Ghislaine Spilled More Than You Think

It’s not everything we wanted, but she offered NEW insight into overlooked corners of the scandal. Mostly, Todd Blanche is to blame.

Aug 30, 2025

“A Man Wants Sexual Favors, He will Find Them. They Didn't Have To Come To Epstein For That.”

Last week, the DOJ released six hours of audio from the interview deputy attorney general Todd Blanche conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell in Florida at the end of July. Days later, she was relocated from FCI Tallahassee, a low-security federal prison for women in Florida, to the Federal Prison Camp Bryan, Texas—a minimum-security prison camp.

I spent last weekend and much of this week listening and extracting the most revealing and curious excerpts. Blanche was motivated in his questioning by his own objectives, but as he sought to get Maxwell on the record about the topics he wanted to cover, he uncovered much more, though you would never know it based on coverage from most mainstream media sources. Among the strangest aspects of the DOJ tapes of Blanche and Maxwell is that they are almost hiding in plain sight. Most coverage has focused on her plea for a pardon and her praise for the president. Almost no coverage reflected any real effort to listen to what she had to say, or to make sense of it, or to take her seriously at all.

Maxwell emphasized that the interview with Blanche, three years into her incarceration, was the first time anyone from the government had asked her anything at all. The meeting came at her request. Her recollections sketch a surreal map of global power networks, a goldmine of gossip and intrigue with implications that span the highest levels of governments, monarchies, business, and elite society. Anyone pretending not to know her is exposed.

Maxwell dished on Epstein’s erectile dysfunction, her suspicion that he never loved her, Fergie’s crush on him, Diana supposedly set up with him. She insinuated there was more to the relationship between Epstein and Lex Wexner, a major point of interest in various theories and conspiracies. She denied hiring underage women and observed how #MeToo warped ideas around burdens of proof and guilt and innocence. She described the women around Epstein as pleased to be with him. At turns, she defended him, but she condemned him, too. She described his perversions as a “slide,” a progression from which the man she first met became the man condemned by the world and the justice system as a predator. Still, she insisted he was not “creepy” in a way that rose to the level of criminality. She complimented his business acumen and intellect. It was complicated, is what it sounded like. It was a real relationship.

After three years studying Maxwell, trying to understand the woman she was before Epstein and who she is in his absence, the interview affirmed my view of her as a figure shaped by layered, generational trauma—imperceptible to those who looked at her and saw just a privileged high society heiress engulfed in scandal—and almost fated for downfall once seduced by a manipulative man.

In the interview, Maxwell was candid, captivating, and as charming as we had been warned. She made clear that she once deeply loved Epstein. She had wanted to marry him and imagined a family with him—a dream he encouraged enough to string her along but never intended to fulfill. Her choices are not relatable to most. But do you have to personally relate to someone in order to understand them? I don’t think so. To me, her story reveals how grossly the media misrepresents people once they are turned into characters, how easily a person flattened in this manner becomes a villain, and how important it is to consult source material when forming your opinions about anyone involved in alleged crimes or confirmed scandals. Especially on this scale. The media narratives are designed to be consumed fast and sustained easily. Nuance is harder to cram into a headline or a viral takedown. Complication takes time to fully appreciate. When we decline to assess anything with that kind of care, we don’t just do a disservice to the people involved in the story, but to ourselves, because we are robbed of a more accurate understanding of our complicated world.

As Epstein’s understudy, Maxwell was rarely afforded nuanced analysis. In documentaries and articles, familiar sources paint her as a money-hungry femme fatale, a cold and narcissistic figure incapable of love, or a calculating socialite who squandered an Oxford education to serve as fixer for a predatory man—one who promised the fortune and status she lost when her father’s crimes erased her inheritance. After his death, Maxwell worked relentlessly. She launched several ventures and managed all of Epstein’s estates. At her trial, jurors saw the meticulous house manuals she drafted—evidence of her remarkable skill at management. Her own words about her experience function as a kind of psychological x-ray, revealing a woman who lived multiple lives, seduced entire cultural spheres, and replayed the patterns of her family history.

