Inside Ghislaine Maxwell's tragic family life: From media tycoon father who died in the Atlantic and the millionaire siblings who suffered bankruptcy, divorce and early death as disgraced socialite appeals against her sex trafficking conviction

Jeffrey Epstein's madam Ghislaine Maxwell has vowed to go all the way to the US Supreme Court in her bid to overturn her sex trafficking conviction - and backing her all the way will be her ever loyal siblings. 

Her oldest brother Ian, 65, has vocally supported his disgraced sister, while Kevin, Isabel and Christine were all present at her sentencing in 2022 - reflecting what a friend described as the Maxwells' tendency to 'stick together through thick and thin'.

Even a cursory glance at the family's troubled and turbulent history reveals plenty of times when this would have been needed. 

Born on Christmas Day 1961, Ghislaine was the youngest of nine children born to publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell and his French-born wife Betty. 

She grew up in Headington Hill Hall, a 53-room Italianate mansion in the east of Oxford where her politicians and business leaders were wined and dined by her father, an escapee from Nazi rule turned billionaire media mogul. 

To understand something of what drove Ghislaine to the moral abyss, one must consider the hard-scrabble background and ruthless ambition of her father. 

Ghislaine Maxwell holding a photo of her late father Robert Maxwell in 1991

Robert Maxwell (back row, center) pictured with his wife Betty (sat with youngest daughter Ghislaine on her knee) and seven of their eight children at home in Headington Hill Hall, Oxford. When this photo was taken Ian (5) was 11 years old and attending preparatory school, while Isabel, then 17 (4) was at grammar school with their sister Christine (3), and youngest son Kevin, 8, (6) was at preparatory school. Second oldest son Philip, (1), had entered his second undergraduate year at Balliol College, Oxford, while Anne (2) was also studying at the university, but at St Hugh's College. Michael, the eldest, was terminally ill after a car crash

Maxwell, front, poses with her siblings Anne, left, Kevin, Isabel, Christine, Philip and Ian in a photo issued by the family after a London reunion in 2019 

The stately home that Maxwell grew up in, Headington Hill Hall, is pictured  

Robert Maxwell was born Jan Hoch in 1923, in Solotvyno, a border town in anti-Semitic Czechoslovakia. His parents were poor Orthodox Jews who spoke Yiddish, and Maxwell would later say that he did not possess his own pair of shoes until the age of four. 

Home was a two-room wooden shack in which the Hochs and their nine children lived in some squalor. Jan was the tall, clever firstborn, doted on by his mother. He was expected to become a rabbi but had other plans.

At 16, as Czechoslovakia was being carved up by its neighbours and Europe was within weeks of war, he gave up his Talmudic studies. After many adventures – real or imagined – he joined the Czech army in exile in France.

When France fell, he joined the British Army, became an NCO and began using the name Ivan du Maurier. By the time he had received a commission and won a Military Cross for a frontal assault on prepared German positions, Jan Hoch had become Robert Maxwell. Cap'n Bob was born. Or, rather, self-created.

Along the way, he had also acquired a wife – Betty – and a rather strange, quasi-upper-crust British accent. And when peace came, there was nothing to go back to. His parents and many other members of his family perished in the Holocaust.

Instead, he set about creating a business empire, based on his acquisition of a scientific book publisher which he renamed Pergamon Press. According to Betty, he also wanted to recreate the family he lost in the war — and so there would be nine Maxwell children. Ghislaine was the last.

The youngest in any family is prone to be the most overlooked or, alternatively, mollycoddled.

Ghislaine experienced both extremes, thanks to her arrival in this world being overshadowed by family tragedy. Three days after she was born in Paris, the eldest Maxwell son, 15-year-old Michael, suffered critical head injuries in a car crash. He fell into a coma from which he never awoke, dying almost seven years later.

His parents and siblings were devastated by the accident. Betty, who rushed home from the French maternity hospital, was to keep a daily vigil beside Michael's bed. Baby Ghislaine – her exotic first name a belated acknowledgement of her mother's nationality – was all but forgotten.

'She was hardly given a glance and became anorexic while still a toddler,' Betty later admitted. Robert Maxwell's attitude toward his children changed because of the crash, John Preston writes in Fall, his acclaimed biography of the tycoon.

'The most obvious thing was we were effectively confined to barracks,' Ghislaine's brother Ian recalled. 

'He had this horror of something happening to another of us. I think it was especially hard for my sister Ghislaine because she was basically ignored.'

And then, everything in the family changed again. One day, aged three, the neglected child stood in front of her still-grieving mother and said: 'Mummy, I exist.' 

Isabel Maxwell (L), Kevin Maxwell (C), and Christine Maxwell (R), walk outside of a United States Federal Courthouse after their sister, Ghislaine, was sentenced to 20 years in prison

Maxwell loved Ghislaine (pictured) more than his other three Maxwell daughters or, indeed, his wife Betty

Betty with Robert Maxwell in 1996. She died in France aged 92 

Betty was 'devastated' by Ghislaine's precocious plea for affection. 'In an attempt to compensate for the fact that she had been neglected, her parents began showering Ghislaine with attention,' Preston writes.

'Pretty, coquettish and indulged, she soon became her father's favourite. Perhaps her father saw something of his younger self in Ghislaine's wilfulness, her refusal to compromise and her apparently cast-iron belief in her own allure.' 

Betty would later note the predictable result. Ghislaine 'became spoilt,' she recalled. 'The only one of my children I can truly say that about.' Ghislaine attended Oxford High School for Girls, then boarded at a prep school in Somerset before returning to Oxford and Headington School.

