It’s rather stunning that Ghislaine Maxwell had never spoken to a US law enforcement officer, or even been approached by one, until July 24, 2025, after she’d been sitting in federal prison for five years. Or at least that’s what she told Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, in an unusual but highly illuminating proffer interview — the transcripts and audio of which were made available on August 22, 2025. According to Maxwell, “No one from the government, at any time since the inception of the case — so dating back to the early 2000s — has ever spoken to me, and indeed, I believe, ever reached out to me at any time to even speak to me. And that includes up to when I was indicted and prosecuted.”
Let’s remember, Jeffrey Epstein was already being re-investigated by the Feds by at least November 2018, notwithstanding his Non-Prosecution Agreement from a decade earlier. Bradley Edwards, the dogged “victim” lawyer, self-admitted FBI informant, and Epstein’s most vociferous longtime legal antagonist, wrote in his book that in November 2018, he and Epstein had reached a verbal agreement to finally resolve their mutual claims against one another, which had dragged on for years. (Curiously, they often met privately in Starbucks or chatted by phone.) But unbeknownst to Epstein, by the time of their ostensible agreement, Edwards had already been “deeply cooperating with the highly confidential criminal investigation against him being conducted by the Southern District of New York.” Edwards strangely recounts how conflicted he’d been about “betraying” and “dishonoring” Epstein, a person whom Edwards had also described as “the most prolific sexual predator in American history.” Notwithstanding that unpleasant characterization, Edwards apparently experienced a crisis of conscience for reneging on his side of the bargain. Because despite the two rivals agreeing on terms by which they could finally get a “divorce,” as they both cheekily called it, Edwards was secretly collaborating with the Feds to put Epstein away for good.
In any event, one might have thought that between November 2018 and Epstein’s death in August 2019, investigators would have at some point attempted to elicit information from Maxwell, who was being widely depicted as Epstein’s wicked and notorious “madame,” who’d allegedly been integral in procuring victims for the prolific child-sex trafficking enterprise that they purportedly ran together. Even if at the time Maxwell might’ve been contemplated as a potentially chargeable co-conspirator, that’s no necessary barrier to the FBI or other agencies seeking her out to extract evidence — perhaps to eventually use against her, as well as Epstein. Later, when Epstein died and Maxwell became the substitute target of the primary prosecutorial action, she was still never contacted. Sure, there arguably could have been some investigatory rationale for this — maybe the Feds wanted to keep Maxwell entirely in the dark, because they thought she might’ve tipped off Epstein to a confidential investigation, or because they perceived her as a flight risk. But there had already been extensive federal, state, and local investigations into Epstein from 2005-2008, when Maxwell was already known to have been a close Epstein associate, and she was apparently never contacted then, either.
Whatever the precise explanation for the decades of no communication attempts, it’s just very odd that the first time Maxwell was ever asked by any government official to describe her role in this allegedly sprawling child-sex trafficking operation was only a few weeks ago. Some insight into why this might’ve been the case can perhaps be found by reading through the new interview transcript, which — like so much else that gets incrementally released about this story — methodically decimates the remnants of popular Epstein Mythology, one prong after the next.
Now, I am of course not asserting that everything Maxwell said in the proffer session must be assumed 100% truthful. Of course she had a motive to obtain clemency. Of course she’s going to do whatever she practically can to get herself out of prison, if at all remotely possible. And if offering an interview to Todd Blanche could be in service of that goal, she’d have every reason to do it. But it should also be noted that Maxwell was voluntarily exposing herself to further prosecution in the event that it could be discovered that she lied; Blanche fully apprised her of this risk. So there is decent reason to believe she would at least strive to be maximally truthful — or at least to avoid telling falsehoods. And even if you’re inclined to believe that her lawyers proactively contacted the DOJ on her behalf to arrange this interview because she planned to deliberately lie, it’s probably a worthwhile mental exercise to suspend disbelief for a few minutes and entertain the possibility that what she was saying could have legitimately been her best approximation of the truth. Because we’ve never heard from her directly before under these conditions. She did not testify at her 2021 criminal trial. She’s sat for depositions in civil litigation, but those don’t permit her to volunteer wide-ranging, self-selected information. Blanche wasn’t deposing her, he was just asking basic questions to guide the session along, and inviting her to say whatever she felt was worth saying.
