MTracey podcast - A discussion with Ian Maxwell, brother of Ghislaine

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

As everyone ravenously gobbles up all the new “Epstein Files,” released with redactions galore by the Department of Justice (hey, I tried to warn you!) please enjoy this discussion I recorded yesterday with Ian Maxwell, a man who I’m sure has many noteworthy traits in his own right, but for our purposes is most relevant because he happens to be the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell — perhaps the most high-profile inmate in the federal prison system. I won’t shy away from acknowledging that I’m of the belief that Maxwell was wrongly convicted, that her 2021 trial was a complete farce, and that she’s essentially been scapegoated for the mythological sins of Jeffrey Epstein. Because someone had to pay for his world-historic wrongdoing, even if the contours of this perceived wrongdoing are seldom well-defined. Along the way, all manner of civil liberties were aggressively curtailed to put Ghislaine in the can — from suspending the right to confront one’s accusers, previously guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, to the “cruel and unusual punishment” of being tormented with beaming strobe-lights every 15 minutes, so she could not even sleep in pretrial detention. Exculpating evidence was withheld from her defense counsel; profit-seeking civil lawyers were effectively deputized as surrogate prosecutors. “Victims” were trotted out to contrive the most outlandish tales about events that took place as many as 27 years before; none had ever named Maxwell as a “sex-trafficking” villain until post-2019, when the settlement floodgates opened, and they could maximize their payouts by ensuring their newly-recalled memories aligned squarely with the government’s crusade to nail someone, anyone, for the broader Epstein fiasco. As an FBI official effused upon Maxwell’s arrest in July 2020, it took a great deal of “creativity” for enterprising law enforcement professionals to figure out a way to send Maxwell to the slammer. Because the factual predicate was not exactly straightforward. But they got it done, by god, thanks in no small part to the cultural and political mania that prevailed at the time, which even swept right through the jury box. One juror spoke up at a critical moment during deliberations, imploring his fellow jurors to set aside their misgivings about the witnesses’ credibility, because he too — the juror, that is — was himself a child sex abuse survivor, and this somehow endowed him with the knowledge that the government-designated victims must be telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One problem, though: this sermonizing foreman had also falsified his juror questionnaire, checking “no” under the question: “Have you or a friend or family member ever been the victim of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or sexual assault?” Which was supposed to have been grounds for him to be disqualified from the resultant jury pool, given the likelihood that he’d fail to remain impartial in evaluating the alleged child sex crimes at issue in the trial. But the judge paid no mind; post-verdict appeals made by Maxwell’s counsel were soundly rebuffed. So now she’s been sitting in prison for over five years, and has also incongruously become a partisan “hot potato,” with Democrats darkly intimating that she must’ve been moved to a slightly-less-onerous lockup facility because she’s an accessory to some “coverup” engineered by Trump, even though no one ever specifies what exactly is being covered up. So there you have it: I spoke to her brother yesterday. And so concludes my stream-of-consciousness introduction to that conversation. One big, unwieldy paragraph that I’m not even going to bother trimming down for aesthetic reasons. Deal with it! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

Okay, so hello, everyone. Today, I have a special and interesting guest. That would be Mr. Ian Maxwell, who I am certain has many distinguishing characteristics of his own, but is of particular relevance in the public arena these days because he happens to be the brother of Galane Maxwell, who obviously features very centrally in the ongoing Epstein mega drama, which has reached yet another fever pitch just in the past few days with the ostensible first release of a tranche of the DOJ's Epstein files pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act that was passed a month ago. And so I do have a particular structure for how I want to handle this discussion, Ian.

But maybe just to start off, to the extent that you've been able to examine any of it or sift through any of it or just, you know, draw sort of preliminary conclusions or inferences about it, what do you make of this most recent disclosure? by the Department of Justice of quote-unquote Epstein files and the controversies around excessive redactions and so forth. Yeah. I mean, the initial release is primarily concentrated on photographic evidence, and a very surprising amount of that has been redacted as to faces and there's almost zero context provided for this photographic evidence.

We don't know, for example, there's a photograph of Prince Andrew as he was at, I think it's been identified as Sandringham, which is one of the royal residences in the UK, lying across the legs of several unidentified divide females except for my sister who is in the background. So that's an example. We don't know when it was taken. We have a rough idea. And it just shows the kind of selective release of this kind of material. And if you are a Republican congressman, you're going to make hay out of the images of showing President Clinton swimming or with identified, unidentified females or with another one on his lap. And if you are a Democrat, you're desperate for the pictures of President Trump, which appeared and then disappeared and then reappeared.

So that's as far as the pictures are concerned. My own view of it is that I don't think this is that I don't think this is that there's any enormous surprises yet in what's been released. Yes, there's a few new shots of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson that pop up there. Michael Jackson is interesting to me. You know, this has been mentioned actually in depositions before, not to get too derailed into a Michael Jackson tangent. But I'm just curious if you have any knowledge of what dealings Jeffrey Epstein

and or Galane, I suppose, had with Michael Jackson. there's a deposition that was finally unveiled in 2024 with Joanna Schoberg, I think is how you pronounce it, which was she was a young woman, adult woman, who was an associate of Epstein's, and she did tell her deposers that she was asked if she ever met any famous people in connection with Epstein. And she hadn't met a number of the people that the deposeders assumed she might have met, But she did actually volunteer that she once met Michael Jackson. It seeming to be around 2001, 2002, 2003, somewhere in that time frame. So do you have any knowledge of what the Michael Jackson relationship was?

I don't. It's the first time I hadn't read that particular transcript that you alluded to. And it's actually the first time that I had seen Jackson in connection with EPSC. And I'm not sure if the picture that we saw that was released featured my. sister. Anyway, she never talked to me about him at all. I did know that she'd met Jagger, for example. And actually, I think he was introduced to her by my father, not by Epstein. My father was a newspaper owner in Britain and met very many. A baron, one might say. I mean, it's just one of those things. So just to close on it, to say that.

Sorry, where did she meet, do you know where that, so there's a photo of Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, and Nick Jagger, seated at some function. It appears to be roughly 2002, 2003, same time period. Do you happen to know what that function was, or did Gleine ever relate to you, like where that might have taken place? I can't help you with that. But we do know, I think, from prior existing evidence that there was quite a long trip on which President Clinton and I think Kevin Spacey was also on that trip. Yeah, Chris Tucker, the actor. They may have met various other people on their way and had dinners and so on. I mean, you know, the president's the president.

you're going to fate he's going to have meeting interesting people all of his all the time yeah the photo of um bill clinton swimming in a pool with galane in the pool um seems like a pretty uh interesting pool to me frankly but that does seem to have been taken um like i've never had the opportunity to swim in a pool with bill clinton so um hey just on a on a huge just journalistically i would definitely dive in um but that seems to be taken at a hotel um taking an hotel pool during one of these trips that Epstein provided his plane for, whereas people just automatically assume when they see these photos, as they do with so much of what comes out about this case,

that it must have taken place on the, quote, rape island as Thomas Massey and Rokana call it or pedophile island or something. But it was really one of the legs of this trip that they took in 2002 or 2003. I think any language like that used by a congressman, it's really pretty shocking. It's designed, I suspect, to cause maximum embarrassment to the president. And my view is that the Democratic congressman involved in this particular inquiry and who sit on these various committees are really using where they can, Gilein to beat the president. It seems pretty clear. That's the purpose behind it. And all I can say is that from the photographs that we have seen, there is nothing that is particularly shocking. Okay,

President Clinton is swimming with my sister and some other lady whose face has been blacked out. But that doesn't imply any wrongdoing at all. And so this is all about, if you're a a Democrat, you want to smear Republicans. If you're a Republican, you want to smear the Democrats. It's all about extracting maximum political capital, as best as each side can do. Frankly, it's a tawdry, embarrassing exercise by these political figures who should really be above it and should be guiding and helping to get clarity and disclosure and not seeking to confuse and generate disinformation and stupidity. And they make themselves look very small.

Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you know, I've sort of described it almost as a sleazy partisan ping pong ball. Because, you know, to the extent that the Epstein matter came up during the Biden administration, it was often by Republicans or Republicans sort of media figures, you know, intimating that there must be some, cover up by the Biden administration to protect prominent Democrats. The current FBI director, Cash Patel, got himself in a heap of trouble because as a private citizen, he himself went on the podcast circuit and declared that the prior FBI

director, Christopher Ray was somehow personally choosing to conceal a list of quote, pedophiles and needed to quote, put his big boy pants on and tell us who the pedophiles are. I'm not sure why Ash Patel chose that particular turn of phrase, but he did. And, you know, even when this story, I can recall, you know, over 10 years ago now, when a, you know, when Gawker first published, you know, the website formerly known as Gawker first published the so-called little black book or excerpts that had been purloined from a copy of the so-called little black book, that was framed largely, around the presence of Bill Clinton on the book and the manifests and so forth.

So it's back and forth, it's like a never ending just well of material that partisans from either side can try to draw on. And so that's, I like to, however, I like, I at least like to think of myself as at least striving to be immune from these partisan distortions that I think have too often, in four, or animated people's perception and, frankly, the overall media coverage of this issue,

which has been, in my estimation, horrendous. I mean, I think you're right. And I think that what drives this is, firstly, that the combinations of all of the elements that make up the story, that make up the underlying cast, if you like, of the Epstein files, is irresistible if you are in at a certain level of the media so you know it's the combination of a royal presidents uh enormous amounts of money sex uh illicit sex in who it's it's catnip so because it's such a shocking combination and hits all the right buttons if you are a journalist who's interested in this sort of thing. It means that stories about it are frequently used to drive sales,

and sales drives advertisers, and advertisers, money pays journalists, and it goes around in a tremendous circle. So that's one area and why the media is consistently carrying on. It doesn't matter what level whether it's the times of england or the new york times they cannot get enough of it i mean i've always said that you know i i i can't deny that i'm part of that group in that i also can't get enough of it but it's from a much different angle obviously right i do think it is a fascinating story on multiple levels in so far as it functions as what i've called sort of like the paradigmatic mass hysteria or moral panic of our age obviously it has so many different components it has a very unusual cross ideological confluence which bolsters why it is that the story is of such enduring

fascination so you have more right wing sort of elements that kind of push these visceral buttons and more left wing elements and you know we could get into those but just the connection to trump alone right now is sufficient for it to be a primary driver of intrigue and debate in the United States. And that also even applies internationally. Like, I mean, Donald Trump is connected anything to Trump even in the United Kingdom or, I don't know, Australia or any place. And then that could be sufficient grounds to keep banging the drum. It does seem to me that if you, just on what you've just said there, you've got Trump, which is, you know, he's like a magnet. for news reporting. Prince Andrews, of course, causes and Guillen, who is a self-British national,

as well as being an American and a French national, drives the British interest. In France, you've got the fact that one of Epstein's major properties was in Paris, and there was some kind of a model scout that was allegedly used to procure women for him, so on. So there's a French interest. Is it a major story in France? I haven't followed that as closely. I know you're in France right now. Is it is it a headline story in France regularly? Of course. Of course. But I think the thing that one, the point that I would like to make here is that if you strip out the politics for a second, put Trump to one side and so on.

Very difficult to do. I don't even know if I can comport my brain in order to achieve that. The driver, if you believe them, for the Democrats, is protecting the victims of Epstein. And it's all about the victims. It took a long time to get to where we are as far as they are concerned. But whilst these ladies who have clearly, a lot of them have suffered in one way or another. What else has suffered in the process of this is my own sister's constitutional rights and her right to due process. And therefore, this

fundamentally becomes, if nothing else, a civil liberties issue in America. We know and you know that civil liberties are being eroded everywhere at every turn. And it's It doesn't matter where you look in terms of the freedom of expression and the press are under attack. The freedom of assembly and protest is under attack. The freedom of association, civil society, due process, habeas corpus, the rule of law. Everything is being attacked in one way or another or eroded in one way or another. So in the case of Gulen, it is... And just to interrupt briefly, because this is the theme,

this is the main theme that I did want to discuss with you, the civil liberties component, which has been almost entirely ignored in the popular press coverage. And I think is extremely grave. But just on the point of, you know, Democrats being motivated by this imperative to supposedly protect victims, that is true. The Democrats and liberals and people on the left, do tend to have more of a pre-existing ideology around the need to protect sacrosancted, self-identified

victims. And it was partly as a function of Me Too that this story exploded in 2018 with the Miami Herald series by Julie K. Brum, which has a surfeit of problems if you go back and reread it. But interestingly enough, what I've always found sort of confounding is, that given this sort of cross-ideological convergence, you often now have people who are at least essentially on the right being just as credulous, if not more so, about the claims of purported or self-identified victims as people on the left had been historically or more traditionally seen to have been. But particularly as it relates to the Epstein story, because there are other components to that story that are kind of driving their visceral interest in it. So when we talk

about this latest release of files, so-called Epstein file, by the DOJ. You say it's surprising that somebody of the faces were redacted. Well, if anyone's surprised by that, they shouldn't be. I've been trying, maybe fruitlessly, to call attention to the court's deliberations that had been underway in anticipation of this disclosure of records, which was bringing about the imposition of incredibly onerous criteria by which the government would be redacting so-called files or expansive criteria over broad criteria. I personally sent a letter that I think you told me you read to Judge Berman in New York that if the so-called victim's lawyers got their way as they were demanding in letters

and in statements to the judiciary and that anybody who ever self-identified as a victim, no matter how credible or no matter how corroborated their purported victimhood has ever been, And if anybody who could even just, you know, unilaterally self-declare as such could then have any of their, quote, identifying information, which we know is going to be intertwined throughout a giant expanse of records. Any of that information is going to be redacted, then people are going to be very disappointed because there's the Epstein Files Transparency Act is not actually going to bring about that transparency. And sure enough, that's, that's turned out to have been the case. Yeah. Let me make two points. You're absolutely right that there is a convergence somewhat counterintuitively between left and right as far as the Epstein files are concerned. But they're coming at it from two different positions. The right is coming at it because the president in his election and then subsequently his officials said that we're going to have transparency on this.

matter. They were going to release the files and this is part of the kind of draining of the swamp narrative and so on and we're going to be transparent. The left is coming at it because it is an obvious area where they can be strong on identification with victims, identification with women. As you say, it's coming at it from the kind of me too end of the equation. and they meet in the middle. What is worrying about the way that this is being done is that we know from Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, who wrote to Congress, I think, just last on Friday, to say that he is being assisted by attorneys of the accusers or of the victims,

whichever position you take, to identify the victims, and their families. And suddenly, a number of victims that might have been 200 tops have now become 1,200 out of 1200. Yeah. Rokane has started saying that now the total number of alleged victims has been revised upward yet again. First, we were told in July that it was over 1,000 victims

had, quote, been harmed in some fashion by Epstein and or Maxwell. And now, Rokane has revised that, you know, that was the Department of Justice and FBI in their notorious July 6th memo, making that totally unsubstantiated assertion. But now it's up to 1,200, more than 1,200, according to Rokana, because he's conflated or fudged the number of individuals whom the DOJ has made redactions on behalf of, or is seeking to make redactions on behalf of, of which also includes relatives of alleged victims but correct kind of has twisted that to mean 1200 victims overall so so 1200 i guess sexual abuse victims so what is so worrying about this is that these lawyers who are providing the names which the DOJ is then deciding whether they go with or not but presumably they are on the one hand are also advising The Democrats, we know this from Chuck Schumer, as to what has been withheld, what information

