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Hunting Ghislaine: weighing conspiracy and truth in the Epstein saga

<span>Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

“You can feel sorry for someone,” says John Sweeney, “and still want them to face justice.” He’s talking about Hunting Ghislaine, the compelling podcast in which the investigative reporter unpicks the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, the 58-year-old British socialite who is currently in jail, awaiting trial for procuring and trafficking underage girls for the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and others. Ghislaine, who denies the charges, faces 35 years in jail if convicted.

Does he think she’s evil? By way of reply, Sweeney tells me that in January he testified against Darko Tasic, the Serbian fighter later jailed for his role in the 1999 massacre of 113 Albanian men and boys in Kosova. “That,” he says, “was evil.”

As for Maxwell, Sweeney muses on the impact of adoring and being adored by her father Robert, who owned and plundered the Daily Mirror. Ghislaine was raised in a life of privilege at the 51-room Headington Hill Hall near Oxford, where her father had himself memorialised in stained glass as Samson bringing down the walls of Gaza. We learn from Hunting Ghislaine that he would urinate from his helipad atop the Daily Mirror building on to people below. He behaved worse in his office. “Maxwell also had the habit, common to megalomaniacs, of crapping in front of people. Perhaps not visibly doing it, but going to the loo with people waiting so would have to listen to him evacuating – whatever you want to call it.”

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When Robert Maxwell drowned, some speculated that he was pushed, others that he killed himself, and yet others that he was simply peeing overboard and lost his balance. “I think he was murdered,” Ghislaine told reporters. That theory was based on the idea that Robert was bumped off by Mossad because he knew too much.

“I don’t buy that,” says Sweeney. “He had been useful to them because of his connections with [Romanian president Nicolae] Ceaușescu and other dictators. Killing him would have been difficult, expensive and irrelevant.”

Robert Maxwell and Ghislaine in 1992.
Robert Maxwell and Ghislaine in 1992. Photograph: News UK Ltd/Shutterstock

Sweeney also investigates Epstein’s death, in particular the claims of a forensic pathologist, hired by his family, that the predator’s injuries suggest he was murdered. “His theory was that the fracture of the hyoid bone does not occur in the case of suicides but [is a sign of] strangulation. Unfortunately that’s bollocks.”

It’s cage-fighting out there for reporters. I was getting death threats

John Sweeney

Sweeney, who quotes a study of 175 suicides that found such fractures were detected in 68% of cases, is clearly enjoying the unbuttoned informality of the podcast format – especially when examining the claim made by Prince Andrew on Newsnight that he went for a walk with Epstein in New York’s Central Park in 2010, to sever links with the convicted sexual predator. In the podcast, Sweeney questions why anyone would break up that way: “Is he thick or what?”

Sweeney also talks to a dermatology expert whom he introduces as “the professor of sweat” to discuss Prince Andrew’s claim that, after the Falklands war, he was left unable to perspire. “It’s bollocks,” Sweeney says. “That’s not the word I would use,” says the professor who nonetheless agrees with Sweeney’s doubts.

Why so much swearing? “Swearing is very much part of me and the mood of the podcast. I want this to be like having a pint with someone in the know.” He thinks his rough-and-ready persona is refreshing. “The public like my stuff. I have that attitude of not being cowed.” Indeed, Sweeney is probably best known for screaming at a Scientology spokesman during a 2007 Panorama.

Hunting Ghislaine, which reaches its conclusion this Thursday, has been a huge hit, so far notching up 6 million listeners. Its success clearly feels like a redemption. “I’d like to thank Tony Hall,” says Sweeney, “for ruining my life.” He blames the BBC’s former director general for his departure from the corporation after 17 years. “I had a very bad 2019,” Sweeney admits. His investigation of the English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson was shelved by the BBC after it was revealed that Lucy Brown, one of Robinson’s followers, had pulled off a sting on Sweeney. “I fell for it. I was fool. I drank too much with a source who was scheming against me.”

‘He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat’ … John Sweeney.
‘He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat’ … John Sweeney. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Brown secretly filmed him making remarks during the encounter that led Panorama to issue a statement saying they had been “offensive and inappropriate”. Robinson claimed Sweeney’s remarks were racist and homophobic. Sweeney believes the BBC did not have his back. “Too many of the management are milquetoast jellyfish who do not realise that it’s cage-fighting out there for their reporters. I was getting death threats.” He says he “cracked up” and had to see two psychiatrists to help him through the stress of leaving the corporation. “I still love the BBC and wish [new director general] Tim Davie the best.”

Now, though, Sweeney seems professionally rejuvenated. He recently published Murder on the Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? – an investigation into the murder of the Mediterranean island’s leading journalist. He is writing a fifth novel. His fourth, The Useful Idiot, was set in Stalinist Russia and included a diabolical character called Cornelius Aubyn. As the first and last three letters of the name suggest, this was a dig at the former Labour leader.

By making his podcast for LBC, Sweeney has been able to tell a story that had been niggling away at him for decades. “I’d always wanted to investigate Robert Maxwell,” he says. After his death, he suggested as much to Donald Trelford, then the editor of the Observer, where Sweeney worked until 2001. “He looked at me as if I was an enormous cowpat.”

The enormous cowpat has had the last laugh: Sweeney is very proud of Hunting Ghislaine. “The journalism is solid. We set out points of view and investigate them and get to a conclusion.”

For me, it is the little details that are most telling. Epstein, we learn, decorated the entrance hall of his New York townhouse with rows of individually framed prosthetic eyeballs. We hear a recording of a prosecutor asking Epstein if it’s true he has an egg-shaped penis, followed by the financier ripping off his mic and storming out of the deposition.

Sweeney looks into how Donald Trump’s former secretary of labour, lawyer Alex Acosta, could have brokered a secret “sweetheart” deal for Epstein in 2008, whereby the latter agreed to plead guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in return for serving only 13 months for the crime. The agreement spared his co-conspirators prosecution and stipulated that Epstein was allowed to go to work every day of his incarceration. Last month, Acosta and his legal team were cleared by the Department of Justice of wrongdoing over that deal.

Sweeney comes to a weary conclusion. “Power and money can help blind justice around the world,” he says. “But in America it’s normal.”

Hunting Ghislaine.