It’s obvious that Maxwell made sure to inject some flattery of Donald Trump — a former social acquaintance of hers, who happens to be the one person with unilateral power to spare her from having to spend the next 15 years in a federal prison facility. Maxwell denies ever perceiving the slightest indication that Trump had engaged in any sexual misconduct, and says she always found him “very cordial and very kind.” She dutifully declares her admiration for “his extraordinary achievement in becoming the President now.” This inclusion of some obligatory Trump puffery — which is what everyone does when they want something out of him — doesn’t necessarily imply that everything Maxwell said over the course of nine hours should be automatically discounted as false or duplicitously-motivated. For instance, Maxwell offers the moderately interesting factoid that she actually first met Trump before she had ever met Jeffrey Epstein. While this seems like little more than some neutral trivia, it’s at least possible to imagine someone negatively spinning it to cast aspersion on Trump. But Maxwell offered it up anyway, suggesting she wasn’t obviously conniving to conceal any potentially derogatory information about Trump.
But she also exonerates Bill Clinton, who she praises as “fantastic,” and insists he “never, absolutely never went” to Epstein’s infamous island — she was “sure of that.” She denies that Clinton could have ever received a “massage” during the various jaunts she took with him aboard Epstein’s private jet. She absolves Clinton of any sexual impropriety altogether, at least far as it would’ve been possible for her to ascertain. Same with Larry Summers, who Blanche also brings up in the interview. So if all Maxwell was doing was trying to make a cynical appeal to Trump for purely self-serving reasons, why would she refute allegations of wrongdoing by two of the people that Trump has repeatedly cited as big-name Democrats who he says had a much more extensive and suspicious relationship with Epstein than he did — and therefore, Trump argues, everybody should focus on Clinton and Summers instead of him? Maxwell undercuts that (already half-baked) argument. “President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” she said. “I didn’t see President Clinton being interested in Epstein. He was just a rich guy with a plane.” That’s almost poetic. Poignant, really.
Maxwell explained that she met Trump through her father Robert Maxwell. If you’re someone who subscribes to the most fervid theories around Epstein’s supposed “connections” to intelligence agencies, and Israeli intelligence in particular, this could be some serious conspiratorial fodder — Robert Maxwell is generally a linchpin of those theories, due to his participation in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, his honorary burial in the Mount of Olives in annexed East Jerusalem, and other indicia that he had ties to Israeli state interests. For the sitting US president to have been introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell through Robert Maxwell is exactly the type of thing that internet-addled “researchers” would ordinarily rush to proclaim as explosive new evidence that the “intelligence” links run deeper than we ever could have imagined. “My father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said of Trump. “He also very much liked Ivana, because she was also from Czechoslovakia where my dad was from.” Wow, Robert Maxwell and Trump’s first wife just so happened to both be from Czechoslovakia, and just so happened to forge friendly social relations over their shared ethnic heritage? A million different subplots could be adduced from that one datapoint alone.
Alternatively, there could be perfectly banal and explicable reasons why Donald Trump would have met Robert Maxwell, who acquired the New York Daily News in 1991, when Trump was a prominent tabloid celebrity in New York City. There could likewise be perfectly unremarkable reasons why Trump would’ve been introduced to Maxwell’s daughter. However, if you’re going to spuriously dot-connect everything else, why not spuriously dot-connect this? Maybe the issue is the spurious dot-connecting to begin with.
Epstein mythologists love to fulminate about the lack of information as to how he got his money. And yes, there’s certainly more information that could be theoretically surfaced on that score. Accordingly, they should be thankful that Ghislaine Maxwell has surfaced some. She says that Epstein’s most significant client was indeed Leslie Wexner, the multi-billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret and other women’s clothing retailers. But she also names some additional high net-worth clients of Epstein, including Elizabeth Johnson, the Johnson & Johnson heiress; Glenn Dubin, the hedge fund manager; Leon Black, the private equity maven; and a billionaire woman from Ohio whose name Maxwell says she’d forgotten. Some of this had already been more-or-less known, but a key prong of the “intel asset” theories is that Epstein supposedly had no clients other than the enigmatic Wexner, and therefore must’ve acquired his vast fortune through some under-conceptualized Wexner/Israeli blackmail operation.
A lot of people have peppered me with questions lately about what Epstein could have possibly done to justify Wexner giving him power of attorney. There had been some information out there on this before, but I guess from now on I can just quote Maxwell, who says she observed their business dealings first-hand:
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Author: Michael Tracey
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