that they think is there or what they know is being held. They're advising some Republicans too. They're outlier Republicans, to be sure. Thomas Nassie and Marjorie Taylor Green are prominent figures, and they do give a sheen of sort of bipartisan unity in terms of the legislative efforts on this issue. So they're on both sides of the aisle, which is such a standard position for a lawyer to be on both sides of the aisle. It's a very classic position. Now, this is the same set of lawyers who did 25 secret agreements with 25 men. The agreements were never revealed to the defense that my sister's trial would have. have completely changed the trial and who are now making a fuss about so when we see when gilin says well you know let's have the 25 secret agreements they don't want to hand them over and yet

here they are now beating the government seeking to get disclosure so when disclosure suits them they push for it when it doesn't suit them they don't push for it in fact yes exactly this these exact lawyers you're Bradley edwards at all have submitted letters to the Southern District of New York, the two judges, Judge Engelmeyer and Judge Berman, explicitly and expressly opposing the full disclosure of so-called Epstein files on the grounds of protecting purported victims. And it just so happens that this coterie of lawyers, Bradley Edwards, David Boyes at all, have newly initiated litigation that they filed against yet. more major financial institutions, Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon, which if history is any guide, could result in them being very lavishly remunerated by any forthcoming settlement,

as happened with the Epstein Estate, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, not to mention any individualized settlements, many of which are still secret or at least non-specified, which gets to that figure of 25 settlements that you raised. you know i i had known about that for a while now it did appear in the habeas petition that was recently submitted on behalf of uh or by gulain to uh the the the judiciary and to my knowledge that information comes from a statement that was made by bradley edwards like the key legal basically antagonist of both epstein and maxwell for many years his entire identity and you know professional um career is wrapped up in it he made that statement on a podcast uh

not too long ago, right? Is that where that information comes from? And like, what more do we know about that? And what could that, if that information had been turned over to your sister at trial in 2021, how could it have enhanced her defense? Well, it would have demonstrated. First of all, the agreements would, we would have had a chance, or she would have had a chance to understand who these men were, whether or not she featured, in any of the allegations of their conduct, and she could have brought them in for her own defense. The fact that one of the claims that has always been put forward,

that there is a list in adverted comments of abusers whom Epstein allegedly trafficked women, too. We've never been able to really get to the bottom of it. Personally, I don't think there is such a list. But there clearly have been people that have been very prominent in not being prominent. I'll give you one example. Not that he's not prominent, but his legal dealings, if any, in relation to the Epson matter, have not been publicized. That would be Leslie Wexner, who was Jeffrey Epstein's primary financial patron.

He was a multi-millionaire, one of the wealthiest people in the United States in the 90s when Epstein became, basically his money manager. Over the course of litigation involving Alan Dershowitz, there was a deposition in which Dershowitz, and he said this elsewhere, but in a deposition in which members of the boys' law firm were president, Sigrid McCauley is the lawyer. She was present for this deposition, and Dershowitz made a statement to the effect, alluding to him having knowledge that a private settlement had been agreed between the victim lawyers and Leslie Wexner, but, you know, a provision of that settlement

would have been to keep it confidential. And interestingly enough, McCauley, you know, who's in the David Boy's Schiller law firm, she seems to object to any further sort of elucidation of that potential settlement on the ground. Or she objects to Dershowitz elaborating any further because it could reveal confidential settlement information, which, would seem to confirm that such a settlement could have taken place. It occurs to me that now we know, and it's been confirmed, that these lawyers are assisting, again, in inverted commas, the DOJ to select victims and their relatives to be redacted. could it be that perhaps these 25 men and their relatives now are also in this frame?

We don't know. We don't know. So what's happening here is instead of clarity and truth emerging, we have the absolute antithesis of disinformation and obscurity and confusion. And so I'm not certain that what's coming here at the moment is shedding a vast amount of light. I mean, let me give you an example. You know, I might, you know, I might start to interject again, but I might quibble with that just a tad because I do think there is some value in what has been produced by the Department of Justice, however incomplete. There is a value. Because it's not just photos.

Like, of course, everybody's going to freak out if there's some photo of Bill Clinton or there's some, you know, obscure photo of Donald Trump or what have you. But there's also been investigatory records that have been produced with, you know, I think unnecessary redactions that do shed light eye on maybe some of the flimsyness of the government's case in terms of its prosecutorial efforts, both against Jeffrey Epstein and Gillesne Maxwell. We have transcripts that have also come out. Just before we started, I posted an excerpt of Alex Acosta, the transcript of him being interviewed by the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility in 2020. We've had the final report for several years now, but we didn't have the underlying materials, some of which have now come out. And also the grand jury transcripts, which aren't mind-blowing in terms of revealing something that was totally unexpected. But they do shed light on more of the kind of the minutia of how the government was assembling its case. And it doesn't validate people's presuppositions that there's some massive globe-spanning pedophilic sex trafficking ring.

but it does illuminate maybe some of the deficiencies and how the government pursued these cases. I think that's a fair critique. What I would say, though, is that in the case of my sister, and you have mentioned, and it's true that she filed a habeas petition just at the tale of last week, what is really shocking is the amount of government miscarriage. conduct that has been revealed in that petition in terms of precisely grand jury transcripts that were not provided, evidence relating to all of the accusers that turned up on the stand. A great deal of that evidence was hidden.

They had MySpace accounts that wrote diaries and goodness knows what that was hidden from Gielin on top of the 25 settlements that just referred to. And as a result of that, it's such a flagrant violation of a constitutional requirement that, as you well know, the prosecution must hand over so-called Brady exculpatory material to the defense. And when they are not doing that and when the jury itself is under tremendous pressure because it turns out not one, but three of the jurors in my sister's case had undeclared prior second. abuse and somehow none of this matters. In other words, habeas is paid lip service to by the courts. It has been hollowed out by the Supreme Court following the 9-11 disaster and so forth. And as a result, you have to ask whether or not there is any purpose in prisoners, even putting forward a habeas petition in circumstances,

where nine times out of 10, 99 times out of 100, it's going to be kicked back on procedural grounds, on technical grounds, and so forth. So let's talk about one item you mentioned there in terms of the civil liberties infringements that have been attendant to this whole drama, because that's something that I've tried to focus on as well. And it also, I think, is useful in broadening out

the implications for people so that it's not just strictly about Elaine Maxwell and whatever you made. may not think of her or about Jeffrey Epstein per se or anything that is you know my sort of narrowly tethered to this particular case it's about when civil liberties are eroded in relation to the most reviled people in society then that erode civil liberties for everyone i mean that people seem to have learned that lesson or so you would have thought during the so-called war on terror when of course terrorists were public enemy number one and that was was used by the government as grounds to encroach on civil liberties, such as, you know, basically

abolishing fundamental tenets of habeas corpus or mass warrantless surveillance or name your other civil liberties abridgment from that period. And, you know, now it seems like public enemy number one, you know, people aren't still, it's not, there's stuff people have become huge fans of terrorists overnight. but pedophiles or pedophilic child sex traffickers or anybody who can be lumped in under that sort of umbrella they're the ones whose civil liberties can be just blithely encroached upon and nobody seems to mind so in terms of the jurors so that's something that's crazy to me that has gotten so little attention and it featured prominently in the appeals that gulane had attempted to make over the years and were projected and you know culminated in the supreme court declining to hear declining the the the the rich of centauri um uh in october but one of the issues is that you know the you know there was a process by which both the defense and the prosecution were supposed to be

evaluating whether jurors for prospective jurors for the 2021 trial of gillane maxwell were sufficiently um uh devoid of bias in part sufficiently impartial or lacking in bias that they could be credible jurors in assessing the evidence put to them. And one of the questions that was on the questionnaire that all jurors had to sign out, had to fill out and answer truthfully, was have you ever, have you or anyone you know ever been a victim of child sexual abuse? Or maybe it was just sexual abuse in general. But either way, a juror,

responded no to that question. And then he became a juror in the trial. He was admitted to be in the jury. And after the trial, this guy went by the sort of pseudonym of Scotty, what it was it? Scotty Davis or Scotty, I'm forgetting now, Scotty something. Scottie David. Scottie David, that's right.

