Paula Cuddy, Creative Director and Executive Producer for Eleventh Hour Films, said: “John’s compelling podcast ‘Hunting Ghislaine’ puts Ghislaine Maxwell centre stage, unravels her story and asks what went wrong for the girl who seemingly had it all. Set in a richly glittering international world, dark secrets are revealed and always in the shadows looms the formative relationship between a daughter and her father. It has all the hallmarks of a premium drama - and with John alongside our partners at Global and The Story Lab we look forward to delivering.” Just so you know, this is fiction: but Heawood and his compadre Kennedy Fisher are played so brilliantly by Barnaby Kay and Jana Carpenter that they’ve started to feel like real people. I find myself rooting for the cynical, intrepid Fisher in particular, despite this series’ dark questions around who she is and what she’s really been up to. This is a new element, and means that our two heroes are not working together as closely as before; Fisher is in a small coastal town in the US, Heawood in Mosul, though there might be a sinister connection between both places… In LBC’s new podcast Hunting Ghislaine, investigative reporter John Sweeney (Panorama, Newsnight, The Observer) sets out to tell the strange story of Ghislaine Maxwell.

He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat’ … John Sweeney. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer Sweeney’s strengths as a reporter show themselves in his account of Maxwell’s trial, forensically detailing the abuse that occurred at Epstein’s numerous properties, the degree of her complicity in the crimes, and the cruelty in her denials – effectively making the victims suffer twice over, in having to relive their abuse in court. Shawn said of Carolyn, one of three girlfriends he says he pimped out to Maxwell and Epstein: “She was a child”, one who, “only had two jobs ever. She worked at Arby’s [a US fast food combine] and she worked for Jeffrey” [Epstein]. Carolyn’s grandfather raped her when she was four years old. Ten years later, she said she was sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell. In New York, under Epstein’s sway, she would go on hunting expeditions for adolescent girls, ostensibly to audition them as models. “I’ve got to get the nubiles,” she told one of Epstein’s employees. A number of girls subsequently turned up at his house wearing school uniforms and braces on their teeth. The story of Jeffrey Epstein has been told in many ways over the past two years, but none have given more than a few cursory moments to Ghislaine Maxwell. His girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes against a series of underage women, some as young as 14, Ghislaine has remained in the shadows. When Epstein’s life began to unravel, Ghislaine vanished, only to reappear when she was arrested by the FBI earlier this year.No old school Fleet Street reporter like me who knew what a monster Robert Maxwell was cannot feel some pity for Ghislaine Maxwell on the day he fell off his yacht. But then Ghislaine fled to New York to serve a second monster. This is a dark fairy story of our times, about how power and money and connections can, for a time, blind justice. But not forever.” John Sweeney A New Weekly Podcast On The Trial Of Ghislaine Maxwell Hosted By Investigative Reporter John Sweeney Available Every Friday Exclusively On Global Player Co-commissioned by Global and The Story Lab, part of dentsu creative Pagliuca had great sport, crushing Carolyn’s spirit so that at one point proceedings had to stop while Carolyn just uttered heart-rending sobs. Pagliuca, with his bouffant grey curly hair a spitting image for another great American, Jerry Springer, read out Carolyn’s surname by mistake. Funnily enough, he’d got previous for this, also reading out the true first name of the first female witness, “Jane”. A famous actor in a long-running Hollywood TV soap opera, Jane had told the court she feared public disgrace if she gave evidence under her own name: “I’ve always just wanted to put this past me. I moved on with my life. I work in the entertainment industry and victim shaming is still very present to this day.” Hunting Ghislaine with John Sweeney sets out to tell the strange story of Maxwell and her role in the Epstein scandal. Maxwell refused to take the stand in her defence, telling the judge that the case against her had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. The truth, Sweeney writes, is she knew she would be ripped to shreds.

So Pagliuca made the same mistake of helping anyone in court with half an eye work out the true identity of anonymised witnesses, twice. Sweeney comes to a weary conclusion. “Power and money can help blind justice around the world,” he says. “But in America it’s normal.” Another mystery, this one real-life and rather more sordid: Hunting Ghislaine, Global’s podcast about Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell. Presented and researched by veteran investigative reporter John Sweeney, this is as gripping as all his work. I don’t always agree with Sweeney, but he really is an immense storyteller: his script is fantastic, his interviewing to the point, his presentation fiery and compelling. Launched in November 2020, written and presented by award-winning investigative journalist and author John Sweeney ( BBC Panorama, The Observer), the six-part podcast co-commissioned by Global and The Story Lab, part of dentsu, tells the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of disgraced billionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell and former partner of notorious convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Paula Cuddy, Eve Gutierrez and Jill Green will executive produce for EHF alongside Chris Baughen for Global and Robbie Ashcroft for The Story Lab. John Sweeney will act as series consultant and executive producer. Last week’s brilliant opening episode (of six), which looked at Robert Maxwell’s relationship with his youngest daughter, painted a swift and devastating portrait of the revolting media tycoon, and expressed some sympathy for Ghislaine. “I feel sorry for her up to the moment her father dies,” said Sweeney. “Because he has formed and deformed her.” Carolyn said that she gave Epstein about 100 massages, all of them sexual, all of them ending with him masturbating. Sweeney raises the question of whether she has been left to carry the can for these two men who, the evidence suggests, killed themselves (Maxwell herself never believed her father’s death was suicide). As he writes: “The vast majority of Epstein’s Palm Beach victims never meet Ghislaine, never hear her name.”

Why so much swearing? “Swearing is very much part of me and the mood of the podcast. I want this to be like having a pint with someone in the know.” He thinks his rough-and-ready persona is refreshing. “The public like my stuff. I have that attitude of not being cowed.” Indeed, Sweeney is probably best known for screaming at a Scientology spokesman during a 2007 Panorama. The life of Ghislaine Maxwell is a dark fairy story, one that plays out in reverse, of how a clever and beautiful woman ends up serving a monster while too many of her powerful friends look away. It’s a mirror, that shows poor and vulnerable victims to be heroic truth-tellers and some of the biggest movers and hitters on earth to be corrupt or at best, complacent, while evil stared them in the face. I have had a week of listening to different mysteries, and it has been most enjoyable, thanks very much. Absorbing, well-told, what’s-really-going-on? tales unfurling in your ears is a wonderful way to distract yourself from 2020’s killer combo of fear and boredom. Oh, the comfort of stories with a beginning, a middle and an actual, definite end! Plus, when there’s a scary element, even ironing becomes exciting.One of the unexpected pleasures of making the podcast was bumping into old friends from Fleet Street like Kenny Lennox, the great Daily Mirror photographer who ID’d the body of the drowned publisher in 1991 and Noreen Taylor, a feature writer on the paper who recalled Maxwell “dragging people into this nightmarish maze and making demands and then cancelling the demand, then making fresh demands. But not because he could get joy out of it. He was just in his own swirling nightmare as well.” In a sense they were made for each other. He was the powerful male figure, and key to a life of luxury, that she had lost when Robert Maxwell went overboard. She had a Rolodex of connections – not least Prince Andrew, who could provide the shady financier with a veneer of social respectability and cachet.