Ghislaine Maxwell’s secret marriage was likely a set up “to protect the money she had,” a former friend of the disgraced socialite told The Times UK last week after the bombshell revelation from prosecutors that Maxwell had refused to give the name of her spouse to court officials after her arrest.
Maxwell was arrested on July 2 on accusations that she groomed and trafficked underage girls for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and faces charges for six federal crimes, including enticement of minors, sex trafficking, and perjury for lying under oath. Prosecutors laid out Maxwell’s widespread fortune while successfully arguing that she not be allowed out on bail, which included 15 different bank accounts, some with balances of more than $20 million and others managed outside of the U.S. Epstein’s former girlfriend also made $15 million on a sale of an unidentified residence in New York City in 2016, prosecutors said.
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Maxwell’s former friend told the Times UK that when they had last seen her two years ago, she remained tight-lipped on her living arrangements. “I asked her where she was living and she wouldn’t tell me,” they said. “She said, ‘A little bit of everywhere.’” As for her relationship status, they said “no one” knew she was married, adding that the last relationship they knew of was with tech entrepreneur Scott Borgerson: “I don’t know of any other guy who she has actually seen.”
After Maxwell was denied bail, Epstein’s alleged victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre spoke out on CBS This Morning about Maxwell’s role in her abuse as a 16-year-old. “She is a monster. She’s worse than Epstein. She did things even worse than Epstein did. She was vicious. She was evil. And she’s a woman,” Giuffre told Gayle King of Maxwell. “She did it to keep Jeffrey happy, for sure. She did it because she loves the control over people…Jeffrey was a sick pedophile. But she was the mastermind.” Giuffre added that from her view of how the trafficking organization worked, “She was pulling the strings, she had his money, he had her contacts โ but Ghislaine was much more conniving and smart than Epstein ever was.”
Giuffre recalled telling Maxwell of being sexually abused in her past early on in their relationship when she first met her at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. “She could smell the vulnerability on a person. I told her a little bit about my past and how I’ve been abused so, immediately it was like the Cheshire smile,” Giuffre recalled. “I asked her, I said, ‘Why are you having all these … girls come in and sleep with your boyfriend?’ And she was like, ‘So I don’t have to do it all the time.’ You know, so she made like a joke out of it.”