He immediately, once the verdict was rendered, He went around bragging on social media and giving interviews to the Daily Mail and other outlets. That he played an integral role by his own telling. He was on documentaries of convincing his fellow jurors to overlook the skepticism that they had as to the credibility of the government witnesses. Correct. Because Scotty Davis stood up or gave this dramatic oration during the deliberations saying and revealing that he too was a victim of. of child sex abuse, just like these other victims who had testified at trial and therefore he could explain to his fellow jurors why they should look past their reservations about the

witness's credibility and convict Maxwell. And that's exactly the kind of bias that was supposed to have been filtered out in the pre-trial, uh, for Dyer. I'm not mispronouncing the, uh, the Latin term. Yeah, yeah, process, meaning the jury sort of filtration process. And apparently like, this is not something that rose to the level of a violation that caused any of the judges to entertain the appeals. It's just crazy to me how just ignored this is. Let me explain you why that happened, and let me explain you why Gillen has re-brought this matter up at her habeas. It happened and it was permitted because the journalist who, one of the journalists who interviewed this man had a legal training. And she understood the inherent conflict between lying on the form and not disclosing

the prior sexual abuse. And she said, you have to declare this. You have to declare it. The subtext being, if you don't, I will. So he goes to declare it. And the judge has no option but to conduct an evidentiary hearing with that juror. And the first thing she says to him before he, she asked some questions is, if you tell me the truth, it's the only thing I ask you to do, tell me the truth, the judge, and I will grant you immunity. So right there, he has a get out of jail free card. He can say anything he likes, plausible, implausible. He knows he's going to be fine. The judge, who's desperate not to have a mistrial on our hands, and that doesn't want to put all these witnesses back through the ringer, et cetera, et cetera, comes to the conclusion, it was a reasonable error. And I am satisfied

that you do not exhibit bias, notwithstanding your prior experience. It's very unfortunate, but there it is. End of. Now, drive forward five years. Here we are, 19, 2025. Last year in July, that journalist who discovered the that was a journalist for the independent. Is that right? The British The independent. Yes, a lady called Julia Osborne Crawley published the book in which it becomes absolutely crystal clear that he did not tell the judge the truth. The judge asked him, had he spoken to other journalists,

had he done this, had he done that? And he said, no. Whatever it was, I have got the specifics, but the book completely undermines his, what he told the judge. In other words, this juror perjured himself in front of the judge, having lied on the jury form. Now, that is as black on the- Okay, I actually haven't read that. I haven't read. What's the title of that book? It's not lasting harm, is it, or is that a different book? Yes, it could be lasting harm. I'm reading. Okay, I haven't actually looked at that yet. Because that is the, This is provided as evidence in the one of the exhibits to the habeas. It's a thousand pages of exhibits.

And what is shocking is that Scotty David not only admitted his own sexual abuse history, or didn't admit it rather, but he told the journalist that two other, two other jurors on that same jury also have prior sexual abuse history and they didn't declare it either. So Gilin was tried. One of these other jurors, one of these other jurors, not Scotty David, but another juror who was unnamed told the New York Times in early 2022 that he or she also had experienced childhood sexual abuse and used that experience to persuade other jurors. that person has never been revealed as far as I know and then who's the third and there are references to a third

where does the where is the potential third juror come from is it just scotty david's retelling of it or is there some other independent basis or a third juror apparently reported himself or herself to the court and nothing came of that either okay so which is just incredible what what could taint a jury pool If not this, I mean, the judge, Judge Nathan's rationale for why this didn't rise to the level of anything that could warrant a mistrial or any other sort of remedial measure was that the misstatement was sort of immaterial or it was an honest mistake. And also that if she were to take any kind of corrective action, that would somehow signal that anybody who experiences child sexual abuse couldn't impartially adjudicated. trial having to do with child sexual abuse so basically she was presenting it as though she was defending the ability of child sexual abuse of victims to kind of like engage in the public sphere or something which made no sense because you know why was it on the juror questionnaire to begin with

if it was some if it was so irrelevant look you've you've pinned it in one go the judge was determined that this trial was not going to be derailed under any circumstances, under any circumstances at all. And the judicial error, not only in that respect, but in the sentencing, she got wrong. In the fine she levied, it was wrong factually. And, you know, so these are other grounds that Gielin is seeking to have a judge look at seriously. she's not, you know, the percentages of habeas petitions that get home, it's sub 2%, it's even less than the Supreme Court, because it's so difficult technically to get over the hurdles which have been put in the way of prisoners to get their constitutional violations in front of the judge. And 90%, if not more, 95% of all of these petitions are decided on paper.

and therefore really valid constitutional violations, due process violations, are not given the space and time to be properly looked at in the round. So any fair-minded judge who is at least independent and able to think for himself should say in the case of Gilles and Sabeas, well, the accumulation of all of this suggests that, that there has been material violations. And I'm going to order an evidentiary hearing. That would be a judge who has my respect. And frankly, your audience should write in and tell the judge, tell their congressman that you cannot attack habeas corpus in this way

and just treat it as if it's yesterday's news. You could be in Gillen's case yourself tomorrow. Another civil liberties infraction, to put it charitably, that I've harped on quite a bit, is the total sort of undermining of the Sixth Amendment, which enshrines a very critical right that all American citizens have to confront their accusers at trial. And in the 2021 trial of Yulain, what happened was that Judge Allison Nathan, decided that she was going to allow three of the four purported victims who were government witnesses to testify under a pseudonym. Now, two of the three were just pure pseudonyms in that they were able to use fake names. A third, Carolyn Andriano was able to use just her first name, which was always strange to me, as though people couldn't piece together who she was using her first name and the other details that she was obviously divulging.

And then the fourth, you know, Annie Farmer, you know, very bravely decided that she would voluntarily use her full name. But of, but the two, the two alleged victims that were able to testify under fake names, you know, were very consequential, particularly one of them who went under the pseudonym Kate, who, sorry, one of the pseudonym Jane, who was, you know, a soap opera actress, Nadia Bjorland, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's an Iranian surname of some sort. She was a public figure. I mean, these were women in their 30s, or maybe even early 40s by that point.

They were not children whose privacy interests needed to be protected on the grounds of just like a general imperative to protect children, right? These were willful adults who had agreed to testify at trial. Nadia Björland was on days of our lives, I believe, right? So maybe she wanted to not be publicly associated with this on the grounds of her professional acting career. I mean, it is interesting that she was a soap opera actress in particular.

But, you know, she was the one who prosecutors wove a narrative around in terms of having been supposedly trafficked by Yulane in the early 90s. That's how the prosecutor, we're able to say that this all began in 1994. So we're 2021, we're now litigating alleged criminal conduct that began, you know, 27 years. earlier or something which is sort of insane to begin with um and then uh kate annushka de georgia was a british national whom the judge found over the course of that trial despite being absurdly pro prosecution in numerous respects um had endured no illegal sexual activity and neither did any farmer and the jury could not convict yelaine on the basis of any illegal sexual activity that

the government had previously claimed these two alleged victims had been subjected to, which is kind of astonishing. But just the abridgment of the Sixth Amendment by allowing that pseudonymous testimony to take place at all is unto itself sufficient to be incredibly exercised about the civil liberties implications of all this, I think. Well, I would agree with you. And we're seeing the continuation of that. attitude in the mass redaction going on now in the continuing release of these of these files. That said, I mean, I think your audience should know that of these four accusers that took the stand against my sister, the judge had to point out that for the sexual component of the allegations for two of them could not be considered as they were both over age. It's kind of an important point.