Through his questions and approach, Blanche revealed himself and the DOJ, too. He treated the interrogation like a tea party—albeit one hosted by a cautious, stale lawyer. He displayed a total lack of curiosity and insufficient knowledge on the subject matter. He fumbled questions and failed to follow up on details about which Maxwell clearly wanted to expand. For instance, she mentioned three times a sexual condition that limited “a lot of intercourse,” and he never asked for more information. She insisted her father did not work for the Mossad and had never met Epstein, a counter to the accusations of blackmail, yet she said she believes Epstein was murdered. By who? We don’t know. Blanche asked but Maxwell did not name any direct suspects. He could have pressed this harder. Blanche also struggled to understand why she was valuable to Bill Clinton. It took her finally stating that Clinton “really liked” her before he registered the obvious implication. They were involved sexually. Her “value” varied.

If the DOJ had wanted to conduct a more productive interview with Maxwell, they should have sent a woman. Instead, Blanche’s performance communicates that his objectives were not to obtain more information in the public interest but to absolve Donald Trump and anyone connected to his administration.

On the subject of Trump, Maxwell said she admired his extraordinary achievement in becoming president. She liked him and has always liked him. Her father loved him.

“I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” she stated.

After Maxwell’s arrest in 2020, Trump was asked if he expected her to make public the identifies of men accused of wrongdoing in connection to the crimes alleged against her and Epstein, who had died the year prior while incarcerated. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.” He added, “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach… But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

Epstein Tapes: “I Was Donald Trump’s Closest Friend”

In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.” By 2019, their fates had taken wildly different trajectories: Epstein was in jail and Trump was in the White House. The president downplayed their association. He knew him, he said, “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” He added, “I had a falling-out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” The following month, Epstein was dead.

In late July, Trump told reporters at the White House that he had not considered a pardon for Maxwell. “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about,” he said.

A few days later, he was pressed on the issue again. “Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it,” he said. “Right now, though, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”

Still, sources close to the matter suggest that some kind of deal may already be in place.

Before his death, Robert Maxwell had hoped his youngest daughter would marry into another powerful family, strengthening the Maxwell brand. He reportedly had his eye on a Kennedy match. According to tabloid records, Ghislaine tried.

In the audio, she disclosed close relationships with several members of the Kennedy family. She laughed, subtly confirming a rumored fling with JFK Jr. Blanche was not very interested. Sticking to precise questions, he made it clear he aimed to also absolve Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and in that way, further protect the administration in which he serves as a cabinet secretary. Had Blanche been more knowledgeable, he might have done a better job. Instead, he led Maxwell to reveal information that contradicted what RFK has said in the past.

Over the past year, RFK Jr. has made inconsistent claims about his association with Epstein and Maxwell, but he has always attributed any connection to his wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died in 2012.

“My wife had some kind of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell,” he told Fox News in 2023. But Maxwell was already enmeshed with the Kennedy family before that marriage. She attended Kerry Kennedy’s 1990 wedding to Andrew Cuomo, and in my conversations with sources familiar with the family, Maxwell was described as a frequent presence around RFK Jr. and Mary. Like Ivana and Donald Trump, both appeared in Epstein’s Rolodex. The Clintons, curiously, did not.

When I asked about his connection to Maxwell, Bobby told me the same story he shared later on a podcast. He first claimed, in a 2023 interview with Newsweek, to have flown on Epstein’s plane once. Then he amended that claim a month later, saying he had flown on Epstein’s plane twice. Both trips—one to South Dakota and one to Florida—were taken with his wife and children, he has insisted, and he never flew with Epstein alone. In his telling, he first spoke to Epstein on one of these flights, and he became suspicious about how a math teacher became so well connected and so wealthy. Yet he has also claimed that one of these flights took place in 1993, when he was still married to his first wife, Emily Ruth Black, and that four of his children were onboard, though his fourth child was not born until 1995.

