Convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and her ex-husband Scott Borgerson hired a succession of blue-eyed, blonde-haired Swedish men as live-in dog-walkers, one of their ex-employees says.
Rasmus Alpsjö, 31, said the former couple were extremely paranoid and went to extreme lengths to maintain their privacy, in an interview with Raeden Greer for her Diaries of a Pretender podcast.
After being hired over the phone by Maxwell’s assistant, Mr Alpsjö said he arrived in New York in March 2015, and was told to come to Central Park to meet his new employers and their pet vizsla, Captain Nemo.
“(Scott Borgerson) sat me down and told me ‘the woman you’re working for, living with, she’s a very famous woman so you can never say who she is and you can never bring people to the house and you have to be quiet about all of this’.”
Mr Alpsjö, then aged 24, said he found his bosses demanding and intimidating at times.
He moved into the basement of Maxwell’s townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and was paid $300 a week to take care of her dogs and fetch coffee, he said.
He recalled Maxwell throwing a tantrum one day when he allowed a delivery person to enter the home.
“(Maxwell’s) just like, ‘Who is this?’ And ‘gimme your ID.’ And then she took the delivery guy’s ID, like took a copy of it,” Mr Alpsjö told the podcast host.
“When she told him to leave, ’cause he was at the wrong door, she was furious at me.”
He claimed that Maxwell told her: “That could have been someone who wanted to kill me.”
Mr Alpsjö said Maxwell considered firing him on the spot.
It wasn’t until years later in 2019 when he saw media coverage of the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein that he connected the late billionaire paedophile to Maxwell.
He didn’t see any inappropriate behaviour during his time working there, he said.
Mr Alpsjö said he met Maxwell through a friend in Sweden who told him “he was going to New York to work for a rich lady”.
“He told me she likes to have young Swedish men in her house doing stuff for her, getting her coffee and looking after her dogs. That’s all he told me. I thought ‘well that sounds awesome’.”
The friend said that, when his three months were up, they would need a “new guy, cause all the guys who have been there looked like really, really Swedish, like blonde, tall, blue eyes”.
“He said ‘you can go after me if you like’.”
Mr Alpsjö said he had a brief interview via cellphone with Maxwell’s assistant who hired him on the spot.
“She asked me ‘do you like dogs and could you come on this date and it was over in five minutes’.”
Among the duties were cooking, feeding and walking Maxwell’s dogs, including her Yorkie Max.
During their first meeting, Maxwell asked Mr Alpsjö if he had a passport.
“I was like ‘yes I have a passport’ and she was like ‘now you have two passports’. She told me you have to register on her website at the TerraMar project and you will get a second passport.”
Maxwell’s short-lived ocean conservation TerraMar charity encouraged people to sign up for digital passports in order for people to become “citizens of the high seas”.
Maxwell was particularly impressed with his cooking skills after he cooked hamburgers on a grill during a dinner party.
“She said, ‘You’re amazing. Like how couldn’t I have seen this before? You (have) actually shown what you can do’.”
Maxwell left New York after Epstein was arrested in 2019 and moved to a secluded mansion in New Hampshire.
She was arrested there by federal agents in July 2020, and charged with recruiting and grooming young girls to be abused by her Epstein.
Maxwell was convicted of five sex-trafficking charges in a federal courthouse in Manhattan late last year.
Maxwell, who is due to be sentenced in June, faces up to 65 years in prison.
Epstein died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking offences.
His death was ruled suicide by the medical examiner.
