Ghislaine Maxwell turned up again last week. But not at the kind of society affair this Jewish “It girl” of the Eighties once frequented. Maxwell is otherwise engaged.

She is being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, on charges of “grooming and enticing minors” for Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted pederast who definitely didn’t kill himself in jail in 2019 shortly before his trial. With jury selection starting this week, she took to the press to complain of the filthy conditions in which she is being held.

In 2008, Florida police and the FBI charged Epstein with multiple counts of raping schoolgirls. He cut a plea deal with Obama’s Justice Department, served 18 months in a “country club” prison, and he and Maxwell resumed their long-standing association upon his release. The pair hit the headlines in 2015, when Virginia Roberts Giuffre in a civil action case accused them of forcing her as a teenager to have sex with their friend Prince Andrew.

Epstein and Maxwell settled out of court. Andrew denies the claims. In the US, he is spoken of with contempt.

In 2020, after Epstein’s mysterious death in a cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, the Justice Department investigated itself and blamed Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor, for letting Epstein go free in 2008. Acosta said he offered the deal because “I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone”.

Which brings us to what I suspect is the real story of Epstein and Maxwell. People who were in finance in late-80s New York say three things. No one knew where Epstein’s money came from; everyone suspected he was reporting to intelligence agencies of more than one country; and it’s inadvisable even now to ask too many questions. But they don’t say this about Ghislaine. In fact, no one says much at all about her.

Still, the rumours swirl. She is the daughter of the disgraced newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell. After a lifetime of going over the top, he went overboard from his yacht in 1991. Rumours persist that he had spied for Israel, the US and the UK, among others. When he was interred on the Mount of Olives, the great and good of Israeli politics, and past and serving heads of Israeli intelligence agencies, turned out for the kind of funeral usually reserved for presidents and prime ministers.

Ghislaine has said she believes her father was murdered. In the Nineties, she made a new life for herself in New York. Epstein, who spent most of the Eighties in Europe, was doing the same. She had a name and no money, he was a nobody who seemed to suddenly get rich in ways no one wanted to talk about. They became partners, and then allegedly partners in crime. Alan Dershowitz represented Epstein in Florida in 2008, and later sued Virginia Roberts Guiffre for defamation. Last year, I asked him about Maxwell’s chances. “I think she made a mistake by settling the first case,” Dershowitz said. “She has to go to trial and disprove the allegations.” The prosecution, he pointed out, “have to go back 25 years”.

When Epstein cheated justice in 2019, he cheated Ghislaine Maxwell too. She is now effectively on trial for his crimes as well as the ones of which she is accused. She denies all charges: she will probably claim that she was one of Epstein’s victims. She may get off, too.

Dominic Green is editor of The Spectator’s world edition