It was also in 1993 that Epstein gave RFK Jr. access to his Madison Avenue office. According to the New York Post, citing family friend Christina Oxenberg, when RFK Jr. enlisted her to help produce a charity event, he told her, “‘I already borrowed an office for you to work from.’” The office was a shared workspace, and Epstein and Maxwell were often there, according to Oxenberg. In her telling, it was RFK Jr., not his wife, who received the invitation to fly to South Dakota. “Maxwell told Oxenberg that she had arranged for Kennedy to take a ride in Epstein’s private jet. ‘Ghislaine made a point of telling me she had arranged to take Bobby Kennedy Jr. on a day trip in the plane,’” said the New York Post.

Maxwell resurfaced in the Kennedy orbit years later. She was photographed at Mary Richardson Kennedy’s 2012 memorial hosted by the Kennedys, though not at the separate service held by Mary’s family. Two years later, in 2014, RFK Jr. was photographed at Maxwell’s NYC home for a fundraiser.

“Some kind of relationship”—the phrase implies almost total unfamiliarity, as if they were barely friends at all, and not close enough for RFK Jr. to know much about Maxwell or Epstein. Yet the facts suggest otherwise.

Maxwell told Blanche about her relationships with other powerful men who later tried to erase her from their stories. I was told that Ted Waitt even hired an Israeli firm to scrub photos of him with her in the weeks before her arrest. She mentioned her ties to the Cuomo brothers and recalled hosting a birthday party for Sergey Brin, with Elon Musk among the guests. She spoke of Musk as a familiar connection rather than a passing acquaintance, as he has stated.

Her reflections reveal not just proximity to power but the gravitational pull she exerted across politics, technology, and culture.

Listening to the DOJ tapes, I came away thinking that Maxwell was less an accessory to Epstein than a reflection of the world she inhabited, with all its hungers, hypocrisies, and compulsions.

In my opinion, the interview is a lens through which we can examine that world, which, like it or not, shapes our culture and government in ways both unseen and overt. All of that is there to hear in Maxwell’s own words. To anyone willing to listen.

Robert Maxwell On Donald Trump

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much. And I think, should be said that he also very much liked Ivana, because she was also from Czechoslovakia where my dad was from.”

BLANCHE: Whatever money or whatever equity was in the businesses, just stayed with your other family members?

MAXWELL: No, there was no money. So my father was never attached to money. He was born a peasant, a real one. Dirt floor, no shoes, no clothes -- some clothes, but not, you know, sorry, I don't mean to say -- nothing. And he never -- he was never into that. I mean, there were things that he had his extravagances, he loved his boat and his plane. So obviously you need money for that. But there was no, nothing else. And there was not a single penny that came to any of us, at any time, ever.

Robert Maxwell As Intelligence

Maxwell: And then the debacle of my father's passing hit the family. And -- and we lost all our businesses and my family thought that it would be best if I stayed in America, because of the intensity of the press and the drama surrounding my father's death in England. So I stayed and Epstein said, well, you can keep helping me. You can help me find a house and we can decorate the house. And it gave me something to do.

Todd Blanche: Were you in a romantic relationship with him at this point, or just friends?

Maxwell: No, just friends.

BLANCHE: And with respect to your father, there have been multiple questions about whether he worked for any intelligence agency. Do you have any knowledge about that?

MAXWELL: I think—well, certainly my father had a background in intelligence during the Second World War. He was a British intelligence officer. My belief is that once you’ve been an intelligence officer, you’re kind of always one; it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re formally employed. I don’t think my dad, in any formal sense, was employed by any agency. But when you are a very significant businessman and politician, as my father was, you meet people over time, and you trade business or ideas. If that would fall under that definition, that’s how I would describe it.

