Late Friday evening the Justice Department released transcripts of two interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell, conducted on July 24th and 25th by Todd Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney and current Deputy Attorney General. The conditions preceding the existence of these interviews tell almost the entire story—Donald Trump and his administration, facing unprecedented scrutiny from the base for his refusal to release the Epstein files, desperately produce a theater of investigation in order to staunch the flow of discontent. The base incentives for the actors at play—Maxwell, already tried and convicted, now serving 20 years in prison for federal sex trafficking crimes; Trump, best friends with her trafficker accomplice, fond of giving pardons to his friends; Blanche, Trump’s employee—reflect perfectly in their respective performances. Maxwell, after the conclusion of the first interview, suddenly interjects:
MAXWELL: May I add something?
BLANCHE: Of course, yes.
MAXWELL: I just would like to put out there that I also focused on how I think the president got swept into some of this unnecessarily, by the way. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I certainly don't subscribe to all the -- all of everything that I see. But I do believe that there is animus in some areas that may have contributed to how the use of the president to harm him, that I find deeply offensive.
You couldn’t play for Trump’s favor any harder than to posit that all of this is actually just a conspiracy theory hatched by his enemies to harm him, and how deeply offended you are by it all. Maxwell does a lot of this very obvious Trump-pleasing—earlier that same day, when asked about Trump’s relationship to her, she downplays it, saying she only met him through his father, but adding, “And as far as I'm concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I find -- I -- I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the President now. And I like him, and I've always liked him. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him.”
The two days of interviewing proceed much like this, with Maxwell pardon-fishing and Blanche just generally being a good sport about it. He basically never presses Maxwell on any of her self-serving narratives or hand-waving away of basic facts about her life or her relationship with Epstein—at one point, she claims she was living in NYC off of a meager $25,000 a year salary from Epstein, and says the following of her father:
MAXWELL: No, there was no money. So my father was never attached to money. He was born a peasant, a real one. Dirt floor, no shoes, no clothes -- some clothes, but not, you know, sorry, I don't mean to say -- nothing. And he never -- he was never into that. I mean, there were things that he had his extravagances, he loved his boat and his plane. So obviously you need money for that. But there was no, nothing else. And there was not a single penny that came to any of us, at any time, ever.
Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father that she’s speaking about here, was a billionaire publishing magnate and former Member of Parliament who was known for taking his helicopter to and from his Heading Hill estate (now home to Oxford Brookes University Law) and his ginormous 180-foot superyacht the Lady Ghislaine. The guy who was so rich his house is now a law school, whose yacht has its own Wikipedia entry, according to Ghislaine was “never attached to any money.”
So what does Todd Blanche say following this claim? Nothing.
BLANCHE: Okay. So -- so when you are talking about your life with Mr. Epstein in the 90s, you -- you're -- you're not -- you -- you're very different financially. You -- you're very different financially positioned than he is --
MAXWELL: Absolutely.
Blanche just lets it slide, and sort of tees up her own point for her. Conveniently left out by Maxwell here is that during her trial in 2021, documents revealed Epstein had actually paid her around $30 million throughout their relationship, beginning in the 1990s. The next day, Blanche comes back to the money issue and points this out, before helping Maxwell dogwalk him yet again:
TODD BLANCHE: So -- okay. So the government had evidence that, even as late as 2007, he paid you a lot of money.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: What was that? What was the money?
TODD BLANCHE: Like several -- millions of millions of dollars in 2007. $7.4 million, I think.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: What was that for? Was it -- was that the helicopter?
TODD BLANCHE: That was -- that's my question for you.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Oh, sorry.
TODD BLANCHE: I don't know.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Okay. Sorry.
TODD BLANCHE: So in 2007 –
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I think that was probably the helicopter. That could have been –
TODD BLANCHE: That was what?
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: That could have been the helicopter, the Sikorsky. Those big chunks like that, I don't -- I didn't -- I don't personally have any memory of receiving a check from him for $7 million. I just -- I just don't. But I would have to -- I know I -- so the answer to your question, to be precise –
DAVID MARKUS [Ghislaine’s Defense Attorney]: You would remember if it went into your pocket –
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I would remember if it went -- I would -- he never paid me to -- for services that you just described, $7 million, to --for any nefarious reason.
