Ian Maxwell’s ramblings on ‘The Spectator’s’ ‘Americano’ podcast are nothing but nonsensical, though his sister may have a point in suggesting Jeffrey Epstein could have been murdered
At The Steeple Times we’re loathe to trust a word that come from her lying lips, but for once Ghislaine Maxwell might be bang on the nail.
Speaking to The Spectator’s ‘Americano’ podcast on Friday, the alleged mucky madam’s brother, Ian, told host Freddy Gray that his sister is the only member of his family that believes her former lover, Jeffrey Epstein, was murdered in jail.
Mr Maxwell commented:
“I do [fear for my sister’s safety]… I am not wholly convinced that he killed himself. Actually, I think that that’s not been very well explained, how a man supposedly under 24/7 guard, in broadly similar isolated conditions to those of my sister is experiencing could somehow die on U.S. watch.”
“It’s extraordinary to me, so yes there is a possibility that she’s in some danger. I don’t buy the suicide watch regime. It’s a nonsense. She’s not a suicide risk. There’s been no evidence of any self-harm. Obviously she’s not a danger to any third parties – which a judge has acknowledged on numerous occasions, so this is – and I can only read it this way – torture and it’s designed to break her.”
“The result is, today, though she turns up for trial and looks the best she can, she is clearly frail, she’s clearly lost an enormous amount of weight and I don’t know how much more she can take.”
“I haven’t talked to my sister since the 10th June 2019. I happen to remember that because all of the family got together for the first time in eight years on that day – which have been my father’s 96th birthday. So, I remember it well.”
“I don’t buy a lot of the conspiracy theories at all. It so happens one of the conspiracy theories about my father is that he was murdered rather than committed suicide or died by accident.”
“And I would venture to believe that she may also think that Epstein was murdered… I do happen to think my sister does think that he was killed.”
Alluding to his role in PR peddling on his sister’s behalf, the ‘Bouncing Czech’s’ son remarked:
“She knows that I am talking to the media on her behalf and yes we can communicate with her through her lawyers because her lawyers, pretrial, were seeing her through Zoom and in-person for several hours a day.”
“Don’t forget the bulk of her sentence has been served in the middle of the pandemic when there were no in-person visits to prisons anywhere in the world I would have thought and certainly not America.”
“So, if we want to say things to her or get messages to her, we do it through the lawyers and they come back the same way. So, in that sense there is a communication, but it’s not the same as giving your sister a hug and saying ‘hi’ and so on.”
Going further, in a ramble of nonsensical proportions, Mr Maxwell attempted to garner sympathy for his sister and added:
“We’re very close as siblings. There’s a gap of fifteen years between my oldest sister Anne, who is now 73, and my youngest sister, Ghislaine, who’ll be 60 on Christmas Day.”
“When you’ve had the kind of alpha male father that we did, you tended to stay close as kids and we’ve done so as adults.”
“[Family life] for us was an extraordinary experience. Not because we had some father with a vast amount of wealth and access to all kinds of goodies. My father was a pretty tough dad and he was a believer that if you had privileges, you also had obligations and he was a pretty serious kind of guy and he brought us up to work hard and if we didn’t, we were belted pretty well and I was hit a few times.”
“But there was a lot of love there and I knew about the best side to stay of him. The best way I could describe this would be in the form of a Chinese proverb that says: ‘Never be too far from the sun that you freeze, never be too close to it that you burn’ and it’s a very narrow line. And we had to run it.”
“We’re pretty clear about [our father]. We love him, the only father we ever knew and I think at some point, we were all in fear of him, but the overwhelming memory of him is a positive memory and not a negative one.”
Turning to his sister replacing her clearly monstrous and alleged abuser of her father with another monster, Jeffrey Epstein, Mr Maxwell offered:
“I can see that is a relatively easy jump to make. She has had boyfriends. She had a very longstanding boyfriend for about seven years or so immediately following going out with Jeffrey, so sometime in the late 1990s, early 2000s, who also happened to be wealthy and so on.”