Second, the lady. Or that they didn't even be, or that they weren't even sexual activities really at all. I mean, for Annie Farmer, her whole contention was that she was going to retroactively frame everything that happened to her through the prism of quote unquote grooming, which meant that an instance of alleged handholding that she contemporaneously wrote in her diary she didn't find to be remarkable or even anything objectionable. That was then grooming. Annie Farmer's diary is an important matter because the prosecution gave the defense, I think, three or four pages of her diary and said the rest is irrelevant on the grounds that she stopped writing it when she met Epstein. We now know from evidence that emerged post the trial that this was contradicted in terms by, Annie Farmer's own lawyer that said she continued to write

right the way through the whole relationship. So the diary was not handed over to Gillen from which we would then have been able. She would then have been able to look at it in detail, cross-examine Annie Farmer about it and about what she thought and so on and so on. And that was never made available. And it's the...

And even the little that was made available. if you actually that's included in some of the files that were just released by the DOJ in the past few days. Even the little of it that was made available contains arguably exculpatory information itself, which is that she's writing contemporaneously that, you know, there was this instance in which I guess her hands touched Epstein with Galane present in a movie theater, but she really thought nothing of it and she didn't want to say anything because she knew how much her sister Maria loved Jeffrey. Actually, you know, one of the things, that people have been touting that came out of this recent record production was this, you know, infamous FBI report that Maria Farmer had long claimed that she made. Actually, there were some

records that sort of attested to some version of this that were in the public domain already. But there's a, there was a report that came out from 1996 that Maria Farmer had long said that she had filed alleging some sort of unspeath, you know, some sort of hazy wrongdoing that have been perpetrated by Epstein. She doesn't mention Gellane at all on this, but she claims that the, that she was filing a child pornography complaint because child pornographic material that she apparently herself created, meaning she had taken photographs of her younger sisters in states of undress,

and that these photographs, had been stolen by Epstein and that Epstein threatened her when she tried to get them back or something to that effect. Now, those photos, to my knowledge, were never recovered from any of Epstein's properties. So who knows what Maria Farher hallucinated? I mean, her credibility is probably in the most tatters that anybody's credibility could ever be, just in terms of her wild delusional fantasies that she's whipped up over the years. But that's one thing that's come out through these these things. Sure.

What we know, again, from evidence that has emerged is that the amount of cross-contamination of the accusers and the victims constantly. In other words, we know, for example, that a great number of these women attended group therapy sessions, organized and paid for by lawyers and that the frequently using the same therapist and the capacity to put ideas into people's minds and then these people somehow lock this information in and believe that it happened to them it's full of suggestions and all this kind of stuff it's just one example where everything has become intermixed interwoven and we don't know, we really don't know what was true and what was not true.

And the evidence withheld from Gieland failed and it absolutely would have enabled her to pin ages, dates, where the abuse was supposed to have taken place, when it took place and so forth, and disprove the alleged ages of all four of the accusers. So this is really a very serious moment where it doesn't matter what you think about my sister. She may be the most notorious person on the planet or in the Bureau of Prison System today. But she is entitled to expect that the justice system will render justice. And the due process really will occur and that people do not hide, suppress, and otherwise. obscure the truth. And so whatever happens to Gieland, whether the judge gives her an evidentiary

hearing or says, the hell with you, what matters is that the truth is out there. She's put the truth in that habeas petition, a thousand pages of it, of exhibits and of factual, verifiable information. That should make a difference to people like you and to other worthy investigative journalists and social media influences who should then bottom out and run with the ball because yeah just um this is also i think underappreciated but just describe her conditions in incarceration pre-trial and how that could have very plausibly inhibited her ability to prepare adequately for the trial she was held in this notorious federal jail facility in brooklyn and you know, could not sleep for any extended period of time.

And, you know, really, it was torturous if we want to use the conventional definition of torture that's used by international institutions. Yeah, amidst many shocking revelations post the trial, one in September this year, the then Attorney General, William Barr, confirmed to Congress that he personally, personally had approved what he said in his own words was a harsh regime. This is a man who was so furious when Epstein died on his watch in whatever murky circumstances he died, that he had to find, he had to find another target. Gillen fitted the bill perfectly. She's high profile, tall poppy. And what then happens is a reverse engineering of the case against Epstein to

implicate and to get home against Gillen. And whilst that was a case was being assembled, and it started to be assembled only after he died. Because in the 2006 indictment that he faced, Gieland wasn't even mentioned. She wasn't mentioned in the grand jury. 70 women were asked if they had an to say about her or was she involved no no that nothing so the judge refused for any of this prior information to be brought to the court so gilan couldn't defend herself properly and whilst that's going on she's in a harsh regime a so-called suicide watch she's in that situation 600 days 600 days She's woken up every 15 minutes during the night, unless she swallowed her tongue allegedly, did this sort of thing. She never slept one night in the same designated bed.

You know, every prisoner has a designated cell and a designated bed within that cell. You're not in that cell. You're an infraction. And they moved her from cell A to cell B to cell B to cell B to cell A to backwards and forwards. She was utterly, utterly, physically hollowed out, mentally hollowed out. By the time the trial starts, and you recall she's brought to trial in four-point shackles, a 60-year-old woman in four-point shackles, which hurt like hell. They didn't feed her from 6 a.m. to when she got home at night.

There was no even something to drink in the holding cell underneath the court. this is the United States. They are signed up to the Nelson Mandela rules, how to treat prisoners, and they're very proud about it. The hell, and this is approved by the Attorney General of the United States. God help you. So even if she had wanted to testify at her own trial, which of course she's under no obligation to,

it stands the reason that she wouldn't have been in a proper state of mind to even do so competently. Listen, you know as well as I do in England and in America. You are innocent until you are proven guilty. She is not going to help the government to prove the case against her. From her perspective, they had failed to prove the case. What she hadn't allowed for was three bent jurors who managed to move the ball from a position of great doubt into a position of conviction. it's almost unbelievable.

When we talk about the assembling of the case against Maxwell in the aftermath of Epstein's death, when there was obviously a huge political outcry for somebody to be punished in lieu of Epstein, given his death in custody under mysterious circumstances, a crucial moment that I admit that I didn't fully appreciate at the time was when Judge Berman held this unprecedented hearing. after Epstein was dead in which he invited all self-described victims of Epstein to come and make statements in court with the imprimatur of the court against a dead defendant who have not been convicted of anything and who obviously couldn't refute any of the allegations made against him.

But he invited this parade of self-identified victims to come into the courthouse in New York and make whatever salacious, statements they wanted to about their purported victimhood or victimization by Epstein. And one of the alleged victims who later was a government witness at the Maxwell trial, Anushka de Gorgia has said that she was ferried directly from that unprecedented hearing held on August 27, 2019, to a meeting with the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to begin strategizing for a prosecution against Gilae. So that's just a mind-blowing affront to civil liberties in my judgment. Nobody seems to care much about it or ever talk about it, but I'm writing about that now,

but it's just one of many. I mean, what you've just described, Michael, what you've just described there is the equivalent of an, instead of a grand jury being private and silent and sealed, you effectively had a grand jury by, as you said, with the imprimatur of the court standing up and spouting forth, all of this hearsay stuff. I mean, as you well know, the most vociferous of the accusers of Gilles, Virginia Joufrey, notably Sarah Ransom as well, were not summoned by the government as prosecution witnesses. If you read her book, a recently published posthumous autobiography, which I sadly have. I sadly endured that. Okay.

So her explanation is that it would have been too confusing. There were too many men and they wanted to keep it on. Right. So this is nonsense. The reality is she would have been completely shut down in flames by the defense for all of the lines. for all of the lies that she told, the least of which she had to back out against Dershowitz and so forth. But there were so many others, you know, spoiled for choice.

And time and time again, you have a situation where- So then why didn't the defense call Virginia Roberts Gouffrey? That's a good question. I don't know why they didn't call it. I mean, if she would have destroyed the prosecution's case, which I think she very much would have, Why didn't the defense call her? I'll give you an answer to that.

