As the ‘Daily Mail’ claims to share new ‘bombshell’ revelations suggesting Ghislaine Maxwell herself a victim of abuse, we remind them that this story is nothing new and abused to abuser should not be allowed as her excuse
In 2019, Eleanor Berry – daughter of the one-time chairman and editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday TelegraphBaron Hartwell of Peterborough Court in the City of London (1911 – 2001) and a woman who crazily considered Robert Maxwell a “surrogate father” – wrote a book in which she alleged the pension pot plunderer used to allow his favoured real daughter, Ghislaine, to choose how she got beaten.
Self-declared “black humour” specialist Berry’s suggestion that the daughter ‘The Bouncing Czech’ named his yacht after was whipped also has long done the rounds and featured also in the crusading author Kirby Sommers’ Ghislaine Maxwell: An Unauthorized Biography and on our pages also, but now the former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown (AKA Lady Evans) has got in on the game and written of these allegations also.
Featured three years after they first surfaced, the story of how the now convicted criminal mucky madam Maxwell was effectively herself a victim of parental abuse was yesterday ludicrously described as a “new bombshell” by the Daily Mail’s chief reporter Martin Robinson. A simple Google search might have prevented Lord Rothermere’s operation making this error, but clearly nobody at Northcliffe House bothered to even think of that.
Clearly, Mr Robinson was fed the uber connected Lady Evans’ publisher’s press release about her no doubt very heavily promoted tome. If he’d actually done some checks, he would have realised that Berry’s revelations to this particular author – which originally but unmentioned by the Mail included that Ghislaine Maxwell had been seeing a psychiatrist over “daddy’s canings” in New York in the 1990s – are nothing new and remain unsubstantiated.
Whilst it is well-known that the most definite bully, thief and supposed war criminal Robert Maxwell had a temper that made the Emperor Nero look mild, the excuse that his now incarcerated daughter simply went from abuse victim to abuser is somewhat pathetic and insulting to her multiple victims.
After ‘dodgy daddy’ died by means foul or fouler depending on who you’d believe on his yacht in 1991, this wicked wastrel had a choice. Ghislaine Maxwell’s siblings accepted that their papa had died of natural causes; she did not and then she headed to New York and took up with Jeffrey Epstein – an equally perverted sexually perverted monster and Ponzi schemer whom her father had most definitely met prior to his deserved demise.
At that time, Ghislaine Maxwell could have decided to make up for what had gone wrong in her world. Betty, her Roman Catholic mother, after all, devoted her subsequent life to researching the Holocaust, yet her French born 60-year-old daughter decided to take up sex trafficking minors. The choice is telling of a woman whose own father once said: “I have a beautiful daughter and she’s just like me.”
Of Ghislaine Maxwell, the wonderfully witty wonder that is Anne Robinson – who worked for Robert Maxwell on the Mirror in the 1980s – is the one who actually sums up the deviant daughter best. In school mistress like fashion, the current host of Countdown remarked in June 2021: “She had a horrendous childhood, she lacked goals.”
Pictured top – A glum looking Ghislaine Maxwell with her now late mother and a photograph of her late father. Though some have lauded the now convicted sex offender’s mother as a “good woman,” others have argued that she had an equally wicked and warped sense of morals to her clearly completely lacking in a moral compass husband.
In 2019, Eleanor Berry recounted of the familial abuse she claims to have been told of by Ghislaine Maxwell (pictured left with her father and right with her mother): “I know I shouldn’t have asked a nine-year-old child the question, but I was absolutely riveted. I tried to hide the tone in my voice. ‘When you said your father is going you a ‘hiding’ what sort of a hiding will it be?’ I asked as casually as I could. Ghislaine looked nonplussed… I was fascinated by the sight of the punitive instruments which had been arranged in a row on the table. Among things I notice, were a riding crop, a ruler, a stick, a cane, which made a swishing noise, on being brought down through the air, and a shoe horn which couldn’t inflict any pain at all. I regret that I was behaving very irresponsibly by toying with the psyche of a child… I completely lost my head. ‘I would ask your father if I could lower my trousers and whip me with the cane,’ I said. ‘What? On your bare bottom?’ ‘Yes,’ I said without thinking. I had caught a bit of sunstroke that morning and my wits were not about me. ‘Why would you ask my father to beat you on your bare bottom with the cane, particularly when the cane is the most painful of the lot? You’re not making any sense.’ It was at this point I got scared, as I feared Ghislaine would repeat my words to her father. ‘Well Ghislaine,’ I replied, ‘pain affects different people in different ways. If I were a man whipping me, I would only want him to be your father.’ … Ghislaine persisted like a dog knowing at its favourite bone. ‘I really didn’t understand you, when you said you’d actually like to take down your trousers and be whipped by my father.’” In a subsequent passage Berry describes Betty Maxwell as “[reminding] her a bit of Fagin, when he was counting tiaras” in the context of a conversation she had overheard about this abuse.Anne Robinson (left) was amongst those not afraid of ‘Cap’n Bob’ when she worked for him; fellow journalist Tina Brown (right) is now, however, being incorrectly made out to be sharing “bombshell” news that is anything but news about how the mucky madam daughter of the pension pot plunderer was abused by her very own father.In February 2022, Kirby Sommers shared of a woman who replaced her monstrous father with the equally monstrous Jeffrey Epstein after the former’s death: “So, she knows she’s going to get a beating and Robert Maxwell storms into his office and Eleanor Berry goes on to chat with 9-year-old Ghislaine and Ghislaine is just ‘ho, hum, ho, hum, he’s going to hit me and Eleanor Berry says: ‘That’s really interesting and what tends to happen?’ Ghislaine gets up off the ground and she leads Eleanor into the house and into this room and she shows her a table and on the table are all kinds of things. There’s like a brush and a paddle and a whip. It goes on and on, there are all sorts of things that she can later choose. He allows her to choose, obviously, what he is going to beat her with. Eleanor is asking her: ‘What are you going to select?’ and Ghislaine tells her that she’s going to select the paddle because it doesn’t really hurt that much, but her friend, who is a lot older than her and in fact has a crush on Robert Maxwell says: ‘Well, I would select this.’ The whole thing is just a very bizarre episode, not only because here is an older woman talking to this 9-year-old child about her own sexual fantasies that she has about her father, but by this point it didn’t matter to Ghislaine that she was going to have a beating by her father. Later on, as she grows up, we now know it now through the victims allegedly… That Ghislaine was into say that world, that sadomasochistic world. She would treat her ‘sex slaves’ and I have to call them that because that’s how they refer to themselves with cruelty. This is something else she got from her father: She got the ability to turn on the charm, but to be cruel when needed. In her case, because she was a female, she learnt early on to turn on the charm for men and she was always very cruel to women – which she still is, she still is.”