TODD BLANCHE: Yeah. I think I understand what you've said about being on the payroll and helping -- him helping you with businesses, and giving you a lot of life things along the way. You travel with him, you ate with him. He's, you know, but there is the -- these massive amounts of money, one-time payments that I –
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: So I don't -- you'd have to trace that, right? So I don't believe that came into my account or I had any control. I have no memory of that. I have no -- no –
TODD BLANCHE: Well, but if there's records that show it coming into your account, it sounds like what you're saying is that not -- putting aside your -- you have no memory of that money being yours.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: No.
TODD BLANCHE: Like you didn't -- that money is not somewhere –
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: No. I wouldn't be like, oh, yippee, let me go. I got $7 million. I'm going to go buy myself a yacht. No. Or I don't know, something else or move it to some other -- no. I don't think -- I don't think, if you look -- you'll have to check, obviously you will. I don't think you'll find that money moving in any – to any account, either of mine or it shouldn't show, I don't believe anyway. As far as I recollect, it wouldn't show me spending it.
TODD BLANCHE: Right.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Does that make sense?
TODD BLANCHE: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think if -- I don't think there's any dispute by anybody, even your lawyers at trial, that -- that that the money went in.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Oh, $7 million in when, what year?
TODD BLANCHE: Well, there's several years; in 2007.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: And?
TODD BLANCHE: 2002, there was $5 million that you were paid in 2002.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Oh, well, I'd have to -- I don't -- I don't remember. But -- okay. So there's -- there would be another large sum, but it wouldn't have come from him later. But it had nothing to do –
TODD BLANCHE: The biggest one was in 1999. There's over $18 million. $18.3 million.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I don't know what that is.
TODD BLANCHE: So what -- but you – you're -- but what you're saying, it sounds like, and if you don't know, we're going to -- we can move on.
Damn, you forgot about the tens of millions of dollars the child sex trafficker paid you for? No problem—makes sense, we can move on.
Blanche basically lets any self-serving claim made by Maxwell slide by no matter how absurd it is. In one particularly strange moment, Maxwell tackles a now very well known accusation made by Virginia Giuffre—the woman who claimed she was recruited by Maxwell while working at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort as a 16-year-old and then ‘passed around like a platter of fruit’ to Epstein’s powerful friends. Giuffre claimed that she had been trafficked to Prince Andrew for sex in Maxwell’s home, with Maxwell implying that the home was too physically small to accommodate sexual activity.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: The idea of him doing anything of that nature in my house, that's the size of this room, is so mind-blowingly not conceivable to me, as the man or what -- I just can't --I can't even – I -- no.
DAVID MARKUS: Is there any way that it could have happened?
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: No.
DAVID MARKUS: Okay.
LEAH SAFFIAN [Ghislaine’s Attorney #2]: Describe the physical plan.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Oh, the physical -- so the -- my house was tiny. I think it's 900 square feet in total. Well, maybe that; is that right? Maybe nine –
LEAH SAFFIAN: Yes.
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: It is on three floors, however. So you're talking about a little -- it's a jewel. It used to be a stable for a horse. It was the stables for the big house. It was a little poor man's home behind the rich man's home. It's a jewel. It's a -- was a gorgeous little place, but it is the size of a nut. If you make a noise, let's say, a little burp or something you don't want to – you'd hear it. It just - Where she says that they had relations in a bathroom, I -- first of all, the bath is an old Victorian bath. I could -- I'm quite -- quite small, it's tight for me. I put my brother in there to see what would happen. And it looks like a blivet, which is a sausage in like a very tight skin. So her description of whatever the two people were doing in the tub, that wouldn't work.
Of course, there is a widely circulated photo of Virginia Giuffre and Prince Andrew on the very day of the alleged sexual activity, with Prince Andrew gripping Giuffre’s waist inside a room with physical dimensions that seem extremely capable of allowing sexual activity—so what does Blanche have to say? Nothing again.
TODD BLANCHE: So you think it's kind of logistically and physically not something that could have happened. [1]
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Well, there's that. And there's just -- Andrew would -- he's so English. He's so -- he had a tie on.