There are a certain category of witness that are as poisonous to the prosecution as they are to the defense. If the prosecution called her, the defense would have taken her down. If the defense had called her, the prosecution would have shot her down. So I decide she is so toxic to everyone that neither side. I could use it. I suspect. I'm not so sure about that. I mean, I think that might be, I mean, I think, you know, if it's true that she would have collapsed, me, the prosecution is the one with the burden of proof, right?

So if it's true that she would have so tainted the prosecution's case as to discredit, you know, the entire argument, then I don't know. Maybe it would have been worthwhile to call her as a defense witness. Not the least. not the least because she is a self-confessed recruiter of women. The little girl, Jane, who was on the stand, allegedly 14 years old when she was recruited by Virginia Jouffre. And we knew this.

We know this because one of the new pieces of that. That was Carolyn who said that she was recruited by Virginia Roberts Gouffrey. Sorry, Carolina. One of the new pieces of evidence that has come. Amen about Carolyn is a sworn affidavit by her mother, no less, who alleged that Carolyn, in fact, was paid by accusers lawyers to deliver the testimony that she did against Gielin. Well, how about the fact that she was a self-admitted schizophrenic? I'm not trying to stigmatize anybody with severe mental illness, but if the government is going to hinge its case on a marquee witness who tells the open court that she is currently hearing voices inside her head warning her that her own children are going to be abducted by child sex traffickers and we're supposed

and the jury is supposed to rely on her testimony about events 20 or more years before beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone and send them to prison for decades i mean that's preposterous that just gets to the fundamental weakness of the government's case that they had to settle on such an impeachable witness, but you know they were saved by the climate of the time making it such that the jury's apprehensions about the credibility of the witnesses could be sort of discarded in the interest of like playing the social function of convicting someone in Epstein's stead. The government was helped by two really unheralded points. One, the jury was not comprised of 12 impartial jurors, number one. Number two, the judge herself had

ordered that a huge amount of exculpatory material, notably the whole of the 2006 indictment of Epstein and everything related to that, everything related to the non-prosecution agreement, was chucked out. The judge is too prejudicial to the prosecution. So, I mean, in a combination where you have the prosecution and the judge and a partial jury, well, no defense is going to stand a chance. I know your aim is not to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein and neither is mine, but my aim really is to suss out to the best extent possible, like the reality of everything that went on here in this crazy never-ending drama.

And, you know, the grand jury materials that were just released yesterday by the DOJ from Epstein's 2019 federal prosecution has an NYPD detective reporting that the marquee witness in that trial, government witness, minor victim number one from the 2019 federal indictment of Epstein, who just this past September publicly chose to reveal herself as Marina Lacerda. she is reported by the NYPD investigator to herself have recruit quote unquote recruited between I think it's like 20 and 50 other girls so that's an interesting person to hinge the government's case on might there might be some impeachability issues there as well and people assume that Epstein was just going to be inevitably convicted had he been able to go to trial I'm not so sure about that you know I just wanted to ask you you know and we'll wrap up to shortly but you know that i know that there will be legions of internet commenters who will be

furious at me if i did not raise with you the subject of potential intelligence ties that your sister and or your father may have had whether to israel or other country's intelligence services this is what people are obsessed with on the internet i have to say um you know i mentioned that the recently released files by the doj contain also some interesting transcripts about the, and that includes the underlying materials of the 2020 Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility investigation in which they interview Alex Acosta at great length. And he's asked about this floating notion that he might have said at some point that he decided to give a, quote, sweetheart deal or let Jeffrey Epstein off the hook in 2007 and 2008 over the course of the federal intercession in the investigative. in South Florida against Epstein because Epstein was known to be a quote intelligence asset or connected to intelligence or something like this and Acosta adamantly

denies it you know emphatically unequivocally denies it just in that transcript just as he had elsewhere well but that became very central to the lore especially on the internet around Epstein so and people think that you know what's so bizarre about this issue is that it's become it's gotten to the point where one's views on Israel as a foreign policy issue or in people's views on Israel's relationship with the United States or even like the war in Gaza, that somehow has gotten grafted on to what one is expected to think about the Jeffrey Epstein case. My view is that this conflation is totally irrational by and large, but that's how it's come to sort of function in like online discourse, especially so many of these popular podcasts and so forth.

forth. So how do you address that? You know, I know your family is generally very supportive of Israel, your father in particular. Maybe you could speak to yourself and your siblings, but how do you sort of disentangle those things? Three very simple points to make on this. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel, has absolutely denied that Epstein was an asset of Israel. He would deny that, though. That would be the retort. Even if it were true, he wouldn't acknowledge it.

Of Mossad and so forth. Anyway, I'm just telling you what's on the record. So we start with the Israeli political official position. I think that was Naftali Bennett who denied it, actually. I think Ahuuq has not addressed. Ehudu Barak was the personal associate of Epis. who has not said much publicly recently, but Naftali Bennett, who's another Israeli political figure, aspiring prime minister said that.

They certainly knew each other. So the other thing you have to then say to yourself is, is Epstein really going to be a credible intelligence asset, given this exceptionally well-known proclivity that he had for young girls? He's asking to be blackmailed himself. He's the antithesis of somebody that you would want to use as an out. That's my own personal take on it because he could be turned against whatever intelligence agency is using him very easily. But just to stop you for a moment. But people think that that's the point.

That's exactly the point. That's why he was so useful to the Mossad because he could run this honeypot operation. people call it, that could then implicate a multitude of prominent people who could then themselves be blackmailed and be coerced into doing the bidding of Israel. I know I do think it is bizarre that if he was an intelligence asset, he was so laxadaisical about like leaving a track record behind where, you know, girls would call up and like there would be massage pad notes for people who are writing, be writing like call XYZ or be sending like unincident text messages and emails constantly. So it's not really behavioral we would think to be an intelligence asset.

I'm going to offer you a rather plausible, I think plausible explanation of what, of what, how this comes about. My father, who certainly had some involvement in the war in 1945, 46, he was certainly close to British intelligence, drive forward many, many, many years. He used to go to Russia. He was also involved in the 1948 War of Independence with Israel or the Napa, the Palestinian, yeah. No, I'm talking about the Second World War. Okay, gotcha. Okay. And then he certainly rendered certain services to Israel at the War of Independence of 1948 relating to aircraft parts or possibly even complete spitfires that he caused to be brought to Israel in 1948. But the most interesting aspect of his later career was that he was a publisher of top-grade scientific technical journals from Russian into English. And he used to go very, very frequently over the iron curtain.

And right at the end of his life, when you recall that the Cold War was coming to an end, we had very, very antiquated Russian leaders Brezhnev, Chenevko and Dropoff, they were all in their late 70s, and they were none of them very well. I remember distinctly that my father would go and report himself to Margaret Thatcher personally in number 10 and say, you know, this is what's going on here, this is my impression of this leader or that leader, whatever. I think it's entirely possible that when Epstein met anybody that was particularly interesting to the United States, he might well have reported himself or vice versa. So I don't think it has to be formalized in the way that people are suggesting he's an asset,

he's not an asset, he's turned, he's not done. I think that if he could render service and possibly get something in return, nothing wrong with that. I'm not going to make a song. As for Gilein becoming involved, forget it. Really? Yeah, I mean, my thing is that you could make an argument theoretically that, you know, there are people who say it doesn't have to be a formal intelligence relationship to be noteworthy, right?

Like Epstein could be some sort of cut out, people will say, or like an informal asset, which, you know, intelligence services do use, meaning that you don't have to be formally employed by the CIA or the MI6 or the KGB or whatever. ever in order to furnish useful information. And same goes for Assad, which could then make one, I guess, reasonably considered an asset. But my impression is that one could potentially argue that Epstein was an asset, quote, of quote of a astonishing variety of countries' intelligence services in one way or another. He claimed that he had the ability to set up meetings with Vladimir Putin. That was part of his dealings with Daug, Barack.

