Pictured: Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. Photograph: SDNY/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Now the world knows what Ghislaine Maxwell did, Channel 4’s three-part documentary Ghislaine Maxwell: The Making of a Monster has a decent stab at answering a follow-up question that can never fully be answered: what made her do it?
In its hunt for an explanation, the programme identifies phases of Maxwell’s early life where conditions that are recognisable as incubators of bad humans had a twist in them, injecting an extra drop of acid. Growing up under an abusive, controlling, multimillionaire patriarch is dangerous enough, but Ghislaine was newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell’s favourite, the youngest of nine, who regularly witnessed her father attacking and humiliating one sibling or another at dinner, while not being subjected to that treatment herself. Even worse than suffering through a toxic environment, young Ghislaine flourished in one, experiencing it as a place in which she was loved.
