5 takeaways from Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview about Jeffrey Epstein

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration on Aug 22 released the transcript of a courthouse interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, the long-time confidante of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who maintained that US President Donald Trump and other famous figures were not involved in the sex trafficking scheme she was convicted of.

In the interview with Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche, Maxwell, who has made it clear she wants to end her 20-year sentence early, said many of the allegations against her and Epstein were false and swatted away a number of theories and loose ends in the case.

She also insisted that a “client list” of the rich and powerful associated with Epstein did not exist, and denied any scheme to blackmail his associates.

The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had concluded in July that there was no specific “client list” for Epstein’s trafficking ring, and no credible evidence that “Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions”.

Epstein’s victims and their families had objected to the interview, and Maxwell’s subsequent transfer to a cushier prison, accusing Mr Trump of offering a sweetheart deal to someone prosecutors say has a history of self-serving falsehoods.

Here’s what happened:

Maxwell praised Trump

Maxwell acknowledged the social relationship between Mr Trump and Epstein but denied any connection between Mr Trump and the sex trafficking ring. She also denied recruiting

an underage victim of Epstein

who said she had been recruited while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump’s Florida estate and club, in 2000.

“I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago,” Maxwell said. Ms Virginia Giuffre, who was 16 at the time, said she was approached by Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago and invited to become Epstein’s travelling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services and passed her around “like a platter of fruit” to rich and powerful predators in Epstein’s circle, including Prince Andrew of Britain.

Neither Maxwell nor Mr Blanche, who was Mr Trump’s trial lawyer before becoming deputy attorney-general, mentioned Ms Giuffre by name during the interview. But Maxwell denied a specific allegation made by Ms Giuffre – that Prince Andrew had forced her to have sex at Maxwell’s home in London – as “absolute rubbish”. Ms Giuffre died by suicide in 2025.

Maxwell, who is seeking a pardon or reduction of her sentence, downplayed Mr Trump’s long friendship with Epstein and

went out of her way to praise the President

. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said during the interview. “The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell said she believed Epstein didn’t kill himself

Maxwell, who was not present for Epstein’s death, speculated that Epstein did not take his own life. She did not offer any particular theory of what had instead happened, but downplayed the possibility that someone had Epstein killed with the intention of eliminating evidence of the sex trafficking ring.

“I don’t see that,” Maxwell said. “I think, is it possible? Of course it’s possible. But I don’t know of any reason why, and I don’t believe in the blackmail or in any of this, I don’t think Epstein had a hit on like that. If it is indeed murder, I believe it was an internal situation.”

A years-long Justice Department investigation concluded that Epstein, who was found dead in his cell with a bedsheet tied around his neck in 2019,

died by suicide, not foul play

.

Blanche appeared to play political favourites with his questions

At several crucial moments in the expansive interview, Mr Blanche peppered Maxwell with questions about some of Epstein’s associates, while dropping other lines of questioning when the conversation appeared to be politically inconvenient.

Mr Blanche, for example, asked many more questions about Epstein’s relationship with former president Bill Clinton than he did about Epstein’s relationship with Mr Trump. In the end, Maxwell denied that either had engaged in sexual misconduct or other inappropriate behaviour, and said neither had visited Epstein’s private islands.

At one point, as Maxwell defended Epstein and denied the allegations of sex trafficking, she said associates of Epstein had been unfairly vilified for their relationships with him.

“Some are in your Cabinet, who you value as your co-workers,” Maxwell said. She did not make clear whom she meant, but at another point she said Mr

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the Health Secretary

, once joined Epstein on a trip to hunt for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas. She added that there was no way Epstein’s associates “would be with him if he was a creep or because they wanted sexual favours”.

Mr Blanche immediately moved on, and the claim that other associates of Epstein work in the Trump administration was never brought up again.

Connections to the rich and powerful

Mr Blanche asked Maxwell about many of the rich and powerful figures in Epstein’s orbit but got little out of her. She named many celebrities, businesspeople and politicians – Mr Elon Musk, Mr Andrew Cuomo, Mr John Kerry, Mr Edward M. Kennedy, Ms Sarah Ferguson, Ms Naomi Campbell, Mr Alan Dershowitz, Mr Kevin Spacey and Mr Larry Summers – but said they were simply friends or had business relationships with her and Epstein.

She described, for instance, how she and Mr Musk had met in 2010 or 2011 at a party for Mr Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and said that she had learnt through legal discovery that Mr Musk and Epstein had communicated by e-mail. Mr Musk, in the midst of a public spat with Mr Trump earlier in 2025, had said that the President’s name was “in the Epstein files” and “that is why they have not been made public”.

Maxwell also said Epstein had been close to Mr Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel, but under further questioning she said she remembered little of their encounters, or why he had been close to Epstein.

Intelligence agencies

One of the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein is the unfounded accusation that the sex trafficking was a means to collect blackmail material on his powerful and influential associates. Particularly in right-wing circles, the theory goes further to suggest that Epstein was being paid for the blackmail effort in connection with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and even the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Maxwell emphatically denied most of those accusations, and said she had no knowledge of others. In one particularly noteworthy exchange, Mr Blanche asked if she had ever had contact with a Mossad agent. “Well, not deliberately,” Maxwell said.

“Pardon me?” Mr Blanche asked.

She repeated: “Not deliberately.”

Mr Blanche did not ask what she meant by that, and moved on. NYTIMES