Ghislane Maxwell Family History

Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell was born on December 25th, 1961 to Robert and Elisabeth Maxwell in Maisons-Lafitte, a northwest suburb of Paris.

Two days after her birth her elder brother Michael was involved in a car accident which resulted in a prolonged coma.  He never recovered and subsequently died.  The whole family was scarred.

Ghislaine was the youngest of their nine children.  Her mother talked about wanting to recreate her husband’s childhood family who had perished in the Holocaust.  And they lived in grand style at Headington Hill Hall in Oxford.

Of the nine chidren:

• two – Michael and Karine – would die early.
• the elder four – Philip, Ann and the twins Christine and Isabel – would go their own ways.  For Philip and Ann it was the need to escape their dominating father (by fleeing to Argentina or by adopting another name); for the twins Christine and Isabel it was internet success in California during the dot.com boom times.
• while the younger three – Ian, Kevin, and Ghislaine – would be more close-knit in relation to their father’s death and to Ghislaine’s later tribulations.

Ghislaine and Her Father.  Robert Maxwell was a rich and powerful man and Ghislaine the favorite of his children.  He named his yacht Lady Ghislaine after her.  All the time he would be taking her to special events.  And she would be there clinging to him, proudly calling him “My Daddy.”

So in November 1991, when news broke of Maxwell’s death in the Atlantic after falling from the Lady Ghislaine, Ghislaine herself was completely devastated.

Ghislaine moved to New York shortly after his death.  It appears that she was seeking to avoid the opprobrium that was being heaped upon him at that time.  She lived there on the small trust fund that he had established for her.  She joined the New York social scene.

Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein.  She first met Jeffrey Epstein sometime around 1993.  Like her father Jeffrey came from nothing and was rich and powerful.  Ghislaine’s attraction for Jeffrey was probably that she had valuable connections, such as Prince Andrew of the British Royal Family.

They were lovers for a time and later close associates.  Their relationship in fact lasted until Jeffrey’s apparent suicide in a New York jail in 2019.  It was only after that time that the world got to know of her role in procuring under-age girls for Jeffrey’s pleasure.

Ghislaine herself was apprehended in 2020 and put on trial for her complicity in Jeffrey’s crimes.  She was convicted a year later and sentenced to twenty years in prison.  In 2025, during the Presidency of Donald Trump, she was transferred from a prison in Tallahassee to a minimum security prison in Texas.

Her Father – Early Times

Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell had been born in 1923 as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the small town of Slatinské Doly on the Czech border with Romania.

He came from a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family.  His father Mechel eked out a living as a cattle salesman, woodcutter and farm laborer.  Mechel and his wife Hannah raised seven children, including Jan.

Most of the family died in Auschwitz in 1943 after their homeland had been overrun by Nazi Germany.  But Jan, as he then was, had earlier escaped to France.  In 1940 he joined up with the Czech army in exile in Marseille.

Jan had an eventful war.  With other Czechs, he joined the British army – first the Pioneer Corps and then the North Staffordshire Regiment.  He was involved in action across Europe, from the Normandy beaches to Berlin.  In January 1945 his heroism in “storming a German machine-gun nest” won him the Military Cross.

When the war in Europe was over in May 1945, Jan was twenty-two years old and about to forge a new identity:

• he got married that year to Betty Meynard, French and a Protestant in her religion
• he naturalized in 1946 as a British subject
• and he changed his name by deed poll in 1948 from Jan Hoch to Robert Maxwell.

Her Father – The Good and The Bad

After the war Robert Maxwell would use his contacts with the Allied-occupation authorities to go into business.  He became the British and US distributor for Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books.

He succeeded as a businessman in post-war Britain, initially in books.  In 1951 he acquired Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher.  As Pergamon Press he rapidly built it up into a major academic publishing house.

For a time Maxwell’s interest was diverted to politics.  He was elected as the Labour MP for Buckingham in 1964, re-elected in 1966, but lost the seat in 1970.

In the 1980’s he became a media figure with his purchase of the Labour-leaning Mirror group of newspapers.  His entry led to a media war between Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Sun and News of the World.  

Bombastic, bullying and with a deep, booming voice, Maxwell became a big figure in British public life.  And not universally liked.

But his business empire, large as it was, was fragile – being heavily dependant on debt.  Any loss in confidence in him could be fatal for his enterprises.  And this seemed to be happening in late 1991.

Robert Maxwell’s Death.  It was in November 1991 that Robert Maxwell fell to his death from his Lady Ghislaine yacht off the Canaries.  Was it an accident, suicide, or even murder?  Bad things were coming to him at that time.  The speculation on his death has continued until this day.

Shock turned to outrage when a £460 million black hole was found in the pension funds of his Mirror group of newspapers.  It turned out that he had been illegally raiding these funds in order to prop up his business enterprises that were on the brink of collapse.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s Family Tree

• Jan Hoch aka Robert Maxwell (1923-1991) from Czechoslovakia escaped to France in 1940 and fought against Germany on the British side.
• Jan became a British subject in 1946 and took the name of Robert Maxwell.  He m. Elisabeth (Betty) Meynard (1921-2013) a French Protestant in 1945
• – Michael Maxwell (1946-1967)
• – Philip Maxwell (b, 1948), migrated to Argentina
• – Ann Maxwell (b. 1949)
• – twin Christine Maxwell (b. 1950) m. Roger Malina
• – twin Isabel Maxwell (b. 1950) m. Dale Djerassi, David Hayden and Al Seckel
• – Karine Maxwell (1954-1957)
• – Ian Maxwell (b. 1956) m. Laura Plumb and Tara Dudley Smith
• – Kevin Maxwell (b. 1959) m. Pandora Davis, later divorced
• – Ghislaine Maxwell (b. 1961)

• Ghislaine Maxwell left London for New York after her father’s death in 1991.  She was with Jeffrey Epstein (1955-2019) from 1994 until his death in 2019.  She was arrested for complicity in his crimes in 2021, convicted and sentenced to prison.

 

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