As an aside—there is a weird tic happening in the Epstein case where people like to assert some bizarre claim to the physical impossibility of their alleged actions. Earlier in this interview, Maxwell claims that Epstein has a heart condition and erectile dysfunction that greatly restricted his sexual activity, while at the same time claiming she herself has a medical condition that limits her own sexual activity. Prince Andrew, when pressed about Giuffre’s accusations, famously contested them on the grounds of her description of him as ‘sweaty’, claiming he had a PTSD-related condition that made him unable to sweat. Now, Maxwell denies those same allegations by implying her home and bathroom are too small to allow for the anatomical reality of sexual activity to even take place.
Nothing new of any real significance came from these 300+ pages of interview transcripts—due to Maxwell’s famed dishonesty and the obvious farce of the Trump admin’s orchestration, it was sort of a definitionally non-news-making event.
During Maxwell’s trial in 2021, prosecutors wrote, “The defendant’s willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct, including some of the conduct charged in the Indictment, strongly suggests her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.” Jack Scarola, a lawyer who represents over a dozen Epstein victims, likewise said that Maxwell’s history of blatant lying meant, “it is apparent to us that approaching an interview casually will be a complete waste of time.”
But Blanche wasn’t un-prepared for the interview, and Maxwell certainly did not outsmart him by spinning a dazzling web of carefully crafted lies. She was sloppy, and so was he. They were both aware of their real audience and what role they were actually playing. When Blanche posted the link to the transcripts on X he wrote, “Except for the names of victims, every word is included. Nothing removed. Nothing hidden.” But of course nothing is hidden; it was a show to begin with. Nobody asked for this—neither the millions of people calling for the release of the Epstein files or the victims and their families, who objected to the interviews. Virginia Giuffre’s family put out a statement saying that the Justice Department had given Maxwell a “platform to rewrite history”, adding, “the content of these transcripts is in direct contradiction with felon Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction for child sex trafficking.”
They are right to point out the obvious—Ghislaine Maxwell has already received a lengthy trial, has already been convicted, and sentenced, a process that included investigations from multiple state and federal agencies and, by her own words, produced ‘‘5 million documents.” At the end of all this, Maxwell had been personally identified by multiple Epstein victims and was found by the Southern District of New York to have “assisted, facilitated, and participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls by, among other things, helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and Epstein to be under the age of 18. The victims were as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by Maxwell and Epstein, both of whom knew that their victims were in fact minors. As a part and in furtherance of their scheme to abuse minor victims, Maxwell and Epstein enticed and caused minor victims to travel to Epstein’s residences in different states, which Maxwell knew and intended would result in their grooming for and subjection to sexual abuse.”
Blanche’s final question of the entire two days touched on the controversy that primarily brought him there, Trump’s bizarre birthday letter to Epstein as reported in the Wall Street Journal one week before the interviews took place. Maxwell, of course, couldn’t recall if Trump had produced the letter or not—it was one of her combined 114 usages of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t recall.’
Maxwell could have offered this kind of interview with law enforcement at any point. That she comes out of the woodwork at Trump’s most vulnerable point is no coincidence, and so far, it’s been a success; she has already been rewarded for her performance, being transferred to a dormitory-style minimum-security prison camp a few days after the interview, where she can take yoga classes and do pilates and roam freely from 6 AM to 9 PM. According to Bureau of Prisons’ policy, Maxwell, a sex offender, would have had to receive a special waiver to be eligible for such a low-security facility, which houses majority non-violent and white-collar-crime offenders.
The Trump admin will continue to divert attention away from its refusal to release the Epstein files—before the Ghislaine interview, they tried to drum up fanfare with performative calls to release grand jury transcripts, 70-pages under seal that Judge Berman wrote, “pales in comparison to the Epstein investigative information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” which he said totals around 100,000 pages.
“The Government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files,” Berman wrote in his denial of the Trump admin’s request, adding that the request itself “appears to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the Government’s possession.”
What a meaningless dog and pony show, and one unlikely to significantly discourage the controversy around the Epstein files. Not only was Maxwell’s pardon chasing completely transparent, but her claim of Trump’s innocence was necessarily a claim of her own innocence, as well as the innocence of every one of Epstein’s powerful friends—when asked if she had witnessed anything inappropriate between a masseuse and one of Epstein’s associates, she replied, “a flat no to any man.” The public sentiment around Epstein’s guilt is such that people are unlikely to buy in to Maxwell’s version of events. It won’t stop Trump from trying.
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