Ghislaine Maxwell

By Norm Clarke

Ghislaine Maxwell says she didn’t know nuthin’.

The shadowy British socialite, in a 2016 deposition unsealed on Thursday, repeatedly denied being a recruiter for Jeffery Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking operation.

Maxwell’s denials and having names of high-profile men redacted in the 415-page deposition were the biggest takeaways of the day.

A longtime confidante and alleged madam for Epstein, Maxwell gave up little when deposed for a defamation suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. In the suit, Giuffre accused Epstein of making her his sex slave when she was in her teens. 

Giuffre named names in her deposition, claiming she was told to have sex with Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and attorney Alan Dershowitz. They have denied the allegations. 

Attorneys for Maxwell, 58, sought to have the deposition sealed, arguing that the details could make it “difficult if not impossible” to get a fair trial.

With Epstein dead from an apparent jail cell suicide in August 2019, Maxwell is facing federal charges for allegedly helping in the recruitment and grooming that led to the purported sexual abuse of minors as young as 14 between 1994 and 1997.

A well-connected financier, Epstein kept a Black Book that contains thousands of prominent names, from politicians to celebrities, whom he courted and invited to parties in the U.S. and on his private island in the Caribbean.

A half-dozen individuals with Las Vegas ties are in the Black Book. That doesn’t mean they have been associated with Epstein’s unsavory history or flew to his Virgin Islands party house. After all, sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, 92, is listed in the book. 

Among those named in the Black Book: a “Steve Winn” with Las Vegas and New York telephone numbers; members of the Trump family, billionaire Kerry Packer, former Hard Rock Hotel owner Peter Morton, celebrity writer Robin Leach and Alfred Taubman, CEO of his family’s high-end mall developments before his death.

Leach and Maxwell were among the investors in a New York restaurant in the 1990s, according to a blurb in New York Magazine.