Now, who knows whether that was true. He could be puffing himself up, as he often did. But there could be connections with the MI6, with the CIA, with the Saudi, the Gulf Arab states. So, you know, Israel obviously is well. But I think, you know, there's a little bit of a disproportionate focus on the potential Israeli connections as though it's somehow dispositive of something. Like, I'm interested to know all the available information that could be unearthed on that just as much as anybody else is. but I think people have become a bit too fixated on it. And they'll point to, I mean, we've discussed this when we talked offline, but, you know,

one data point people point to is that your father was buried in the Mount of Olives in, you know, East Jerusalem, or some would say, an next East Jerusalem. So then this is extrapolated to mean that his youngest daughter, Galane, must have been working with Israeli intelligence services, and then Jeffrey Epstein must have been running a child sex trafficking operation at the behest of Israel. There's like some logical leaps there that don't quite make sense, but like explain the significance or give me give us your recollections of that the burial of your father. And on top of that, how have your interpretations of your father's death changed at all or your theories for it or that of your siblings shifted at all as the years have gone by? What do you make of it now?

Well, all I can tell you is the only member of the family that believes that my father was murdered is Guillen. She also thinks that Epstein was murdered. That's her position on those two deaths. The rest of the family, myself included, are perfectly content with the accident theory as to the way my father died. I haven't changed my position on that. and I know none of my siblings have either. And my father used to have quite a tough view about people who died. You know, if you said, he said, look, they're dead.

It doesn't matter how they die. They're just not going to come back. So let's get on. The life is for the living and so forth. He was always somebody who was thinking about tomorrow. He wasn't thinking about yesterday. He was not even thinking about today. He's thinking about tomorrow.

And, you know, he was an exceptional and extraordinary human being. And it's, I miss him, I have to say. And as to the internment in Israel with such fanfare in the Mount of Olives, where, you know, Sheldon Adelson, another benefactor of Israel, has also buried, was also buried after he died in 2021. you know people make a lot of inferences based on you know based on the fact that your father was buried in the mount of alas um again he chose your your recollections of that internment ceremony he chose the spot the ceremony was extraordinary uh i remember just so flashes this is now uh gosh

more than 30 years ago and um i remember for example that uh the There was a huge gathering in a kind of big memorial hall in Jerusalem and many hundreds, low thousands of people were present. The present of Israel gave an oration. And then the family had to stand and shake hands with almost everybody in the audience. And I remember asking somebody just to my right, there were a lot of young children, maybe. 50 children came and shook hands. And I said to the man beside me, who are these children? And the guy said, these are the survivors of Chernobyl that your father arranged to remove and get over to Israel.

And they are extremely grateful to him. You remember Chernobyl was the great nuclear disaster in Ukraine. In Ukraine. And there were a lot of... Yes, that's right. And so he did a huge amount of, he was very generous and generous to a lot of people. So he supported the notion of Aaliyah meaning, Jews in the diaspora ought to relocate to Israel and he used his wealth to help facilitate that. Yes, he used his relationship with the

Gorbachev to organize a huge number of Russian Jews to come to Israel. So he became a kind of super Jew at the end of his life. And I think Israel was very grateful. Didn't he at one point? So confirm or fill in the details for me, if this is true, when this guy, Ben Maniche, or I think is how you pronounce his name, he was sort of a defector from the Israel. military who had some involvement in the Israeli nuclear program. Maybe I'm somewhat misstating his name.

But your father's newspaper was the... His name is Harry Ben Manashi. Manashi. And your father's newspaper, your father was told about this, or like, Ben Manashi came to England wanting to spill the beans on Israeli nuclear secrets. There's a story that goes that your father caught wind of this. I guess it must have been with respect to the daily record, if I'm not mistaken, that was the newspaper he ran, right? And he killed the story and or he notified Israeli officials that there was a, you know, they had a traitor in the midst or basically he ratted out Ben Manish.

Is that is that accurate as far as you know? My father took the view that Arabanaashi was a traitor. Okay. I have no doubt at all that to the extent that was brought to his attention, he would have brought it to the attention of Israel. And what happened happened, and he served a huge sentence and quite correctly. You said that Yelaine is your lone sibling. She is alone among your siblings who believes that both your father and Epstein were murdered. What are her grounds for believing that Epstein was murdered?

I've heard her mention that in the past, but have you heard her elaborate on what her theory is there? Who killed Epstein in her theory? You know what? Because I personally don't subscribe to that theory, because I'm not a conspiracy man, I'm a cock-up man as a rule. In other words, things don't happen by conspiracy. They happen by error and so on. I just, I'm not interested in that theory at all. I never bottomed it out with it.

If you want to hear more about it, talk to the brother, Epstein's brother, who believes the same thing. Okay. And so, you know, I think it's plausible for the record. It doesn't have to be a sprawling conspiracy necessarily for something to have been low level that took place in the prison. You know, people who are perceived to be notorious pedophiles usually don't do very well in prison. Yes. I think that's a much more plausible excuse. If you use Occam's razor, which is that the simplest explanation is generally the truest,

the likelihood in fact that he was killed inside the prison by somebody, you know, who just doesn't like alleged paedophiles or whatever. And the guards might have looked the other way. I mean, the guards are often in collusion with the inmates in the prison system. I mean, I did think that one idea, namely that he didn't think he was going to get out. of it and he paid uh he paid somebody to rob him out may in fact in other words a kind of auto suicide is i don't know the thing that's so strange about it is that he had another bail hearing that was coming up shortly and you know his lawyers were adamant that they had a very solid um

defense for him like maybe he would have been granted bail at that point who knows i mean uh that that's the one area where i've always said that i'm much less certain about the so-called conspiracy not being true. Not that you have to posit some grandiose conspiracy again, but just that, you know, I don't know, it's a reason that somebody who is, again, regarded by other inmates as the most notorious pedophile in world history might have had some safety issues to deal with. I mean, by the way, for what it's worth, I don't think Epstein would have made bail. And I don't, Gillen didn't make bail and she ended up trying to put up something close to $30 million. So, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's really it it's how he died i can't uh i can't really be bothered with it the man is dead

he's on gut in an engulfing of people's lives as a as a as a result of his death my sisters andrew god knows what countless victims it's it's a hell of a mess my what do you I mean, you remind me what your interactions were with Jeffrey Epstein. You met him, right? Or what were your impressions of him? And how do you look back on him now, just in general, as to this amazing international? I met Jeffrey Epstein one time. Okay.

And what were your impressions of him? I met him one time. And I can tell you exactly when it was in the spring of 1996, New York City at a lunch, a lunch, I think, organized by Gillen. My brother Kevin was present. Gillen was there and Epstein was there. It's the only time I ever met him. And I've, three things stick in my mind. One, he was a highly intelligent man. Two, he had a kind of dark charisma. and I was very aware that he listened in a very aggressive fashion. That's a kind of an unusual idea to listen aggressively.

What it means is that anything that he could take from whatever you were saying, he was going to take, but nothing really came back the other way. So my third point about him was that I didn't really warm to him. He didn't strike me as a warm person, and he wouldn't have been somebody that I would have, off my own bat, Garland had a drink in a bar on 3rd Avenue, and we'd have had a jolly good time. I don't think so. Just that was my impression of him, and I never met him again. A lot of varied people evidently did have a jolly good time with him. I mean, we could go through the roster of, you know, prominent people in various fields who apparently did enjoy him enough to attend his so forth. said he was a highly intelligent man he had some very highly intelligent people and that he spent time with i have to conclude maybe uh kevin and i that were then very poor and miserable we just

come off a tough trial of our own and we had nothing to give him at all uh gilean i think was already out of the amorous part of that relationship the relationship between them struck me as being altogether more professional already by 96 than it had been initially. And, you know, it was, that was my impression. Were you introduced to him as somebody that Gillen was in an amorous relationship with? Or how is he presented to you at that? No, I don't think we knew, the family knew that Gillen had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. but because she was in America

and Kevin and I were in England we didn't see much of her and frankly my twin sisters who lived on the coast didn't see much of her either for that matter but the so we understood the nature that there was a

good relationship there but they never lived together they never had he didn't have the key to her house she didn't have the key to his house didn't she have her own bedroom or home like designated bedroom in the Palm Beach house at one point. Did she say it again? I'm sorry.