On Robert Maxwell Meeting Epstein

MAXWELL: I know they never met.

BLANCHE: Well, how do you know they never met?

MAXWELL: They — just categorically know they never met. Well, because after, in 1991, before my father died, he asked me if I'd met anybody interesting or whatever, you know, because I was still trying not to be sucked back into the family business. And I told him that I had met Mr. Epstein. And the reason why I shared that I'd met Mr. Epstein, because I believed, at that time, that Epstein worked for Bear Stearns. And Bear Stearns was one of our banks. And I knew that my father was friendly with both Jimmy Cayne and with Ace Greenberg. So my dad came -- was actually in New York, I think. If I remem- -- I may -- I don't think I had this conversation on the phone, but I --I honestly we're talking 30 years ago, so I'm not sure. But if I -- I maybe I told him this verbatim, because it happened -- I know that what my dad did, whether I saw it or whether I -- he did it and told me later I -- that I don't remember. But he called both Jimmy Cayne and Ace Greenberg to ask if -- what sort of guy he was and was he even allowed to -- because (indiscernible) so . . .

BLANCHE: So they never -- they never met.

MAXWELL: He didn't even know who he was.”

Ghislaine’s First Impression of Epstein

MAXWELL: I — he just invited me to come and have tea, and I was like tea, that's English. Okay. But what was unusual, was in his offices. So I went to his offices and we met. And I found him very engaging and that was that.

Maxwell’s Salary

MAXWELL: And I didn't know that he had any money. It was like, I want to say it was $12,000 a month, which to me seemed like a fortune. And I said to myself, I found this house, but I don't think you can afford it. He was like, that's ridiculous. Of course I can afford, and he rented it. And that house came with -- it was a State Department house, because it was -- I think that was under sequestration or whatever it was. And I -- I put it back together, but there were certain rules, you couldn't paint, because it had to go back and he gave it back to the country.

So he had this house and I had moved into a 10 foot by 10 foot apartment, because all of our stuff had been either lost or frozen or -- or whatever. So he became, in this moment, my life line, really, because I was -- everything was --felt very similar to this moment, if that makes sense.

On Epstein’s Heart Condition

BLANCHE: A heart condition? Okay.

MAXWELL: Which meant that he didn't have intercourse a lot, which suited me fine, because I actually do have a medical condition, which precludes me having a lot of intercourse.

BLANCHE: So what -- what was your understanding of his heart condition and why that prevented him from having intercourse regularly?

MAXWELL: I don't know. I mean, he liked other forms of sexual activities.

Leaked emails show Epstein’s attempts to dabble in security tech—across borders—in the last years of his life.

Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Spy Industry Connections

“The emails below, which have not been published elsewhere, paint a picture of Epstein as a man very eager to be at the nexus between private money and public surveillance. While they were hammering out the Reporty investment, Epstein invited Barak to come to a meeting with Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and the surveillance contractor Palantir, in May 2014. Although Barak couldn't make that meeting, Epstein insisted that Barak "spend real time with peter thiel [sic]" and offered to set up a dinner the following month.”

Zorro Ranch

MAXWELL: So the ranch was very challenging, because not only that, but it had BLM land, so to help maintain your BLM, you have to have cattle and I love animals. And so the first thing, horses. And so I wanted it, if you're going to have a ranch, I like authenticity. And so I don't think you should have a ranch if you're not going to have the things that make it special.

9/11 Changed Everything

MAXWELL: Other girlfriends. I definitively knew that it was over after 9/11, actually, because we were both in New York and I don't know, were you in New York on 9/11? I mean, 9/11 ...And it was a scary time if you were in New York. You didn't know, I didn't know, nobody knew what was going on. And he was in 71st Street and I was in 65th Street, my house. And he wouldn't see me at all. Asked me, his mum, who I'm very close to, who's in hospital at Lennox Hill, just asked me to look after her. And then I knew, as anyone did at that time, if you're not going to be there for someone in 9/11, you're never going to be there. So for me, that was the line's end. And he had another English girlfriend actually, from 2000.

