## JAMES PATTERSON

Maxwell said a few months before his demise. "It was poor. It was Orthodox. And it was Jewish. We were very poor. We didn't have things that other people had. They had shoes, they had food, and we didn't. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives, and neighbors. I don't know what went through their minds as they realized that they'd been tricked into a gas chamber."

Maxwell's own death was followed by an international scan- dal. It turned out that he'd stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds and used them to prop up his empire. Two of his sons were tried for conspiracy to commit fraud and ultimately exonerated. But Ghislaine, who had grown up in luxurious surroundings and counted the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, among her intimates, could not escape the dark shadow her father had cast. Looking to start fresh, she took the Concorde to New York City.

At first, it seems, Maxwell and Epstein were lovers. "She was madly in love with Jeffrey," says a longtime friend of Ghislaine's. Then they became something more. Ghislaine took care of Epstein's travel arrangements. She managed his household and opened doors that very few Brooklyn-born Jewish boys could have passed through. According to lawsuits and witness testi- mony, she also became one of several women who procured young girls for Epstein.

She was not jealous, according to people who knew her back then. If anything, Ghislaine seemed to take pleasure in satisfy- ing Epstein's needs.

Ghislaine introduced Epstein to a fabulous world that the

Brooklyn boy knew noi
taught Epstein the differ
But despite or was it
Epstein, she, too, gradi
According to Jane Doe
filed in 2009 by a womai
of the services Maxwell
ment of underage wom
papers, Maxwell has ve
Virginia, with any othe
with, or with any crimina
In a 2016 answer to a c
Maxwell called the alleg
The case of Nadia B
first noticed by Epstein,
in the eyes of her mother
Bjorlin's Iranian-bor
years ago about her famil
and Epstein. Bjorlin's fat
music, had died a year ea
this made the girl a vuln
"She was at school a
Michigan, when she met
"My daughter was a s
little girl, not mature for
thought she was nine or
"Epstein was a big dc
her father had died, so sh
He said, 'Here's my numb
"He kept saying, 'Cor

116

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009267
documents/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009267.jpg
{"people":["james patterson","robert maxwell","prince andrew","jeffrey epstein","nadia bjorlin","virginia bjorlin"]}