Robert Maxwell's luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. Multi-millionaire Maxwell probably plunged to his death from the yacht. Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who suffered a tragedy, the death of her father, a war hero, a philanthropist, a good man, in suspicious circumstances. She fled to New York where she made a new life with a brilliant mathematician. Her name is Ghislaine Maxwell and her lover was Jeffrey Epstein. Through Jeffrey, and her family name, Ghislaine became friends with some of the most powerful people on earth, ex-President Bill Clinton and President-to-be Donald Trump and the second son of the Queen of England, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. The enormous cowpat has had the last laugh: Sweeney is very proud of Hunting Ghislaine. “The journalism is solid. We set out points of view and investigate them and get to a conclusion.”

As for Maxwell, Sweeney muses on the impact of adoring and being adored by her father Robert, who owned and plundered the Daily Mirror. Ghislaine was raised in a life of privilege at the 51-room Headington Hill Hall near Oxford, where her father had himself memorialised in stained glass as Samson bringing down the walls of Gaza. We learn from Hunting Ghislaine that he would urinate from his helipad atop the Daily Mirror building on to people below. He behaved worse in his office. “Maxwell also had the habit, common to megalomaniacs, of crapping in front of people. Perhaps not visibly doing it, but going to the loo with people waiting so would have to listen to him evacuating – whatever you want to call it.” 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. 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 final part is the strongest because Sweeney is able to do what he does best: place himself in the action, rehearse the arguments, and make biting, morally informed character assessments. He also carefully watches Maxwell, how she reacts to evidence and the extraordinary hapless defence her hugely expensive lawyers mounted. So, from one of her father’s greatest enemies in life, for the monster’s daughter, some measure of pity.After bullying the secretary, she blurts out what the Sun editor said: “I don’t want to talk to that fat Czech c**t.” The secretary vanished, never to work at the Mirror again. Ghislaine was Epstein’s partner, and she hails from a wealthy family, given that her father was a billionaire. As Epstein’s girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes 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 last year. She denies six charges of enticing young girls for sex with Epstein and perjury.

Find out what John Sweeney really thinks about his interview with Vlad Demchenko, the Ukrainian soldier who arrested him on Day 2 of Putin's war on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Available exclusively on Global Player. Hunting Ghislaine, a Global Original podcast, begins on November 19th. On Global Player or wherever you find your podcasts. 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.

By making his podcast for LBC, Sweeney has been able to tell a story that had been niggling away at him for decades. “I’d always wanted to investigate Robert Maxwell,” he says. After his death, he suggested as much to Donald Trelford, then the editor of the Observer, where Sweeney worked until 2001. “He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat.” Sweeney looks into how Donald Trump’s former secretary of labour, lawyer Alex Acosta, could have brokered a secret “sweetheart” deal for Epstein in 2008, whereby the latter agreed to plead guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in return for serving only 13 months for the crime. The agreement spared his co-conspirators prosecution and stipulated that Epstein was allowed to go to work every day of his incarceration. Last month, Acosta and his legal team were cleared by the Department of Justice of wrongdoing over that deal.

As such, it’s a perfectly sensible proposition, which may well be true, but as Maxwell herself has never really spoken about any of it – she elected not to give evidence at her own trial – it’s hard to know how damaged she was before she began damaging. John speaks to people like him, who are not prepared to be part of the silent majority. They have put their livelihoods and personal reputations on the line to challenge those who run our governments, lead our industries, control our finances and dictate the way we live. They refused to toe the line, and have found themselves in trouble. Big trouble. Activists, agitators, heroes… or villains. You decide. For the past six months I have been working on a six-part podcast investigation, Hunting Ghislaine, for LBC, Britain’s biggest commercial news-talk station. I have come away from this deep dive into the life of Ghislaine believing, one, that the evidence against her is damning; two, that sat around the high tables of Manhattan, Palm Beach, London and Windsor sit some pretty disgusting people; and, three, that a part of me feels pity for her. After hiding for almost a year, she now finds herself facing multiple charges for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually exploit and abuse under-age women which could lead to her spending the rest of her life in jail. 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 creativeIf you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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. Sweeney theorises that, like a cult victim, just as Ghislaine could never bring herself to believe her father was the monster he palpably was, so she “blinded” herself to Epstein’s depravity, even as she became a willing accomplice to it. A former acquaintance sees it differently, observing that Ghislaine would not be the first woman who “possesses a sexual pecadillo of sharing women with her boyfriend. Underlying all of this was her libertarian sexual appetite.” Hunting Ghislaine is an investigation into the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite who is currently in jail, awaiting trial for helping Jeffrey Epstein and others exploit underage girls. 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.

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.”

Hunting Ghislaine with John Sweeney sets out to tell the strange story of Maxwell and her role in the Epstein scandal.