A newly released document from the US Department of Justice's Epstein files contains an unverified FBI tip from 2020 alleging that Ghislaine Maxwell was seen in the United Kingdom in 2009 with a young girl resembling Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old British toddler who vanished from a Portuguese holiday resort in May 2007.
This single witness account, submitted online to the FBI's National Threat Operations Center by a UK resident, has reignited online speculation about Maxwell's links to one of Britain's most agonising unsolved mysteries, though officials stress it changes nothing in the ongoing McCann probe.
Unlike the mountain of corroborated evidence that sank Maxwell in her 2021 sex-trafficking conviction, this tip remains a lone voice from over a decade after the claimed sighting, with no follow-up investigation documented or announced by authorities on either side of the Atlantic.
Unpacking the FBI Tip on Ghislaine Maxwell and McCann Lookalike
The tip, logged on 7 July 2020, paints a fleeting street scene from late September or early October 2009. 'In September 2009 I was living in [location redacted],' the anonymous submitter wrote. 'It was a Sunday and very quiet. I turned off from my street onto the main road and found myself walking behind a woman and a little girl.'
The woman, described as looking 'just like Ghislaine Maxwell', seemed agitated, hurrying the child along while a middle-aged man strode ahead. The girl, around Madeleine's age by then – about six – clutched her hand over her right eye the entire time, twisting back repeatedly to stare at the witness.
Up close, the tipster noted, 'she looked like Madeline [sic] McCann. The woman I saw looked just like Ghislaine Maxwell.' They claim to have alerted local police back then, only resurfacing the memory years later amid social media chatter tying Maxwell to trafficking networks.
Madeleine McCann Case Unchanged By Ghislaine Maxwell Allegation
The resurfaced FBI record has gained traction largely because it sits at the crossroads of two of the most scrutinised criminal narratives of the past 20 years. But the hard reality, as far as the Madeleine McCann investigation is concerned, is that it does not appear to have shifted the ground at all.
Madeleine disappeared in May 2007 from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when she was three. Despite an investigation that has spanned countries and generated thousands of reported sightings, there has been no confirmed trace of her, no recovery of remains and no definitive resolution.
Authorities highlighted in the DOJ material make no claim that the Ghislaine Maxwell tip led to new lines of inquiry. The document is silent on any operational outcome, and there has been no public suggestion from British, Portuguese or US investigators that Maxwell is a suspect in the McCann case. Nothing is confirmed, and everything in this particular tip should be taken with a grain of salt.
The attention now being paid to the report appears to stem from social media rather than policing. Lebanese-Australian entrepreneur and commentator Mario Nawfal recently flagged it on X, describing the allegation as a tip 'buried in the Epstein files' that linked Maxwell to a girl resembling Madeleine. That framing may be compelling online, but the underlying record remains sparse.
Epstein Files Tip Fuels Speculation, Not Evidence
The FBI intake report makes no claim to do so. It records what was said, when it was said and by whom. It does not state that agents confirmed the sighting, that photographic evidence exists, or that the girl seen was Madeleine McCann. It does not even state conclusively that the woman was Ghislaine Maxwell, only that the tipster thought she 'looked just like' her.
The file boils down to one anonymous, unconfirmed tip, filed online more than ten years after the supposed encounter. So far, investigators have given no sign that it changed the course of the McCann inquiry, which is still active.
