Their names bookended an era of greed and delusion – a father who built his empire on lies and a daughter who inherited his talent for self-destruction. I was sixteen in 1991, living in Britain, when Robert Maxwell went overboard from his yacht. The man was everywhere back then – blaring headlines, booming voice, expensive suits.
He and Rupert Murdoch were like twin cartoon villains, fighting over who could own more of Britain’s attention and truth. When Maxwell’s body was found floating beside the Lady Ghislaine, the yacht he had named after his daughter, it felt like the ending he’d always been writing for himself: dramatic, mysterious, over-the-top.
From refugee to emperor
Maxwell’s story began far from Fleet Street. He was born in 1923 as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the then Czechoslovak town of Slatinské Doly in the Subcarpathian Ruthenia region, today’s Solotvyno in Ukraine, and grew up in a poor Jewish family. Most of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He fled west, fought for Britain in the war, and won the Military Cross. Out of that trauma grew an obsession with survival and then domination. By the 1950s he had reinvented himself as Robert Maxwell, a publishing entrepreneur who turned Pergamon Press into a global powerhouse. He charmed scientists, bullied rivals, and saw rules as things for other people. By the 1980s he was a media titan, owner of Mirror Group Newspapers, an MP, and a man who mixed patriotism with megalomania. He was brilliant, exhausting, and utterly convinced that he alone understood how the world worked. Then, in November 1991, he disappeared. Hours later his body was found in the Atlantic. Within weeks auditors discovered hundreds of millions of pounds missing from company pension funds. The empire collapsed overnight. The man who had wrapped himself in the Union Jack had stolen from his workers.
Wisse Dekker, Hans van den Broek, Henry Kissinger, and Robert Maxwell at an economic forum in Amsterdam in 1989.
The favorite child
Ghislaine Maxwell, his youngest child, was Oxford-educated, multilingual and magnetic. People said she was the only one who could calm her father’s rages. He adored her, named his yacht after her, and built her into his legend. When he died, she was the one who faced the cameras – devastated yet loyal, still defending him. When the fraud became public, the family name was ruined. Ghislaine left Britain and started over in New York. She did what her father had always done: built a new identity. She charmed her way into Manhattan society, raised money for marine conservation causes and became a familiar face at parties filled with power and money. Then she met Jeffrey Epstein.
The new empire
Epstein’s world was the same game with different stakes. Private jets, billionaires, secrecy, influence. To those around her, Ghislaine looked sophisticated and assured. In reality she was still orbiting men who made her feel relevant. Epstein gave her purpose, just as her father once had. In 2021 she was convicted of recruiting and grooming minors for Epstein’s abuse and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The woman who had moved through the world’s most exclusive rooms now sits behind bars. Her father’s yacht and his financial deceit were replaced by her own brand of exploitation and disgrace.
Mirrors everywhere
The parallels between them are striking. Both were masters of performance. He built a public empire on borrowed money; she built a social empire on borrowed power. Both believed charm could erase wrongdoing. Both surrounded themselves with influence and secrecy. Robert Maxwell had alleged links with intelligence services and politicians. He thrived in the grey zone where information meant leverage. Ghislaine’s connections with royalty, presidents and Silicon Valley investors gave her the same illusion of safety. Each lived by the same rule: control the story and the truth can wait. And both fell apart the moment they lost control of the narrative.
The yacht Dancing Hare, formerly known as Lady Ghislaine.
The psychology of power
It is easy to call them monsters, but that misses the point. They were clever, damaged people warped by power and isolation. Robert’s childhood – the loss, the flight, the need never to be powerless again – made him see vulnerability as failure. He built a fortress of wealth and noise around his fear. Ghislaine grew up inside that fortress. Her father’s moods set the weather. Success, beauty, and obedience were the currencies of love. When he died and the money vanished, she discovered that charm could buy the same security her father’s power once had. Epstein offered her both. There is a strange symmetry in it. The man who survived tyranny became tyrannical; the daughter who worshipped him became the servant of another tyrant.
From illusion to legacy
When I moved to the Czech Republic in 2001, by chance, the country where Maxwell was born, no one talked about him. For all his noise, he left nothing behind but debt and scandal. His British identity had been an invention, and once the performance ended there was nothing left to applaud. In Britain, his death changed pension-fund laws and corporate regulation. In America, his daughter’s conviction became part of a wider reckoning with exploitation and privilege. Between them, father and daughter managed to expose two eras of corruption: his financial, hers moral.
The shape of modern power
The Maxwells feel like prototypes for the age we live in now. The arrogance, the self-mythology, the insistence that rules don’t apply – you can see the same traits in modern oligarchs and political strongmen. People like Trump or Musk would have recognized Maxwell instantly: men who think charisma equals competence, who believe being loud is the same as being right. That is why their story still fascinates. It is not just scandal; it is a study in delusion. Both Robert and Ghislaine mistook proximity to power for meaning. They were not evil masterminds, just people who had forgotten what reality looked like outside the bubble of their own influence.
The author is an English tutor in Prague
The final act
Robert Maxwell is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, a statesman’s grave for a man who died a disgraced thief. His daughter sits in a Florida prison, the last echo of a dynasty that mistook power for purpose. Between them lies a parable that has not aged a day. When you build your identity on control, eventually the performance collapses. The Maxwells spent their lives convincing the world, and themselves, that they mattered more than the truth. They got away with it, until they didn’t.
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