She was the toast of high society in London and New York. Now Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted of grooming and trafficking underage girls. After learning to serve her crooked father’s whims, she then did the same for another tyrant, Jeffrey Epstein.
Ghislaine Maxwell was born on Christmas Day 1961. Three days later, a car carrying her 15-year-old brother Michael crashed into a lorry along a foggy Oxfordshire road. Michael Maxwell would spend the remaining seven years of his life in a coma.
Although she had been born into material abundance – her father was the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell – by every account, Ghislaine Maxwell’s earliest years were disfigured by emotional neglect. Betty, her mother, later admitted in her memoir that after Michael’s accident the baby “was hardly given a glance” by her devastated parents.
One day in 1965, according to Betty, three-year-old Ghislaine Maxwell stood in front of her and declared: “Mummy, I exist.” Betty also believed the toddler developed anorexia. To compensate, from this point both parents went to the opposite extreme and began lavishing affection on their youngest child.
Though she was never spared the abuse and the rages her father would inflict on every one of his offspring, she would soon emerge as his favourite. And, Betty would later write in her 1994 memoir, that favourite daughter “became spoiled, the only one of my children I can truly say that about”.
Now a New York court has convicted Ghislaine Maxwell of charges so shocking – grooming and sex trafficking girls for abuse by the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – it’s tempting to look for an explanation in her dysfunctional childhood.
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Key moments in the sex trafficking trial
But just as her crimes are impossible to excuse, Maxwell is a difficult woman to comprehend. For a life lived in public, the…
Source : yahoo