BLANCHE: Okay. So — so go ahead. So what — what — at that point, when you say you realized kind of it was over?

MAXWELL: Well, I mean, I'm talking about the — the — I had had, there was a —I had wanted to get married and have children.

And Epstein had encouraged me to believe that that would -- I don't know about the --certainly by the mid late '90s, I knew the marriage part was never going to happen. I had believed that maybe in '96, '97, '98 maybe, but then I realized it wasn't that. But I did think that we might have a child, which is what I had really wanted. And I realized …

Moving On

MAXWELL: So we stopped having physicality. I mean, that doesn't mean we weren't friends. I certainly did stay, sometimes, in his room. I mean, friends with benefits, if you will, just not sex. Sorry.

And I started dating.

And I met someone that I fell very much in love with in 2003. His name was Ted Waitt. Ted Waitt, you may know as the founder of Gateway, the computers. And we had an amazing relationship that ended in -- went on until 2010, I think. And I was with Ted from that time.

GM on Epstein: “He was useless at maintaining relationships with people who worked for him, I'm not.”

Epstein’s Email to Maxwell 2015

Blackmail / Home Surveillance

MAXWELL: So even, let's assume that that premise is correct, that he was doing that and he was going to tell everybody, going to say, "oh, you know, you had inappropriate relations with an underage girl." If you don't have a video or photograph, photographic evidence, because I -- I'm not sure that even the FBI would take that. Well, maybe today, but certainly not back then, would take that seriously. So you have to have something to say, "Hey, you know, look, I've got this video of you doing terrible things and you need to." So I built those houses, many of them. I decorated those houses. I put the electricians in for the wiring. I never wired, nor saw, a single house that had any type of inappropriate, let's say, video surveillance. And I'll define that for you. Inappropriate surveillance would mean in a bathroom, in a bedroom, in any private area of a home.

But in the criminal case, I received videos of Epstein talking to women and stuff like that. I did get those. I also saw binders, photographs of women and (indiscernible). I never saw any, well, I don't know -- I don't know how old some of these women were. There were definitely some of the victims from Palm Beach, the photographs of them in -- in -- without clothing.

Kennedy Connections

Young GM pictured with Joe Kennedy and John Kennedy Jr.

RFK On The Epstein Flight

Virginia Giuffre

MAXWELL: And the reason I believe that, so this --she -- she was a self-confessed having been sexually abused as a young girl, and was trained -- her words I'm quoting now, not mine, in all the arts of whatever that is, the sex program by a man called Ron Eppinger, who was her pimp from when she was 14, I believe, or 15, I don't know. And in her book describes him training her to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else. I believe that then what happened was that he met her, and she came as a masseuse to his house, in December of 2001 is when I think it started. Now, what their relationship was or what happened with them in that early period of time, I cannot say. What I can say is that he liked her and she started to travel with him at that time period. I believe -- I know, then, what happened was that she -- when she first started to see him or first came into his orbit as his masseuse or whatever, she was engaged to be married and wearing an engagement ring, and was living with her fiancé? She broke up after a few months, with her fiancé and took up with the local drug dealer. So let's say after four or five months of -- in the time period when she was seeing Epstein, let's say we're now May, June of 2002 or is it 2000. I can't remember. From whenever she hits the -- whatever that is if that's 2000. I think it's 2000. I'm sorry. I think it's when she met him. December of So -- so then you go through -- I don't remember. You'll have to look.

