The Maxwell Doctrine – A Rigged Game That Protects the Guilty and Lies to Society

There are moments when history exposes itself. 338 pages of transcript, we have read it in full, recorded under oath, were supposed to bring light into the darkness. Instead we are witnessing the birth of a new genre: the legal performance art of strategic forgetting. Ghislaine Maxwell, once the architect of a system that treated girls like merchandise, sits before her interrogators and plays a role so transparent that it once again becomes impenetrable. It is like watching a magic trick where the magician does not even pretend to actually perform magic - and the audience still applauds.

The setting itself already made clear: this was less about merciless truth-finding than about a stage where the defense could rehearse its narratives. Washington has given us a theater play that is second to none. More than 34,000 pages of so-called “Epstein Files” were presented with great fanfare - a mountain of paper that cries out for clarification but only echoes scandals long known. Democrats play the indignant, Republicans the avengers, and both sides know exactly: as long as they shout loudly enough, no one really has to listen. The salami tactic of publication - bit by bit, Friday nights, when newsrooms are closing - has become so predictable that one could think there is a script. And perhaps there is. The first act of this farce begins with a question so simple that its answer seems almost impossible: Did Jeffrey Epstein ever talk about Donald Trump? Maxwell, who spent years at Epstein’s side, who coordinated his appointments, welcomed his guests, managed his world, answers: “No. I do not remember conversations about him.”

One has to let this statement melt on the tongue. Two men who moved in the same circles, who appeared at the same parties, whose names stood in the same guest books - and Maxwell claims not to remember that one ever mentioned the other? It gets even more absurd: Did Trump ever visit Epstein’s houses? “I have no memory of that.” Did she ever see the two together? “No, not that I remember.” The photographs that prove the opposite exist. They are public. One can google them. But Maxwell has decided to live in a parallel world where evidence does not matter as long as one stubbornly claims not to remember. It is the trump card of the powerful: not to deny reality, but to deny one’s own perception of reality.

With Bill Clinton Maxwell refines her technique. Yes, she had seen him on flights - that is hard to deny, the flight logs are known. But of course she had “never observed anything inappropriate.” The flights on Epstein’s private jet, lovingly called “Lolita Express,” are rewritten into harmless business trips. And then this sentence, whose calculated casualness is almost genius: “President Clinton liked me, and we got along great. But I never saw that warmth or however you want to characterize it, between him and Mr. Epstein.” She reverses the relations of closeness. Suddenly she is the one who was close to Clinton, while Epstein and Clinton hardly knew each other. It is a rewriting of history so brazen that one could almost feel respect - if it were not for the bitter aftertaste that here the truth is being sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

The island Little St. James, described by survivors as a place of systematic abuse, turns under Maxwell’s account into a kind of holiday paradise for adults. She was there, yes. She “took care of guests, coordinated the staff, organized activities.” But underage girls? “No.” This single word stands against dozens of witness statements, against judicially documented reports, against the tears and traumas of the survivors. Maxwell constructs a reality in which the island was nothing more than an exclusive vacation spot where successful people relaxed.

Perhaps the most revealing document of her amnesia strategy is Epstein’s infamous birthday album for his 50th birthday. A leather-bound book, “about 12 inches, 14, 15 inches” tall, “brown and thick, about this thick” - Maxwell can remember every physical detail. The texture, the color, the dimensions are present to her. But the content? Missing. Was Trump mentioned in it? “I do not remember.” She had still seen it for years in Epstein’s New York brownstone, behind his desk on the shelf. After that the trail is lost; where the book is today, she does not know. That her name should appear in it in her handwriting she does not deny clearly, but emphasizes that she does not remember it.

The Wall Street Journal later reported about obscene congratulations in exactly this album. Maxwell’s selective memory follows a pattern so obvious that it once again becomes strategy: she remembers everything harmless with photographic precision, while everything incriminating disappears into a black hole. The problem is only: with such stories the Wall Street Journal itself has made itself vulnerable. We never understood how one can publish such a sensitive claim without solid evidence - and then leave it standing without backing. It was unwise, both journalistically and strategically, and ultimately harms everyone interested in serious clarification. Instead of lifting the veil, it created an attack surface that critics can use to cast doubt on the entire debate. When it comes to the infamous “client list,” Maxwell becomes a semantics acrobat. “There is no list in that sense,” she claims. Of course there were contacts, flight lists, guest lists - “but not what the public calls a client list.” It is a sleight of hand with words. The names exist, the connections are documented, the data is available - but because they are not stored in a single file with the heading “client list,” they allegedly do not exist. It is like claiming a puzzle does not exist just because the pieces are not assembled. Maxwell describes the women in Epstein’s environment with a language George Orwell could have invented. They were “very interested” in Epstein. Their relationships were “characterized by their interest in him.” She never saw anyone who “did not want to be with him,” never anyone “under any form of coercion.” The systematic manipulation and exploitation of young girls is rewritten into a story of mutual attraction and voluntariness.

