“She’s Our Waldo, and We’re Gonna Find Her”: The Hunt for Jeffrey Epstein’s Alleged Enabler Ghislaine Maxwell
She’s been rumored to be everywhere from the Brazilian riviera to Teaneck, New Jersey. She was tracked down on the Massachusetts coast, then photographed at a fast-food joint in L.A.—but the photo was staged. Now, the Sun is offering £10,000 for information leading to her in person. (And the FBI probably knows just where she is.)
ast week, as America’s media class was consumed with every twist and turn in the Donald Trump impeachment hearings, a different sort of media frenzy was playing out in the U.K. Prince Andrew had just participated in a disastrous BBC Newsnight segment about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which was widely seen to make the prince look even worse than he already did (a difficult feat). It was as if some insane plotline from a future final season of The Crown was being written in real time.
The scandal had largely faded from view over the past couple months, in the wake of Epstein’s jail-cell suicide on August 10, pushed aside by headlines, here and abroad, concerning the Trump-Ukraine inquiry and Britain’s looming general election. Then, in 49 awkward and uncomfortable minutes on November 16, Andrew’s BBC sit-down shoved it right back into the center of the news cycle. The interview also reignited one of the most bedeviling angles to date: Where on earth is Ghislaine Maxwell?
With Epstein dead and Andrew crawling back under a rock—the duke announced last week that he will “step back from public duties for the foreseeable future”—Maxwell has, in effect, become the primary person of interest in the entire sordid affair. It was the überconnected British heiress, after all, who introduced Epstein and Andrew in the first place, and Maxwell has her own sins to answer for: allegedly acting as the fixer who pressed Epstein’s underage masseuses into service. Her story is a potent mix of criminal intrigue and stratospheric social influence, and the mystery of where she has been since Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July makes it all the more mouthwatering—along with the fact that, for the most part, Maxwell has proven incredibly adept at evading bloodthirsty journalists and federal investigators alike.
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