Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome back to the Epstein Chronicles.
Journalist and author John Sweeney has recently released a book
about Glaine Maxwell, and today we're going to talk about
that book a little bit and talk about the review
of that book that The Telegraph has put out. So
let's get to it. Headline Hunting Gallaine Review Queasy Biography
of an abuser who saw sex as currency. John Sweeney's
new book sheds fresh light on Maxwell's servile, abusive relationship
with her father, but it's prose will make you cringe. Now.
I haven't read this book yet. I'll probably grab it
off of Audible and get to it in the next
few weeks, as I try to do with most of
these books that come out covering this topic. So I
don't have much to offer in the way of personal
experience as far as reading the book yet, but I
found this review to be relatively interesting. This article was
authored by Mick Brown with Glenn Maxwell, now confined to
a cell in Florida's Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institute, serving a
sentence of twenty years for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to
sexually abuse minors and with the names of those wealthy
and powerful men to whom it is alleged Epstein peddled
sexual favors. Still waiting disclosure comes yet another chapter in
this most horrific saga. Well, that's pretty much spot on
horrific saga. For sure. She definitely has some names that
nobody is aware of or that people need confirmation of.
The question is would she ever play ball? And so
far it certainly seems like the answer to that question
is no. Hunting. Golaine by the investigative journalist John Sweeney,
is based on Sweeney's popular twenty twenty podcast of the
same name. It's a story with which we are all familiar,
overly familiar, perhaps, But while Sweeney draws copiously on the
extensive reporting done by others, his book, carefully researched and
written in a breezy journalize, casts a new light on
the complex character of Glaine Maxwell and her fateful relationship
with Epstein and her father. So my guess is we're
going to rehash a bunch of old territory here, maybe
get some you know, new information, a tidbit here, there,
some insight, but the overall story is what it is.
There is no excuse under this sun for Maxwell to
engage in the abuse that she engaged in. Robert Maxwell
was untamable, dangerous, unpredictable, with power. Over All, he surveyed
physically huge, brutal, narcissistic, and sadistic. He was hated by
almost everybody he came into contact with, except for the
youngest of his nine children, Glaine, whom he apparently adored
but not enough to restrain his bully and frequent beatings. Look,
some people are just like that. There are some people
out there who shouldn't have children, And if you're gonna
abuse your children, you, my friend, are one of those people.
And it seems like Robert Maxwell was an abusive dickhead.
Sweeney offers fresh light here. We think of Glaine as
Maxwell's spoilt favorite, which she was, yet at the same
time he treated her appallingly. Nothing was too good for her,
but nothing she did would ever be good enough for him.
Her adoration seems almost Stockholm syndrome like. It is clear
that Golayne was damaged long before her father toppled off
the back of his one hundred and eighty foot luxury yacht.
The Lady Golaine serendipitously avoiding the revelation that he had
been in bezzling four hundred and sixty pounds from the
Mire pension scheme, and again another coincidental suicide, if you will,
surrounding the Maxwell Epstein's story. Now, am I gonna sit
here and tell you that Robert Maxwell didn't take a
topple off of that boat. No, I'm not. I don't know.
I wasn't there, But it sure seems a bit suspect
to me that on the evening basically of him being
outed as in bezzling this money, he happens to quote
unquote fall while he's taking a whiz off the side
of his boat. Okay, I guess reading Sweeney's description of
her hopelessly servile, horribly abusive relationship with her father, it
is hard not to feel some sympathy for her, a
sentiment quickly extinguished when you consider that she has shown
no sympathy nor remorse for the young girl she pimped
on Epstein's behalf. You mean abuse on Epstein's behalf. Right,
I'm not gonna give her the out by saying, oh,
she's just the pimp. That's not what she was. That
would infer that these women were being sold. They weren't
being sold. Jeffrey Epstein was providing this quote unquote service,
if you will, so that he could get information from
these encounters. So it wasn't like Heidi Flice. You couldn't
pick up the phone and call Jeffrey Epstein and be like, hey,
send me a girl for a buck fifty. That wasn't
what he was doing. Sweeney explores the theories about Epstein
having laundered Robert Maxwell's ill gotten gains without ever getting
to the bottom of it, but it seems clear that
Glen knew Epstein or of him before she flew to
New York in the wake of her father's death. She
became Epstein's lover and the manager of his various homes,
although they never cohabitated. He had his mansion and she
had the mansion he bought four. The whole thing about
her not knowing Epstein until she got to New York
is a bunch of bub kiss. They knew each other. Now,
were they intimately friendly, I don't know, but they certainly
knew who each other were and of each other. In
a sense, they were made for each other. He was
the powerful male figure and key to a life of
luxury that she had lost when Robert Maxwell went overboard.
She had a rolodex of connections, not least Prince Andrew,
who could provide the shady financier pedophile with a veneer
of social respectability and cachet. That's what he was looking for,
That's certainly part of it. He wanted to be accepted
in all of those circles, and he knew that his
money alone wouldn't get him there, and he couldn't connive
his way there. So he needed the vehicle to get
into these social circles, and that was Glen Maxwell. Then
there was the shared interest in sex. Epstein, as Donald
Trump observed, had a widely known enthusiasm for young girls.