In the transcripts Ghislaine Maxwell draws a picture full of ambivalences. Again and again she emphasizes that she never saw coercion: all women who surrounded Epstein were “very interested,” she had never seen anyone under pressure, unhappy or in distress. Epstein’s ritual of asking people - “anyone” - to massage his feet or shoulders was almost omnipresent. She herself may have occasionally rubbed his feet, but was not a masseuse and never observed sexual acts. Payments to masseuses, if at all, were handled by the household staff. On the accusation that prominent guests like Larry Summers or Bill Clinton visited Epstein for sexual services, Maxwell reacted dismissively: men could find sexual favors everywhere in the world, they did not need Epstein for that. Whether there were individual cases she could not exclude, but she had no knowledge of them.

With Prince Andrew Maxwell’s amnesia reaches Olympic dimensions. A party with Andrew and Virginia Giuffre? “Absolutely not.” She cannot remember such an event. The photographs that prove the opposite are world famous. But Maxwell has decided to live in a world where photographs have no evidentiary value as long as one repeats often enough “I do not remember.”

The massages story is a lesson in semantic warfare. Did she ever see Clinton in a compromising situation with a masseuse? “I do not remember that.” Did she herself massage Epstein? “I certainly rubbed his feet while we talked.” But that was not a massage, just “foot rubbing.” The distinction is so absurd that it is once again brilliant.

Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, appears in the transcripts like a ghost. She owed Epstein money - 15,000 pounds, not dollars, as Maxwell pedantically corrects. The financial entanglements between Epstein and the British establishment are hinted at, but never illuminated. It is like shining a flashlight into a cave and immediately turning it off before the eyes can adjust.

Particularly explosive is the passage about Clinton. Maxwell describes that she had indeed seen the ex-president several times in conversation with Epstein, but never a “warmer” closeness. She had not seen him either on Epstein’s island or in his houses in Palm Beach or New York and considered it practically impossible because of the Secret Service. Clinton had been friendly toward her, but she had never seen him close to Epstein. The infamous picture that shows Clinton in a blue dress she had only seen in the press - in the house it had never appeared to her, she herself called it “hideous.” Again and again she repeats that Epstein’s interest in Clinton seemed to her rather due to the fact that he was a former president.

Nevertheless episodes appear in her memories that leave questions open: she confirms that Clinton was on board on an Africa trip, together with the actor Chris Tucker. However, she only perceived Tucker in this context, later perhaps once again in Los Angeles. She knows nothing of a closer connection. In general Maxwell portrays Clinton as polite, friendly, but not particularly familiar with Epstein. The humanitarian Africa trip is used to whitewash, as if a good deed could erase all others. The various lists - the black book, telephone logs, Rolodex files - become a fog wall of confusion. Alfredo Rodriguez, Epstein’s former butler, allegedly had evidence. Brad Edwards says he created a list. Maxwell claims to know nothing about it. Everyone points to the other, no one takes responsibility. It is a carousel of accusations that spins so fast that no one can recognize anymore who was where when. And then, in a moment of surreal despair, Maxwell plays her most absurd card: “My father was on an IRA death list. I was very careful whom I trusted.” The Irish paramilitaries are posthumously declared accomplices of her ignorance. As if the fear of the IRA had made her blind to the crimes that took place right before her eyes. What unfolds over these 338 pages is not a testimony, but a masterpiece of obstruction. Every answer seems pre-calibrated by a team of lawyers, every memory gap strategically placed. It is like watching a chess game where one of the players claims not to be able to see the pieces while still executing every move perfectly.

The scene in the transcript reads like a chamber play under glaring neon light. On page 205 Todd Blanche asks the question directly, without circumlocution:“Do you believe he did not die by suicide?” Ghislaine Maxwell answers without hesitation. “I do not believe he died by suicide.” The sentence falls like a stone into a silent room. And as if to underscore the sinister thought, she describes everyday life in prison: for $25 worth of goods from the prison commissary one could pay a fellow prisoner to bludgeon someone with a padlock. No hesitation, no relativization - her words sound like a report from experience, almost like a casual manual from the shadow world behind bars.

But only a few pages later, on page 207, the tone shifts abruptly. Again Blanche presses, this time with the big question: was Epstein silenced from the outside because he knew too much about powerful men? And suddenly Maxwell makes a U-turn. “I have no reason to believe that,” she now says. More than that: the idea is “ludicrous.” If they had really wanted to eliminate him, she adds, there would have been countless opportunities long before he was in prison. Outside he would have been a much easier target.