“She’s somebody who grew up with a demanding father, intelligent, she was present at constant dinners and lunches and social events where she met a lot of very interesting people. Some of them wealthy, some of them brilliant scientists and so on. So, she was used to being with intelligent men whom she could respect and so on and inevitably in those kind of circles, there’s a lot of money at the same time.”
“I don’t think that it follows that she went directly from my father to Jeffrey as a clone, but if it hadn’t been Jeffrey it would have been some other rich, intelligent man.”
“I suppose I became aware of [Epstein and Maxwell’s] relationship in the early 1990s, but I and my brother, Kevin, were in terrible trouble because our father’s businesses had blown up. We were directors of it, we were subsequently arrested in June 1992 and then we had four years in the wilderness and a very well covered trial, a criminal fraud trial which ran from 1995 to 1996.
“There was no time in that context other than to fight for our lives and I lost my marriage in that process and I didn’t see very much of my sister during that whole time. I couldn’t travel, our passports had been taken and so-on.”
“Only when we were acquitted in January 1996, finally we flew off to America to see Ghislaine and she affected a number of business introductions for us and on that occasion, I remember on that occasion, I remember meeting Jeffrey Epstein for lunch with Ghislaine and with Kevin and I have to say I didn’t warm to him.”
“He didn’t strike me as, he was a bit of a cagey character, clearly intelligent, had a certain charisma, but he was someone who took things from you rather than gave things back. Not a man, not a very clubbable man, not a man you want to go and have a drink with and that was the only time that I met him.”
“By the time I met him in 1996, that relationship had been ongoing on since 1992 for sure and I think it had therefore passed… I didn’t get [the impression they were together] when I was there with them, but you know, we now see photographs that have surfaced during the course of this trial that are, I don’t know what the dates there on them are, but are very early in their relationship and it is clear that she is very fond of him.”
Regarding his father’s preferential treatment of his sister, Mr Maxwell stated:
“I don’t think that’s true, though I know people think that because he ended up naming his boat ‘Lady Ghislaine,’ but the story behind that is a much more prosaic story. He actually wanted to call it the ‘Lady Elizabeth’ – and name it for my mother – but there already was a ‘Lady Elizabeth’ and you couldn’t have two boats with the same name.”
“I’m not sure, but I think what he decided was the way to best deal with it, so he went from my mother to my youngest sister, Ghislaine, and that’s how that happened, but Ghislaine, like all of our siblings, if she was in trouble, she was cast out and she had a fair amount of tough times with my father.”
Turning to his sister’s trial itself, Mr Maxwell added:
“I think that the key thing is that she should never have been put on trial. The case against her is really a case against Jeffrey Epstein. It’s been reversed engineered post his death against my sister and it’s been driven from the start by a combination of enormous embarrassment on the part of the U.S. legal authorities on the one hand and by the greed of the lawyers of the accusers on the other hand.”
“And that has whipped up tremendous fury against my sister that has totally trashed her presumption of innocence and has led to her being jailed for over 527 days in isolation, treated as guilty before any trial and by virtue of being a pre-trial detainee, she is innocent, but that’s been completely cast-aside.”
“She’s been, as I said, kept in isolation, she has been woken up every fifteen minutes throughout the night for over 500 days by torchlight – allegedly to see if she is alive. She is deemed to be a suicide risk. Patently she is not.”
“She’s been denied bail four times by the judge at first instance and twice by the appeal court judges.”
“She’s been brought to the trial as recently as yesterday in four-point shackles from her jail, forced to walk up and down stairs in the courtroom.”
“She’s not being fed properly. She’s not been able to see her lawyers for more than 15 minutes during the pre-trial and post hearings. I mean, this is outrageous and it’s in a first world country like the United States of America.”
“It’s a disgrace and it’s why the family lodged a complaint with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitary Detention in Geneva just about three weeks ago because America must be held to account for what has happened to her.”