She and her siblings were objects of fascination to her classmates, living as they did in a mini-palace with domestic staff and limousines. But life at home was always challenging, and often brutal.

At meal times the father, a sometime Labour MP, demanded that the children prove their erudition.

They would have to expound across the table on topics chosen at random by him. If a child's discourse failed to meet his approval, the meal would be interrupted while he beat the miscreant – boy or girl – with a belt.

Maxwell and Betty with Anne and Philip walking along the Strand in London in 1971  

A family photo showing the four Maxwell sisters, Isabel, Anne, Christine and Ghislaine  

Beatings would also be administered for failures at school, or untruths. 'Bob would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp,' Betty admitted in her memoir.

His youngest completed her secondary education at Marlborough public school in Wiltshire.

It was there that 'Good Time Ghislaine' began to emerge, like a butterfly from the stifling Headington cocoon. 'I liked her, very much,' one contemporary told the Mail.

While an undergraduate at Oxford reading modern history and modern languages, Maxwell's reputation as a party animal, social tornado and networking queen grew. 

When she was 22 and still an undergraduate, her father made her a director of Oxford United Football Club, which he had bought two years previously. She was 'the youngest and best-looking director in the league', it was reported.

Ghislaine was later set up with her own company — Maxwell Corporate Gifts. When her father launched The European newspaper in May 1990, she was given a paid consultant role.

Unknown to her — and the world — her father's empire was billions of dollars in debt and about to fall apart, with the tycoon desperately laundering money and pension funds to stave off bankruptcy.

Robert Maxwell with Ian (left) and Kevin (right), who became Britain's biggest ever bankrupt 

Kevin with Ian at the launch of their think tank in 2018

When Robert Maxwell went overboard from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the Canary Islands in November 1991, the extent of his theft became clear, not least the £426 million hole in the Mirror pension fund.

But she stood by her father, who, it transpired, had provided her with a substantial trust fund linked to a Lichtenstein bank, the payments from which continued after the Maxwell business empire disintegrated. In an interview with Vanity Fair the following year Ghislaine said: 'He wasn't a crook – a thief, to me, is someone who steals money. Do I think my father did that? No.'

By then she had relocated to New York. She told Vanity Fair: 'We'll be back. Watch this space.' And by late 1992 she had met her father's replacement: Epstein. By 1996, 'broke' Ghislaine was the queen bee of Manhattan again, rubbing shoulders with the great and good and spending a reported £20,000 a month on her Visa card alone.

A 'friend' reportedly said her dependence on Epstein was 'pretty total' but that 'he can treat her very well or very badly. He bullies and pampers her. He can be impatient, demanding and extremely critical'.

John Sweeney, creator of the podcast Hunting Ghislaine, sees an obvious link between Ghislaine's relationship with her father and the one she had with Epstein. 

'After the monster her father died, she found a second monster,' he said. 

'Robert Maxwell stole hundreds of millions of pounds from people who were dependent upon his good word; Jeffrey Epstein turned out to be a darker figure, a worse human being.' 

Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, right, with Donald and Melania Trump in 2000

Epstein in a March 2017 image released by the New York State Sex Offender Registry

Ghislaine was handed 20 years in prison in 2022 for trafficking teenage girls to be abused by Epstein. 

But her siblings have consistently remained united in support of their disgraced sister, blaming Epstein for 'sucking her into his web' and criticising the conditions she was subjected to behind bars. 

Ian has emerged as one of his sister's staunchest defenders, and recently revealed she was planning a 'come-back'. 

Speaking to Mail +  about meeting her a month ago, he said: 'She looked and sounded absolutely like the sister I know – her hair is dark and glossy, her complexion is good and she's keeping fit.'

The fates of the other Maxwell children have been many and varied. 

Robert's second son, Philip, was a brilliant scientist and mathematician who won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, aged just 16.

But he so loathed his domineering father that, as soon as he could, he fled to Argentina to get 'as far away from [him] as possible'.

Philip was last heard of living in a £65-a-week flat in North London trying to be a writer, and joined the siblings for a reunion in London in 2019.

Ghislaine has filed more than 400 complaints over the unfavorable conditions in prison since starting her 20-year sentence at FCI Tallahassee 

Tallahassee low security prison in Florida, where Ghislaine is serving a 20-year sentence

Anne, the eldest daughter, dreamed of becoming an actress before retraining as a teacher. 

She was bullied by her tyrant father over her looks and trained as a Montessori teacher, married an osteopath and is now believed to be a hypnotherapist in Surrey, practising under another name.

Isabel, born a year after Anne, became a successful tech entrepreneur who, with her twin Christine, founded one of the earliest internet search engines, known as Magellan, in 1992.

However her fortune waned and she was declared bankrupt in 2015. 

She has been marred twice. Her first husband was U.S. film-maker Dale Djerassi and the second Magellan co-founder David Hayden.

She then began a relationship with the illusionist Al Seckel, was once a significant player in the Californian literary, academic and celebrity scene. 

Seckel failed to repay countless debts over the years that resulted in endless legal proceedings. In 2015, he was found dead below a cliff near their home in the village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in France's Lot Valley.   

Robert and Elisabeth's sixth child, Karine, died of leukemia in 1957, aged three. 

Their youngest son, Kevin, became Britain's biggest ever bankrupt when a £407million bankruptcy order was made against him in 1992. 

He was later tried and acquitted of fraud charges arising from his role in his father's companies.