In this abrupt change - within just a few pages - lies the entire ambivalence of her statements. First the categorical no to suicide, spoken with the certainty of a woman who knows the prison system from the inside. Then the sudden turn: no conspiracy, no murder plot, only wild speculation. It seems as if Maxwell is trying in the middle of the interrogation to redraw the lines of her own narrative - a zigzag course between alleged insider knowledge and sudden distancing, which turns the transcript into a flickering psychogram of fear, calculation and contradictions.

Ghislaine Maxwell paints the picture of a man who did not rely solely on dark secrets or social networks, but on something much more down to earth: money and control. As if we did not already know that. Again and again the names of billionaires and corporate bosses come up. Above all Leslie Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, whom Epstein apparently steered down to the most intimate details of his business and finances. Maxwell describes how Epstein not only developed investment strategies, but rebuilt entire company structures, reorganized personal finances and penetrated down to the smallest everyday contracts - “no detail was too small.” Even the contracts for maids in his clients’ households were drawn up by him. A financial manager who became a house manager - and thus created dependencies that went beyond money. In addition names like Leon Black, Jes Staley or Elizabeth Johnson of Johnson & Johnson appear. Maxwell acts ignorant, emphasizes she was not privy to many details, yet between the lines it becomes clear that Epstein spun a discreet but far-reaching web of consulting, control and loyalty. His model was simple: whoever saved billions paid him a percentage fee - an “a la carte” compensation, as Maxwell calls it. These business connections gave Epstein a power that was not only based on his mysterious parties, but on brutal sobriety: he gave billionaires profits, relieved them of delicate responsibilities - and thus gained access to their closest lives. Maxwell tries to distance herself, refers to memory gaps, emphasizes her detachment. Yet the picture that emerges is unmistakable: Epstein was not just a social parasite, but an architect of economic dependencies - and it was precisely there that the source of his unparalleled reach lay.

Washington meanwhile plays its own game. The files are released bit by bit, always just enough to generate headlines, never enough to provoke real consequences. The Democrats are indignant about the Republicans, the Republicans about the Democrats, and both together protect a system that goes deeper than party lines. Sometimes a single name is enough to expose the staging. Todd Blanche - the man who defended Donald Trump in the hush money trial against Stormy Daniels, one of the most important defense attorneys of the ex-president - is also sitting here in the background. That is no coincidence, but a signal. Maxwell and Trump do not only share a network of shadows and silence, they even share the same legal architect. Blanche, who built for Trump the wall of denials and rejections, functions in the Maxwell interrogation as architect of amnesia. He builds the walls against which every question bounces. This makes it clear: these defense strategies are not spontaneous reactions, but two variations of the same choreography.

The journalists who try to untangle this web are not attacked head-on - that would be too obvious. Instead they are trapped in a labyrinth of half-truths, redacted documents and semantic tricks. The truth is not denied, it is diluted until it is no longer recognizable. And while everyone argues about lists and names, about who saw what when, the actual tragedy is almost lost: girls were systematically recruited, manipulated, abused. They were treated like merchandise, their bodies became currency in a game of the powerful. These girls have names, faces, stories. But in Maxwell’s account they do not exist. They are the ultimate unpersons in this Orwellian farce.

The Maxwell transcripts are more than just a document of failure. They are the blueprint for how power protects itself. How a system that is corrupt to its core preserves its darkest secrets while pretending transparency. Each of Maxwell’s non-memories is another nail in the coffin of justice. Each of her reinterpretations - from abuse to consent, from exploitation to interest - is another slap in the face of the survivors. In the end one bitter realization remains: the truth has not disappeared. It lies open, in photographs, in documents, in the testimonies of the survivors. But it is overlaid by such a dense web of lies, half-truths and strategic omissions that it becomes invisible. It is the perfect cover-up - not by hiding, but by flooding. Not by silence, but by endless, meaningless talk. The Epstein Files are not clarification. They are the opposite: a monument of obfuscation, erected in full public view while we watch. And that is perhaps the greatest insult of all - that they do not even pretend not to lie to us. They lie openly, shamelessly, with the certainty that nothing will happen. Because the system protects its own. Always.

And over all the papers, all the excuses and rhetorical distractions one point is almost lost: the girls did not end up in these houses and airplanes by accident. They were procured - targeted, organized, tailored to concrete wishes. Anyone who believes that there is only a single list, a closed file, a handful of names, is lying to themselves or wants to be lied to. Behind the familiar silhouettes there exist further records, further structures, further responsible parties. That this aspect is so persistently left out is no accident, but part of the system. And that is exactly where the key lies - not in Washington’s theater play, but in the connections that are still being concealed.

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines
Ding, dang, dong – ding, dang, dong

To be continued ...

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