Glenn Maxwell was a prominent figure among the elites of high society in London and New York. Now, she has been convicted of recruiting, trafficking and sexually assaulting underage girls by the late US financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Gaylene Maxwell was born on Christmas Day 1961, and three days after her birth, a car carrying her 15-year-old brother Michael crashed into a truck on a foggy Oxfordshire road, leaving Michael Maxwell to spend the remaining seven years of his life in a coma.
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And although she was born into material abundance as her father is journalism mogul Robert Maxwell, the early years of her life were marred by emotional neglect. Her mother Betty later admitted in her memoirs that after Michael's accident, "her devastated parents did not care for the baby."
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One day in 1965, Betty said, 3-year-old Glenn Maxwell stood in front of her and said, "Mom, I'm there." Betty also thought the little girl had anorexia. To make up for it, the parents went the exact opposite way and proceeded to lavish affection on their little girl.
Although she was not spared the wrath that her father inflicted on all his sons, she soon seemed to be his favourite. Betty later wrote in her 1994 memoir that this favorite daughter "has become spoiled, the only one of my sons I can really say that about".
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Now, a New York court has indicted Glenn Maxwell on the most appalling charges of recruiting and trafficking girls to facilitate their sexual abuse by the late US financier Jeffrey Epstein, so it is tempting to seek an explanation for her troubled childhood.
But just as her crimes are impossible to justify, Maxwell is a hard-to-understand woman who, although she has lived her life in the limelight, the minute details of her biography have always been extraordinarily elusive.
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Glenn Maxwell grew up in Headington Hill Hall, a vast Italianate mansion overlooking Oxford in Britain. Instead of buying it, her wealthy father somehow persuaded the mansion's owner, Oxford City Council, to rent it to him for a small sum in return for renovating the property. Robert Maxwell had said of it that it was "the best city council in the country".
Throughout Glenn Maxwell's childhood, lavish parties were held at Headington Hill Hall, attended by politicians, celebrities and the media. But after the VIPs left the building, the palace was an emotionally draining place for a girl to grow up in.
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Robert Maxwell rose out of extreme poverty in a Jewish settlement in what was formerly Czechoslovakia, where most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust, to become a war hero in the British Army, then an academic publishing magnate, a Labor MP, and eventually the owner of the Daily Mirror. It is one of the best-selling newspapers in Britain.
As a businessman, he was criticized as a bully. At home, he is depicted in John Preston's biography as a "cruel father" who physically and verbally abused his children.
Maxwell Sr. would interrogate his sons at the dinner table for their knowledge of geopolitics or their plans for the future, and would cry to tears if he deemed their answers unsatisfactory. Ian, one of Robert's sons, told Preston: "He was hitting all of us with the belt, both girls and boys."
Although Glen Maxwell was his favourite, she was not immune to any of these practices. But while some of her siblings withdrew or rebelled, she was always eager to please her father.
Glenn Maxwell told British magazine Tatler in 2000 that he was an "inspiring" father, and devoted herself to keeping him happy.
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It seems to have succeeded, as the father named his yacht Lady Guillen instead of his wife Betty or his three older daughters.
It is clear that he had high hopes for his youngest daughter, as he had ambitions to marry her to the late John F. Kennedy Jr.
Glenn Maxwell was educated at Marlborough College and Oxford University, where she studied modern history and languages.
Author Anna Pasternak, who was a contemporary of her at Oxford and traveled in the same social circles, says: "It was very clear to me even as a university student that she was interested in power and money. In the air they always look over your shoulder to see if someone more powerful or more interesting than you is standing behind you."
Rachel Johnson, the sister of the former British prime minister and a contemporary in Oxford, raised eyebrows recently when she recalled that she had seen Glenn Maxwell in the university's youth hall "with her bright, naughty eyes as she rested in my brother Boris's lap".
After graduation, her father appointed her as a manager at Oxford United, the football club he owned and headed, and set up her own company.
But she has become a constant figure in the pages of Tatler magazine or Nigel Dempster's gossip column in the British Daily Mail, where she was usually described as a "society woman" rather than a businesswoman. She began dating Count Gianfranco Secogna, an Italian aristocrat.