So then I think -- so she -- she takes up with the local drug dealer and she becomes druggie, druggie. Like, you know, how druggies -- well, maybe you don't. I live with a lot in Tallahassee. They become even more unreliable than normal. And at some point, she's now working somewhere else. He stopped seeing her, because he doesn't like people who do drugs. And I think that not seeing her lasted five or six months. And in that period of time, she got arrested for theft, and she had a warrant out for her arrest. Now, this I've pieced together because this piece I didn't know. She then called Epstein to -- to have help avoiding the warrant for her arrest, and he sent her to Thailand to get a massage therapy license. This is the bit that I guess. This is the bit that I extrapolated. In the period of time from when she came back to when she left, he asked her to replace herself as his masseuse or whatever -- whatever she was doing, and she brought the first replacement for her.

Ted Waitt

MAXWELL: So I — I wanted to have a full break when I started dating Ted. And he was clever. I — I — I suppose it would be true to say that I sort of viewed Mr. Epstein, at that point, as sort of family, if you will. Like someone I could rely on. And I should have had more confidence in myself. I can see that now. But at the time, given everything that had happened in my life, I thought that it would -- and I saw how he was with other people like Eva, who seemed to be very comfortable with him, and I thought this would be -- and he always said, I was like family. So he worked hard to make -- maintain a relationship with me. He was generous with me. He Let me use the plane, for instance, which was very generous, he would check in with my mum. He did things that were meaningful to me in that time.

And then, it may still not have worked, but that his -- his mother, Paula, had been in a very serious car crash. And I -- she had become sort of like a — a surrogate mother for me, sort of, because my mum wasn't there. I could — I could look after her the way that I would —sorry.

BLANCHE: It's all right.

MAXWELL: The way that I would've liked to look after my own mum. So I became very close to his mother. And she had been in a car crash and in 2004, I believe it -- it may have been 2005, I -- I don't recall exactly. She took a -- her health tooK a serious decline. And Epstein called me and asked me if I could look after her. And by looking after her, that meant organizing her doctors, making sure she had new clothes, making sure her house was clean.

DAVID MARKUS: Where was she?

MAXWELL: She lived in -- in a retirement establishment in -- outside of Palm Beach, outside of -- its West Palm. I want -- I was going to say something like the Golden Girls, but it's not called that. I just don't remember what it's called. But it was an old age -- it was a retirement home, if you will.

Lex Wexner

BLANCHE: Did -- was there -- did --did he give -- did Mr. Wexner gift a property in New York to Mr. Epstein?

MAXWELL: So we're talking about 71st Street. So I don't know what the business deal was, because, again, I'm not part of his business thing, but I think what happened would be that, let's say Les owed him in, theoretically, for his services, $100 million or whatever it was. He could have traded that against the property.

BLANCHE: But do you know that that happened or that's -- are you -- are you kind of --do you remember whether there was conversations about that or are you just thinking that could be one way that it happened?

MAXWELL: I'm not sure. And I'm not trying to be -- I just don't remember if that's something I know or if that's something that I remember, or if it's something that I subsequently know. I believe -- I believe that to be what happened, but I don't want to tell you that I have --

BLANCHE: Yeah.

MAXWELL: Does that make sense?

BLANCHE: Did Mr. Wexner and Mr. Epstein -- are you aware of they -- of their falling out that they ultimately had?

MAXWELL: I think -- I wasn't there and I don't know how it happened. I only know what Les has said in the press.

BLANCHE: So you only know about their, you know, their falling out or whatever you want to call it, from what you've kind of read, not from any firsthand knowledge? You did -- you weren't there, you weren't part of that?

MAXWELL: Correct.

Epstein’s Attention To Detail

BLANCHE: So he would assist his clients, at times, with -- you're saying with even small things like contractual relations with --with --

MAXWELL: He said no detail was too small, because everything that affected how they lived and how they managed their life, was something that he felt he was -- if they want, he would be responsible for, to make sure that the contract -- so that if you had to fire someone, it wouldn't come back and sue you or if that -- that sort of …

AUDIO …

“A Man Wants Sexual Favors, He will Find Them. They Didn't Have To Come To Epstein For That.”