Dear Gossips, 

Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, as you know, in New Hampshire yesterday, after maintaining a very, very low profile for almost a year. According to FBI New York Assistant Director in Charge William Sweeney:

"We learned she had slithered away to a gorgeous property in New Hampshire, continuing to live a live a life of privilege while her victims continue to live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago. We moved when we were ready and Ms. Maxwell was arrested without incident.”

 

It’s an interesting choice of words – “slithered” – deliberately used here to characterise Ghislaine Maxwell as a snake. Snakes have a dark reputation. Describing someone as a snake means they can’t be trusted, that they’re evil… but also cunning. And slippery. Ghislaine Maxwell tried to slip away, slither away, and of course it’s much easier to do when you have that much money. Authorities revealed yesterday that she moved as much as $20 million around across as many as 15 bank accounts. Though it’s not clear how she got her money, the New Hampshire property was purchased in cash and her identity camouflaged behind a limited liability corporation. Ghislaine Maxwell was good at keeping Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets and just as good at self-preservation. How will she preserve herself now that she’s in custody, charged with all kinds of heinous crimes? 

Prosecutors not only want to hold her accountable, but they also want to know what she knows… and who she knows. If a deal is eventually put on the table then, what does that look like? And who’ll be a part of it? 

 

This case, obviously, isn’t just about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Many people are also wondering about the timing, considering that US Attorney General William Barr pushed Geoffrey Berman, United States District Attorney for the Southern District of New York out just two weeks ago. Geoffrey Berman has been “at the forefront of corruption inquiries into [Donald] Trump’s inner circle”. Word is the Trump administration was trying to install their own preferred candidate, Jay Clayton, as his replacement which ended up backfiring and Geoffrey Berman ended up endorsing Audrey Strauss, who led the Ghislaine Maxwell press conference yesterday, to step in as acting US District Attorney. The point is, there are a lot of people who think the stretch of this stink is vast. It’ll just keep wafting all over the place, from New York to DC to Florida, across the Atlantic, and all the way to Buckingham Palace and beyond. 

One of my favourite questions: coincidence or conspiracy?

 

And we haven’t even gotten to Prince Andrew yet. He’s known Ghislaine Maxwell for a long, long time. During his interview with Emily Maitlis for BBC Newsnight last November, the interview that precipitated his forced retirement, he said that he’d last seen Ghislaine in the spring/summer of 2019. Not that long ago! She was the one who introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein. She was the one who was pictured with him as he had his arm around Virginia Roberts Guiffre, then 17 years old. If they’re digging up all of Ghislaine’s accounts, her documents, her emails, etc, how much correspondence exists between her and Prince Andrew? And what’s in that correspondence? 

During Audrey Strauss’s press conference yesterday confirming the Southern District of New York’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew came up, as Strauss announced: 

“I’m not going to comment on anyone’s status in this investigation but I will say that we would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk with us, we would like to have the benefit of his statement. I have no further comment beyond what I just said, which is that our doors remain open, as we previously said, and we would welcome him coming in and giving us an opportunity to hear his statement.”

There’s another one of the Prince Andrew highlight reel. What an accomplishment – for a member of the British royal family to come up during a press conference about an alleged sex trafficker. Here’s another one: while his mother’s face appears on bank notes across the globe, Andrew’s face showed up in Shoreditch on a mural. 

Prince Andrew mural
A mural of Prince Andrew, Duke of York is seen in Shoreditch on July 1, 2020 in London, England (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Yours in gossip,

Lainey