She also established a kind of private members' club exclusively for women where Pasternak attended several occasions, and while the idea seemed innovative at the time, Pasternak ruled out at the time that Maxwell would be a feminist champion.
"What I do remember is that she was the kind of woman who fascinated others, but I don't remember that she was a very good friend of another woman, and I think the woman was not really important to her, it was just a way to reach another strong man," Pasternak says.
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After her father took over the struggling New York Daily News, in January 1991 she was sent to headquarters as his representative, her entry point into the Manhattan social scene.
But in November of that year her world was turned upside down as her father disappeared from the deck of Lady Guillen's yacht off the Canary Islands, and his body was later found floating in the sea.
Glenn Maxwell flew directly to Las Palmas, where the yacht was towed. Overwhelmed by her grief at the loss of her father, she was commissioned to deliver a moving speech to the international press gathered at the quayside.
It soon became clear that Robert Maxwell had gotten his hands on the £440m Mirror Group pension fund, as part of a scheme to artificially inflate the company's share price at the expense of the company's 32,000 employees.
Thus, the Maxwell family and the British government had to settle the situation, with the latter eventually paying £100 million to rescue the fund.
In June 1992, two of Robert's sons, Ian and Kevin, were arrested and charged with fraud. They were eventually acquitted in January 1996.
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While her father's guilt was clear to most people, Glenn Maxwell continued to defend him, telling Edward Klein of Vanity Fair in early 1992: "He wasn't a fraud, the thief to me is someone who steals money, do I think my father did? No, I don't know what he did.. Obviously something happened.. Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run away with the money? No, that's my definition of a fraud."
Although the rest of her siblings accepted that Robert Maxwell's death was either an accident or a suicide, his youngest daughter insisted that he had been murdered.
Despite her protests, the fallout from the Pension Mirror scandal has made Britain a less welcome place for her. In November 1992, it was reported that she had purchased a one-way ticket to New York for $4,000.
Harry Mount was feeling lonely in Manhattan in 2005 after he had just been hired at the age of 33 as a reporter for Britain's Daily Telegraph in New York, but at the time few people in the city knew.
When a friend asked him if he wanted to take him to a party at Glenn Maxwell's house, Mount took the opportunity, Glenn has been a prominent figure in Manhattan society, where she has been photographed with Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and even Pope John Paul II.
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Among the great and prominent figures of American society, her impeccable British accent and friendship with Prince Andrew made her a strange and charismatic figure.
When Mount arrived at her five-story mansion in Manhattan, he was surprised when she approached him and began to bombard him with questions. He remembers her listening intently to his responses as if he was the most wonderful person in the world.
"There was no reason for her to be particularly friendly with me," says Mount, who is now the editor-in-chief of Oldie magazine in which he wrote of their meeting.
Mount hypothesized that her mystery and charm were a byproduct of her turbulent childhood. "You end up with this mix of great connections and confidence as you cycle through the great and the eminent but, basically, you're not sure of yourself," he said.
He continued, "People who are not confident in themselves are a little nicer than those who are often confident in themselves."
Later Mount realized that something was missing.
Glenn Maxwell is reportedly left with an annual income of £80,000 from a trust. And he should have guessed, as he later said, that this amount was not nearly enough to pay for her stately home. Years later, prosecutors indicated that the property had been financed by Jeffrey Epstein.
At that point Mount was unaware of her relationship with the well-known financier.
But before long, Epstein's relationship with Maxwell came under scrutiny by every journalist in town.
In 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl told police that Epstein had molested their daughter, and three years later he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. After his release, allegations against him began to pile up, and he was accused of managing a "wide network" of girls for sex.
He was arrested again in 2019 for sex trafficking and died in his cell a little over a month later, turning the focus of authorities inevitably onto Glenn Maxwell.
Epstein, like her father, was a very wealthy man of humble origins. In his case, those humble origins were a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Like her father, Robert Maxwell, he will also be disgraced and committed suicide under controversial circumstances.
Glenn Maxwell's relationship with Epstein was undoubtedly a win-win. On the one hand, she could introduce him to her wealthy and powerful friends, and on the other hand, he in turn had the capital to fund the lifestyle she was accustomed to.
