As Jeffrey Epstein’s former associate was found guilty on five of the six sex-trafficking counts she faced, British journalist Petronella Wyatt shared some details about her encounters with the socialite, some of which date back more than three decades.
Their first meeting occurred in the Eighties at a fancy Italian restaurant in London when Wyatt was 16. She recalls how Maxwell, seven years her senior, “was sitting at the best table, her contralto voice holding court to a group of 10 or 12, most of them men".
“I was in an alcove in the social Outer Hebrides when one of the men at her table beckoned me over,” Wyatt reminisced in an article published by the Sun. “We were introduced. ‘Oh, I’ve heard of you,’ she said. I was both flattered and intimidated. Her smile was charming but her gaze disconcertingly direct as it flicked up and down my body. I was trying to formulate a reply when she laughed, turned to the man on her left and began licking his ear.”
She mentioned that there was “something very sexual” about Maxwell, and “an almost Geisha-like desire to please her male companions.”
When the two met again at a cocktail party in New York “almost a decade later”, Wyatt noted that Maxwell “seemed harder”, as the latter “had lost her charm and appeared to be playing a role”.
“After the moment of mutual recognition, she laughed a little too loudly. I asked her how she was, but she didn’t answer. What she did was encircle my wrist and run her fingers over it in peculiar crab-like movements,” Wyatt recalls. “’What are you doing?’ I asked her nervously. ‘Showing you how to give oral sex.’ ‘Why?’ I asked stupidly. She raised her eagle-winged eyebrows in astonishment. ‘Don’t you want to please men?’ she responded, as if this was a professional career.”
Wyatt also pointed out that, while she pulled away, “some of the younger girls came forward to take advantage of Ghislaine’s masterclass.”
The journalist also suggested that the death of Maxwell’s father - British media proprietor Robert Maxwell - changed Ghislaine and “perhaps sent her on her headlong rush towards a man like Jeffrey Epstein".
She mentioned that Robert Maxwell allegedly abused Ghislaine both verbally and physically and also “taught her to despise members of her own sex”.
“Given Ghislaine’s upbringing and the values with which she was inculcated, her victims would have seemed to her less than human,” Wyatt remarked, adding that Maxwell actually attempted to “pimp friends and acquaintances” on several occasions.
Ghislaine Maxwell gained quite a bit of notoriety in recent years over her ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein, a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who was found dead in 2019 in his prison cell in New York where he was awaiting trial on charges of sex-trafficking of minors.
Maxwell herself was arrested in the United States in July 2020 and stood trial on charges of procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein, with the guilty verdict announced by the court shortly before the end of 2021.