Hunting Ghislaine

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Hunting Ghislaine is an investigation into the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite who is currently in jail, awaiting trial for helping Jeffrey Epstein and others exploit underage girls. In LBC’s new podcast Hunting Ghislaine, investigative reporter John Sweeney (Panorama, Newsnight, The Observer) sets out to tell the strange story of Ghislaine Maxwell. He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat’ … John Sweeney. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer If Maxwell was like that to his staff, how did he treat Ghislaine, the apple of his eye? Monstrously says an old enemy, Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye who was sued so many times by Maxwell that he can’t remember.

One female acquaintance recalls a party at Robert Maxwell’s posh “council house”, Headington Hall (rented from the local authority), where Ghislaine organised a game of “guess whose”, in which the men would be blindfolded and the women removed their bras to be fondled and groped. Ghislaine, she says, saw “sex as simply a currency”. Another puts it more bluntly, saying “she was obsessed”. In his new podcast for LBC, John Sweeney tells how his investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell left him believing there are some ‘pretty disgusting people’ sat around the high tables of Manhattan, Palm Beach, London and Windsor. Hunting Ghislaine with John Sweeney sets out to tell the strange story of Maxwell and her role in the Epstein scandal. Paula Cuddy, Creative Director and Executive Producer for Eleventh Hour Films, said, “ John’s compelling podcast ‘Hunting Ghislaine’ puts Ghislaine Maxwell centre stage, unravels her story and asks what went wrong for the girl who seemingly had it all. Set in a richly glittering international world, dark secrets are revealed and always in the shadows looms the formative relationship between a daughter and her father. It has all the hallmarks of a premium drama – and with John alongside our partners at Global and The Story Lab we look forward to delivering.”Sweeney raises the question of whether she has been left to carry the can for these two men who, the evidence suggests, killed themselves (Maxwell herself never believed her father’s death was suicide). As he writes: “The vast majority of Epstein’s Palm Beach victims never meet Ghislaine, never hear her name.” Last February, Putin launched his big war on Ukraine. Vlad Demchenko is a Ukrainian film-maker turned soldier who arrested John on Day 2 of the war on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Having sorted that, they’re now friends. Vlad tells John why he’s risking his life to defend Ukraine – and Europe. This is the story of an ordinary, extraordinary Ukrainian who is standing up to the Russian killing machine.

Just so you know, this is fiction: but Heawood and his compadre Kennedy Fisher are played so brilliantly by Barnaby Kay and Jana Carpenter that they’ve started to feel like real people. I find myself rooting for the cynical, intrepid Fisher in particular, despite this series’ dark questions around who she is and what she’s really been up to. This is a new element, and means that our two heroes are not working together as closely as before; Fisher is in a small coastal town in the US, Heawood in Mosul, though there might be a sinister connection between both places… Find out what John Sweeney really thinks about his interview with Vlad Demchenko, the Ukrainian soldier who arrested him on Day 2 of Putin's war on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Available exclusively on Global Player.Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who suffered a tragedy, the death of her father, a war hero, a philanthropist, a good man, in suspicious circumstances. She fled to New York where she made a new life with a brilliant mathematician. Her name is Ghislaine Maxwell and her lover was Jeffrey Epstein. Through Jeffrey, and her family name, Ghislaine became friends with some of the most powerful people on earth, ex-President Bill Clinton and President-to-be Donald Trump and the second son of the Queen of England, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. The story of Jeffrey Epstein has been told in many ways over the past two years, but none have given more than a few cursory moments to Ghislaine Maxwell. His girlfriend, his alleged pimp and partner in a series of sex crimes against a series of underage women, some as young as 14, Ghislaine has remained in the shadows. When Epstein’s life began to unravel, Ghislaine vanished, only to reappear when she was arrested by the FBI earlier this year. The story of Jeffrey Epstein has been told in many ways over the past two years, but none have given more than a few cursory moments to Ghislaine Maxwell. The life of Ghislaine Maxwell is a dark fairy story, one that plays out in reverse, of how a clever and beautiful woman ends up serving a monster while too many of her powerful friends look away. It’s a mirror, that shows poor and vulnerable victims to be heroic truth-tellers and some of the biggest movers and hitters on earth to be corrupt or at best, complacent, while evil stared them in the face. Detained, tortured, stabbed, and sentenced to death. This is Aiden Aslin’s astonishing story, from the heart of the conflict in Ukraine. Aiden fought with the Ukrainians and was captured by Russian forces during the siege of Mariupol. After a normal childhood in Nottinghamshire and ambitions to be a policeman, how did he find himself a prisoner of war? And how did he survive it?