Whats the Point of Trying to Understand Ghislaine Maxwell?
People are curious about Ghislaine Maxwell. Epsteins Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell, a three-part docuseries streaming on Peacock, offers plenty of potential answers to these questions. Interviews with former friends, alleged victims and reporters on both sides of the Atlantic describe Maxwell as a party girl, a sophisticated connector, a good actress, a woman determined to live in ostentatious luxury. One interlocutor frames the young Ghislaine, devastatingly, as the ultimate daddys girl. Mercurial and sometimes vicious as an employer, in high-society settings she could be impossibly fun. The Daily Mail made a meal out of a recollection in the doc from aristocratic reality TV star Lady Victoria Hervey that Maxwell had a X-rated sense of humor. You can see why this kind of character shadingand the armchair psychoanalysis that comes with itmight be intriguing to many who watched in horror as the Epstein saga unfolded. I dont think such curiosity is entirely prurient, either. Of course people want to know what could go so wrong in an apparently smart, extraordinarily privileged womans life that would lead her to spend years allegedly orchestrating a sex trafficking conspiracy whose victims were other women and underage girls. Understanding how atrocities happen is crucial to preventing their recurrence. To that end, though, Im not sure Epsteins Shadow is asking the right question. Maxwell certainly makes a fascinating villain. To the credit of director Barbara Shearer, there is more to Epsteins Shadow than gossip and pop psychology. It begins with a fairly thorough account of Maxwells early life. Born in 1961, she was the youngest and perhaps most beloved of Holocaust refugee turned British media mogul Robert Maxwells nine children. Her Oxford classmate, author Anna Pasternak, recalls that, as a result of her closeness with her notoriously difficult father, Ghislaine learned to read powerful mens moods. Like her older siblings, she got absorbed into the family businessan international portfolio of media properties that would eventually include the New York Daily News; unlike them, she played an informal role as a sort of social liaison for her father. In that capacity, she was said to appear on his arm more often than even her mother, Betty. So, of course, Robert Maxwells mysterious death at sea in 1991aboard a private yacht he christened the Lady Ghislaine, no lessaltered the course of his daughters life. Always a shady, controversial figure, the patriarch was posthumously revealed to have plundered his employees pension funds to avoid bankruptcy. With the familys empire and reputation in ruins, Ghislaine Maxwell fled Britain for New York, where society types apparently had a higher tolerance for the moral shortcomings of the ultra-wealthy. Though she still ran with a posh crowd, her material circumstances were much diminished. Enter Epstein, an old business contact of her fathers, whose short-lived romance with Maxwell gave way to a very different, allegedly monstrous kind of mutually beneficial arrangement. This isnt exactly an untold story. And what followsa summary of the charges against Epstein and particularly Maxwell, followed by accounts of his death, her disappearance and her arrest in New Hampshire last Julywill surely be even more familiar to most who seek out this doc. Because she wont face trial until November, on eight counts including sex trafficking, we dont know yet what will become of Maxwell. (She maintains her innocence, pleaded not guilty to all charges and, according to a prefatory note, did not respond to interview requests for the series.) There is in fact a remarkable amount that remains unknown about Maxwell, from her fluctuating financial circumstances to her personal life post-Epstein; Shearer notes her fathers complicated entanglement with various intelligence agencies and entertains speculation on whether she mightve carried on these relationships. For all its redundancy, Epsteins Shadow feels like a perfectly competent profile of a person for whom that isnt necessarily a straightforward task. Still, I came away from it frustrated at the way we fixate on the personalities and backstories of people accused of doing terrible things. Even if we acknowledge that essentially evil human beings do existthe Epsteins and Hitlers of the world, whose drive to harm others seems so intense that it must be innatethen we move on to psychoanalyzing their enablers. Once you sift through the evidence, its easy to conclude, as many of Shearers subjects do, that some combination of avarice, romantic proclivities that run to the Oedipal and lessons in survival gleaned from a childhood under the influence of a cutthroat man has motivated Maxwell throughout her life. There will always be amoral individuals. Speculating over what makes each one tick is an effective way of generating endless tabloid fodder, but its only useful insofar as it illuminates what needs to change on a systemic level in order to thwart their successors. In the case of Hitlers accomplice Adolf Eichmann, a lead architect of the Holocaust, the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt famously wrote that he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. Rather than being an extraordinarily malicious person, he was a clown living a genocidal lie fostered and perpetuated by a culture of willful self-deception. With so much time spent fleshing out what Maxwell was like, and how she got that way, Epsteins Shadow leaves questions about the societal and systemic factors in their alleged crimes hanging. The series most telling quote from Hervey isnt about her ex-pals dirty mouth, but about why she continued associating with Maxwell for so long. If one of my best friends went to jail, I wouldnt just cut them off, like, right away, she says in the final episode, visibly struggling to explain her loyalty. I would want to, like, find out what happened. Now thats a documentary worth making. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. 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