In addition to their closeness, prosecutors noted during the trial, Glenn Maxwell "was not wealthy when she met Epstein".
Having returned to New York in the wake of her father's death, she has been working in real estate and living in an apartment that rents for $2,000 a month, a decent standard of living by any standard, at least when the trust is taken into account, but nonetheless somewhat lower than she'll be used to. .
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But it is not easy to determine the exact details of the relationship between them, such as when did it start? and how long did it last? And how exactly should it be defined? They were all contentious issues in the trial that had just ended.
Four charges were brought in Maxwell's trial relating to the period between 1994 and 1997, when the indictment stated that she was one of Epstein's closest associates and also had a "intimate relationship" with him.
By 2000, she was linked to another businessman, Hoted Wet. But it appears she continued to work for Epstein. In 2003, Epstein called Maxwell his "best friend", and journalist Vicki Ward noted that most of his life appeared to be orderly. Intimate photos of Maxwell and Epstein, released by prosecutors, indicated that they remained close.
In court documents, former employees of Epstein's mansion in Palm Beach described her as a housekeeper who supervised staff, handled finances, and acted as a social coordinator.
A housekeeper testified that Epstein gave employees a 58-page instruction manual and instructed them to speak only when spoken to and to avoid eye contact with Epstein. It is tempting to conclude that just as Maxwell learned to satisfy the whims of her fickle father, she applied the same skills to Epstein.
Whatever the precise nature of their relationship, prosecutors portrayed their closeness as a decisive factor in the pattern of abuse suffered by the victims as Glenn Maxwell searches for and prepares the victims for Epstein.
Now she has been convicted on 5 of 6 counts, including the most serious one, sex trafficking of minors.
Sarah Ransom, who said she was abused by Epstein, told the BBC's Panorama: "Gillen was controlling the girls by putting them on probation, and she knew what Jeffrey liked. ".
In the months following Epstein's death, Maxwell sank to the ground, and newspapers speculated about her whereabouts as a photo of her outside an N&O Burger in Los Angeles made front pages around the world.
Then she was arrested in her secluded mansion in the US state of New Hampshire in July of 2020, and a few months later a surprise appeared that she had married a tech CEO named Scott Burgerson.
Maxwell was detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. While she was waiting for her trial to begin, her brother, Ian, told the BBC's Today program that she was being held in a cell measuring 1.8m by 2.7m with a concrete bed.
"The cell is under 24-hour surveillance and has 10 cameras, including one that tracks her movement," said Ian Maskwell. "She is not allowed to move into the corners of her cell, and she is not allowed to stay within two and a half feet of the cell door."
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It is a shameful fate for a woman who has spent most of her life surrounded by riches. It was left to the prosecution to explain why the crimes they had placed in that cell were committed.
Prosecutors have suggested that money was a catalyst. Journalist John Sweeney, who has featured the issue in his podcast Hunting Gillen and is writing a book about it, suggests a deeper psychological impulse.
"You can't understand what happened with Jeffrey Epstein without understanding her relationship with her father," he says. "The truth is that Guillen learned to serve her father and then had to serve a second monster. That's what she's done her whole life."
Another similarity between Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein is that both have escaped full account of their crimes. Defense attorneys argued that Glenn Maxwell was the scapegoat for Epstein, the old story of a woman taking the blame for her partner's crimes.
But Pasternak rejects the idea that Maxwell is in any way less guilty than Epstein. "Without Gillen, Epstein would have had no chance of reaching so many young victims," the author says.
Ian Maxwell, during the trial, wrote an article in The Spectator presenting his sister's defense. And it started with the media scolding.
He said they were pronouncing her name inaccurately, as her name was not "Ghislain", and insisted that it was "Ghilin".
To anyone following the case, it seemed remarkable that such a basic detail was consistently wrong, even though it concerned a woman who had lived her whole life in the pages of news, gossip columns, and gossip.
But as the trial progressed, it became clear that much of what had been assumed about her relationships, her source of income and, often, her whereabouts, was likely not what it seemed.
To be sure, her crimes defy explanation, too. Although all her ups and downs have been public, Glenn Maxwell remains mysterious and unknown.