophile,” Sweeney says. “I feel sorry for her because she’s disconnected from reality, but she wasn’t disconnected enough from reality to bank the 30 million. Did she not think about those kids who came to Epstein, leaving in tears, again and again?”
Who knows if the Windsors had the stomach to watch the convict Maxwell give her defence of Uncle Andrew last night. Barak reported that Maxwell “looks good”, she is healthy and allowed make-up in prison, which must reassure the women whose lives she helped to ruin. But sometimes in the interview Maxwell tips her head forward, and the camera catches a glimpse of her grey roots. And it makes you wonder, what’s going on in her head, beneath the cover-ups?