Three Peas in a Pod
Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump have a history that goes back more than thirty-five years. When Jeffrey Epstein joined in, it turned out that they all had helluva lot in common.
Millions of profoundly cynical people seem to be leaping to the horrifying conclusion that convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell is getting special treatment from the Trump Administration. They appear to have arrived at this conclusion merely because she’s been transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility at Camp Bryan, Texas, where, according to People Magazine, she’s allowed to play with puppies, move freely in a facility with unlocked rooms, entertain visitors, and eat specially prepared meals delivered to her by prison employees.
All in violation of standard Bureau of Prison policy for convicted sex offenders.
Hard time—with room service!
Who knew?
As a result, I’ve adapted a passage I wrote in American Kompromat (2021) about how Trump met Jeffrey Epstein’s on-and-off again girlfriend and sex trafficking colleague who, thanks to Donald Trump, is now receiving such extraordinarily attentive care at one of the finest penal institutions in the entire United States.
The story begins in November 1991, just after Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, a buccaneering publisher and rogue intelligence operative based in London, plunged to his death into the Atlantic off the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.
At the time, it was (and remains) unclear how much Ghislaine really knew about the dark side of her father’s world. When she went into her father’s office on the Lady Ghislaine after his death and ordered the shredding of his documents, had she read them? Was she privy to his secrets? Did she know what to look for? Did she know about her father’s ties to the KGB? Did she know about her father’s ties Israeli military intelligence, and its chief, Ehud Barak? Did she understand that her father worked with both of them but for neither?
And then there was her friend, sometime lover, and partner in sex trafficking, Jeffrey Epstein. What did he know? Were he and Ghislaine going to continue to play out Robert Maxwell’s games of money laundering, massive theft, and espionage?
It’s not clear exactly when Ghislaine met Epstein, but in 2020, Ari Ben-Menashe, a renegade Israeli agent who was engaged in various questionable activities with the senior Maxwell, told me he had met Epstein in her father’s Daily Mirror Building in London, in 1990. “He was just a nice Jewish boy from New York,” Ben-Menashe told me. “Nobody really knew what he was up to. And he started a fling with Maxwell’s daughter.”
By then, Ghislaine had already decided that Donald Trump was vitally important to her future. While she was working for her father in London in a division of his company that specialized in corporate gifts, the Trump name was already being transformed into a luxury brand. As a result, Ghislaine decided Trump would be a great catch as client. She also realized that her father knew Trump fairly well. Robert Maxwell had been Trump’s rival trying to buy the New York Post(both men were unsuccessful), but in 1989 he had invited Trump to party aboard the 180 foot Lady Ghislaine and the two men met at social engagements from time to time.
But when Ghislaine asked her father to call Trump on her behalf, according to Nicholas Davies’s Death of a Tycoon, Maxwell erupted in anger.
“Have you got your bum in your head?” he said. “Why the fuck would Donald Trump want to waste his time seeing you and your crappy gifts when he has a multimillion‑ dollar business to run?”
Nevertheless, Ghislaine reached out to Trump anyway, and, in the end, he fit in quite well with the Maxwells and Epstein. Arrivistes all— be it Epstein’s Coney Island, Maxwell’s Ukrainian shtetl, or Trump’s downmarket Queens— they had all come from the wrong side of the tracks and had come into great wealth.
They were three peas in a pod.
Moreover, the sex trade was part of the equation—for all three men and Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell’s gargantuan sexual appetite was well known to Mossad, and as a result, according to Gordon Thomas’s Gideon’s Spies, the Israeli intelligence service arranged the tycoon’s visits to Israel so that “he was serviced from one of a stable of prostitutes the service maintained for blackmail purposes.”(Given his immense girth, it was said, Maxwell preferred fellatio.)
And Maxwell, like Epstein, was not merely a consumer of sex. Through much of the eighties, the Bulgarian cooperative bank that Maxwell owned had laundered millions for Semion Mogilevich, the multibillionaire who was one of the richest men in the world of sex trafficking. (As I have reported in The New Republic and in House of Trump, House of Putin, Mogilevich was a major figure in the Russian Mafia whose subordinates laundered untold millions of dollars through Trump real estate.)