Didn't she have a bedroom of her own or a bedroom that was designated for her in the Palm Beach house at one point? I do not know. Is the straight answer to that? I've read that. I suspect the latter. Okay. So what do you, how do you reflect back now on just this seismic, like almost bizarrely world

historical role that Jeffrey Epstein ended up playing? In multiple countries, you know, causing, you know, constitutional crisis perhaps in the United Kingdom. You have the ambassador, Piedel Mandelson, Sacked. You have, you know, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and, you know, some of the highest profile, like Titans of our age in politics and academia and business and entertainment embroiled in this never-ending saga that now is culminated in the U.S. Congress passing and Donald Trump, you know, maybe begrudgingly signing a law that really is extremely unprecedented in that it is meant to release all these investigatory materials that would never be released. I mean, all the reverberations that he's had. How do you reconcile it?

And how does it, like, comport with, like, what your impressions would have been, I don't know, 20 or 30. 30 years ago when I would think you had very little reason to anticipate that this is how things could have panned out. I mean, this is without question, the single greatest scandal, political, financial, social scandal of my lifetime. And as you point out, it has impacted so many people, so many different areas of public life, so many countries. and involving such immensely impressive elites everywhere that I've never seen anything like it. And if you had told me 30 years ago that this was going to be the outcome, I mean, I'd have told you it was a fantasy and you should get on and make a film about it. Okay.

One more question for you as we wrap up here. But on the Sunday news shows yesterday, I'll meet the press to be specific. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general was interviewed. And he's the official who famously or infamously, depending on your perspective, interviewed Galane in July in her prison facility that she was then in in Florida. and then a huge route, to use the British term, broke out around Gilaine being subsequently transferred to what was seen as a more permissive or less onerous prison facility. Now, I find it bizarre that people would even entertain the term club fed or make it seem like living in a federal prison, no matter the security level, is some kind of pleasant experience or someplace that. you'd go on holiday that that's ridiculous to me but she was seemingly transferred to a less burdensome facility let's say and and Todd Blanche was asked you know point blank like what role did he have

in enabling or giving rise to that prison transfer because it did happen you know just in the aftermath of her having done that interview and he kind of hedged a little bit I mean I think you can pretty much and surmise pretty easily, that Todd Blanche would have had to have been a role. I mean, he did emphasize that he's the one who has sort of domain over the Bureau of Prisons in his capacity as deputy attorney general. So obviously, as high profile as the transfer of that would have had been probably something that would have been brought to him for his approval. But he didn't confirm or deny it directly for whatever reason.

What do you know about his role in facilitating that transfer? and, you know, why wouldn't he just come clean about it? It's not like it's something that's scandalous. I know it could be interpreted as scandalous, but it seems pretty run of the middle to me. I think this has been over-wrecked. And I want to take you back to the death of Jeffrey Epstein in U.S. federal custody in New York in August 2019.

The government has never come over that. On their watch, they lost this man. even though he was allegedly on 24-7 surveillance and suicide watch and they lost him. So if the government's collective memory is operational, it cannot afford and nor will it lose another federal prisoner, namely Gillen, on their watch because there, the incompetence of the BOP and goodness that would never, recovered. The fundamental reason that Gillen was moved from Tallahassee to Texas is because her life was threatened multiple times inside Tallahassee. It was a very, very violent and dangerous place. Notwithstanding, it was supposedly in the lower security level within the federal system.

God help us, whatever the higher ones are. But she was considered by virtue of talking to the government by virtue of talking to the Attorney General, no less, likely to be snitching and possibly dragging down other people. And this is absolutely anathema to other prisoners. You do your time, you shut your mouth and just keep your head down. And that was real. They had to get her out of there. They selected Texas. I have no idea of his specific role, but I would say that the threats were real and they could not leave a second before getting her out of there. And I have to tell you, I'm damn grateful that she's in Texas. She's able to get sleep. She's able to recover. The prison seems to be professionally run. Guards who run by the book, warden who runs a tight ship. The whole place

is correct. And that's how prison should be in America and indeed around the world. I wish it had been like that for the five years that she's, you know, had been in prison. And don't forget that in three days time, it's her birthday. Gillen turns 64 years old on Christmas Day. It'll be her sixth Christmas inside. So that's why I'm grateful, have an opportunity come on talk to you, try and give a slightly different narrative. And I know you are yourself, thank goodness, of independent cast of mind, to look at things in the round and take a view which is not necessarily popular you're not getting any bouquets for doing this michael other than possible you have my respect quite the opposite i'm getting a lot of mud slung let's say but i can take it okay so this is the final final question

and we've gone longer than we expected so i appreciate it but um it was odd that you know susy wiles who's Trump's chief of staff gave a series of interviews to a journalist who then published them in Vanity Fair last week. He caused a big to-do. And she did, yeah, and she did mention, you know, the Galane Maxwell prison transfer and other stuff to do with the Epstein, you know, in Broglio. And she said that Trump was ticked off or Trump was not happy when the prison transfer was made, which, you know, I found. hard to believe because, you know, Todd Lanch was Trump's former personal defense attorney. He's now the deputy attorney general.

The idea that he would take an action as high profile as that without getting an okay, at least implicitly from Trump, seems absurd. But on top of that, like, can you give us any insight in whatever entreaties have been made to the Trump administration, to Trump himself, perhaps,

who we know was at least some, you know, social acquaintance of Galane. I always thought it was notable that when Gilein was first arrested in 2020, Trump was asked about it shortly thereafter and said something to the effect of, you know, I wish her well, you know, if she did something wrong, let them prove it.

He seemed skeptical, frankly, of the veracity of the charges at the time. Perhaps having to do with his personal knowledge of both her and Epstein on, you know, the Palm Beach, New York, whatever social circuit. How have any appeals for clemency been going? Like, what's the response? if any give us some insight in so far as you have it i can tell you no appeals for uh commutation or pardon have been made to the trump administration now this this trump administration

the simple fact is that in order for gillen to even contemplate making such an application she must have exhausted all possible uh legal appeals This habeas petition is her last legal petition that she can make. So only when this is behind us, one way or the other, are we going to know how to go forward with this? Obviously, the possibility that the president is able to issue a pardon and he has said, not just he wishes her well and so on, but he's also said he has the power to issue pardons. He just hasn't thought about it and he hasn't been asked about it. Well, certainly, from the family's perspective,

Gieland's perspective, I can confirm that that is a fact. And I should also say that generally it's a motto in our family, don't get ahead of yourself. Let's finish one thing and then move to another thing. So let's see how this plays with the habeas. And we'll take it from there. There's always the possibility that Gieland could be repatriated. Who knows?

I mean, here we are in December 25, the files are continuing to be released. Gillen has issued the habeas. Trump has gone on holiday. That's where we stand. Yeah. Just before we start, I saw that apparently more files are coming this afternoon or today's sometime. So, you know, they're never a dull moment. Okay. Ian Maxwell, thank you for doing this.

I hope people found it edifying. Obviously, viewers and listeners tuning in can look for the next installment of the series that I'm doing. on the whole fracas here with Matt Taibi, which should be coming shortly. And we'll obviously follow further developments with interest, or at least I will. So thank you. Merry Christmas. Likewise. Bye-bye.