According to one visitor, there was only one book on
view on his home, the Marquis de Sades, The Misfortune
of Virtue. And I'm sure most of you are familiar
with the Marquis de Sade and his right, probably not
the only book you'd want hanging out on the shelf.
Gallan was a partying girl, vivacious fun and, in Sweeney's words,
a sextup big time, perhaps carried away by the tawdriness
of the subject matter. Sweeney's writing can sometimes veer alarmingly
to a sort of Mickey Splaine readucks. Kevin Maxwell's spirited
wife Pandora is described as his ballsy squeeze. Hey, look
a little flowery Uh. Wordplay is never a bad idea
for a book. At the end of the day, you
have to entertain. If you're writing a book, people have
to be entertained by it. One female acquaintance recalls a
party at Robert Maxwell's posh council house, Headington Hall, rented
from the local authority, where Glaine organized a game of
Guess Who's in which the men would be blindfolded and
the women remove their bras to be fondled and groped.
Glane says she saw sex simply as a currency. Another
puts it more bluntly, saying she was obsessed. And there's
been a lot of stories about this instance and that
game that she allegedly set up and how uncomfortable it
made some people. But my guess is a lot of
people weren't uncomfortable by it because a lot of people
share her proclivities. They might not be outed yet, but
there's a lot of sick people out there, folks, and
a lot of them are in so called polite society.
Puritanism sickens the soul, Sweeney writes, per slipt, and I
am no puritan. But the evidence is clear that Glen's
sexuality was charged unusually so and under most circumstances. I
don't care. If you want to be a sexual person,
you want to go out and you want to have
sex with people, that's your business. What do I care?
As long as people are consenting. But that's what we're
talking about here, right, A bunch of girls who didn't consent.
In New York, under Epstein's sway, she would go on
hunting expeditions for adolescent girls, ostensibly to audition them as models.
I've got to go get the new Biles, she told
one of Epstein's employees, meaning Maria Farmer. Maria Farmer told
us all about the new Biles and what Glenn Maxwell
used to say to her. A number of girls subsequently
turned up at his house wearing school uniforms and braces
on their teeth. Sweeney methodically chronicles the steps of grooming,
spotting the victim as being vulnerable, unstable from a broken home,
the friendly approach, the offer of a job, advancement or
simply ready cash. The seemingly innocent suggestion of giving Epstein
a massage, the ensuing abuse and entrapment. And that's how
it all worked out. You go over there, it starts
out with a massage. Before you know it, you're caught
up in the web, and you're not only being abused,
you're bringing your friends over to be abused as well.
Sweeney theorizes that, like a cult victim, just as Glaine
could never bring herself to believe her father was the monster,
he probably wond so she blinded herself to Epstein's depravity,
even as she became a willing accomplice to it. I
don't see it that way, sorry, no way. She knew
exactly what she was doing, and she did it with
all the gusto in the world. A former acquaintance sees
it differently, observing that Glaine would not be the first
woman who possesses sexual piccadillo of sharing women with her boyfriend.
Underlying all of that was her libertarian sexual appetites that
played a lot into it. She had her own proclivities,
Here's no doubt, There is no doubt about it. The
book has the feeling of being written in a hurry,
the structure is frequently haphazard, it is poorly edited. The
breezy tone begins to great. In a list of scientists
courted by Epstein, who was apparently interested in cryogenics and
wanted his brain and penis frozen, Stephen Hawking is described
as the late great astronomer, Oliver Sachs as the brain boffin.
Both men attended parties thrown by Epstein, where the kinapes
were handed out by stunningly beautiful models out of a catalog.
Pondering why the boffins allowed themselves to be courted by
such a transparent chancer as Epstein, Sweeney writes, clever men
can be rubbish about sex who knew prudently, adding there is,
of course no evidence that any of the stellar intellects
committed any wrongdoing, well except for the ones that Virginia
has pointed to. How about those guys? Probably a few
questions to ask them. Sweeney strengths as a reporter showed
themselves in his account of Maxwell's trial, forensically detailing the
abuse that occurred at Epstein's numerous properties, the degree of
her complicity in the crimes, and the cruelty in her denials,
effectively making the victims suffer twice over and having to
relive their abuse in court. Maxwell refused to take the
stand in her defense, telling the judge that the case
against her had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt
the truth. Sweeney writes, if she knew she would be
ripped to shreds, that's a fact. She knew that if
she got up there, she would be absolutely hammered and
absolutely destroyed by the prosecution. Among the wealth of evidence
presented to the court was the Palm Beach Etiquette Manual,
including a list of toiletries that Epstein insisted as staff
kept in stock. One item catches the eye Birberry Baby
Touch soothing massage oil. Somehow, nothing quite encapsulates the full
horror of what Epstein did and Maxwell's part in it,
more than the thought of that. Well. That is a
review from the Telegraph on the new John Sweeney book.
Now I haven't read it myself, like I said, but
I plan on reading it very soon. So there you
have it, folks. If you're looking for some more information
you want to gobble down another book, there's one for you.
As for me, that's gonna do it for this episode.
If you'd like to contact me, you can do that
at Bobby Kopuchi at ProtonMail dot com. That's b O
B b Y c A p U c c I
at ProtonMail dot com. You can also find me on
Twitter at b O B B y underscore c A
p U c c I. The link that I discussed
can be found in the description box.