As for Trump himself, at least twenty‑five women have made sexual assault allegations against him. Many of the charges are still pending and may never come to court, but sex crimes seem to come with the turf. In 2002, when Trump began partnering with the Bayrock Group, the real estate development company in Trump Tower, he brought into his orbit a host of oligarchs and mobsters involved in money laundering, sex trafficking, and child prostitution, and who, allegedly, shipped in teenage girls from Russia and Ukraine to have sex with them and their wealthy friends
Moreover, Trump had his own model agency and, wittingly or not, through Trump Model Management, provided Epstein’s operation with same business framework he used to scout models. Jean-Luc Brunel was a key figure in Epstein’s network, which relied heavily on him and his MC2, a “modeling agency whose younger models were allegedly part of of Epstein’s operation.” (In 2022, Brunel, like Epstein, was found dead in a jail cell, in Paris.)
According to a sworn deposition in 2010 by MC2 bookeeper Maritza Vasquez, “Jeffrey Epstein…was giving instructions to Jean-Luc [Brunel] saying that he wanted to have the same contracts as, uh—what’s his name, of Donald Trump.”
In other words, according to Vasquez, Epstein saw Trump Model Management as a prototype to emulate while working with Brunel to lure minor children to participate in sexual activity for money.
Vasquez’s testimony included one other priceless tidbit when she testified that Epstein “had a relationship with a woman (sic) that her father was very wealthy and that’s how he started his own money.”
Vasquez couldn’t remember the woman’s name, so she asked the attorney to help.
“Ghislaine Maxwell,” came the answer.
“Yes!” replied Vasquez.
That meant Robert Maxwell was the source of Epstein’s money—or at least a significant portion of it.
And so Ghislaine and Epstein created a world of unimaginable decadence—with Donald Trump often along for the ride. It was a calculated spectacle that declared to the world that they had all been embraced securely in the bosom of the powers that be.
And, as has been widely reported, Epstein meant the real powers that be— Nobel laureates, heads of states, British royals, Wall Street powerbrokers, and A‑ listers in every glamour profession. And of course, there was Donald Trump, who had no fewer than sixteen phone numbers beside his name in Epstein’s black book.
Within the context of their highly transactional relationships, Trump’s friendship with Epstein struck onlookers as a significant mutually beneficial connection. Remember, in the nineties, Trump needed friends. Desperately. He had gone belly‑up in Atlantic City. With personal liabilities exceeding $800 million, he had just been forced to sell off his three Atlantic City casinos and the Plaza Hotel, along with his yacht, the Trump Princess.
In addition to helping Trump get back on his feet, Epstein seemed to be the apotheosis of a latter‑day version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy ideal— surrounded by gorgeous young women, bespoke private planes, and spectacular residences, all while Ghislaine orchestrated a never‑ending series of movable feasts— on the Upper East Side, at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, in the Caribbean— at which Epstein would entertain and play courtier to presidents, movie stars, brutal dictators, world‑ class scientists, Wall Street billionaires, and the like. And he’d have sex with two, three, or more young girls almost every day.
Trump fit right in. Jeffrey and Ghislaine invited him everywhere—and Trump reciprocated. At one highly selective party in 1992 at Trump’s Mar‑ a‑Lago resort in Palm Beach, the New York Times reported, no fewer than twenty‑ eight attractive young women were flown in to participate in a calendar‑ girl competition as entertainment.
The organizer, George Houraney, who ran American Dream Enterprise, a small Florida company that staged a calendar‑ girl contest and other events, was appalled to learn that there were only two male guests— Trump and Epstein.
“Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s,” Houraney told Trump, according to the Times. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein? . . .I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.”
But Trump ignored Houraney’s warning and plowed ahead anyway. Houraney’s longtime girlfriend Jill Harth later told the New York Times that Trump groped her nonstop at a business meeting around the same time.
“He was relentless,” Harth said, describing how Trump took the couple to dinner, sat beside Harth, and put his hands up her skirt all the way to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”
In that context, its not surprising that the gentle treatment accorded Ghislaine might raise more than a few eyebrows.
American Kompromat
How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery
It's such a shame that no one (apparently) ever gave Trump the beating he deserved.
FOLLOW THE MONEY = crimes then in full view !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is bigger and dirtier and more diabolical than imagined and there will be one big huge toilet flush once all these crimes are exposed and sentencing has happened = WHY ALL THE DRAMA AND DISTRACTIONS AWAY FROM THEIR BLACK HOLE