A woman with ostentatious pearl earrings sits down for an interview in Central Park.
When the interviewer asks if she is happy, the woman says yes, though she notes: "I have a wish for myself, it's to be able to achieve something."
Decades later, that woman — Ghislaine Maxwell — sits behind prison bars, her greatest achievement being infamy.
Born the daughter of a media mogul, Maxwell's reputation has eroded into that of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's closest accomplice.
Exploiting her connections, Maxwell recruited, groomed and abused dozens of young girls with Epstein.
And, under the veil of wealth, evaded justice for decades.
Now, as her legal team looks to apply pressure on US President Donald Trump, here's how the socialite became forever intertwined with Epstein.
A media baron's favourite child
Maxwell was the youngest of nine children of hardened press baron Robert Maxwell.
The Mirror Group Newspaper billionaire, who rose to wealth after impoverished beginnings as a Czechoslovakian refugee, was known for being a "monstrous father".
"He treated his whole family very badly," former The Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade recalled in 2021.
With a proclivity for affairs and a tyrannical persona, Ghislaine was one of few family members left unscathed by her father.
Maxwell "treated [Ghislaine] more leniently than any of them", Greenslade noted.
To understand why, some point to the tragic circumstances that engulfed her earliest years.
Three days after Ghislaine was born, her 15-year-old brother Michael crashed into a truck.
He would spend the remaining seven years of his life in a coma.
As the family spent months by Michael's bedside hoping for a miracle, Ghislaine stopped eating.
"One day, aged three, she planted herself in front of me and said simply, 'Mummy, I exist,'" Ghislaine's mother, Betty Maxwell, wrote in her memoir, A Mind of My Own.
"I was devastated and, from that day on, we all made a great effort with her, fussing over her so much that she became spoiled."
So beloved was his youngest child that Maxwell's 15 million pound ($30.7 million) yacht even bore her name: the Lady Ghislaine.
A mysterious death, a legacy tarnished
It was the Lady Ghislaine that Robert Maxwell was sailing in 1991 when disaster struck off the Canary Islands.
While an inquest ruled Maxwell died by a heart attack, combined with accidental drowning, speculation followed.
Was this a terrible accident or did the tycoon jump?
In the weeks to come, the circumstances Maxwell was fleeing would be made fully apparent.
Days before his death, Maxwell was reportedly asked by the Bank of England to come in for a meeting to explain a strange, $71 million hole in the Mirror Group's pension fund.
The embattled businessman, it was discovered, had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund to prop up his empire.
All up, Maxwell had accrued more than $1.8 billion in debt.
Though Ghislaine consistently denied that he had killed himself, the rumours persisted.
"He was a man who could not face the ignominy of jail, of being shown to be a liar and a thief. And he very much knew that was coming," Greenslade posits.
Former Mirror Group editorial director Charles Wilson argued otherwise.
Maxwell had "too much of the arrogance of his own ability to conceive of such a thing", Wilson said.
Regardless of the cause, in the wake of tragedy, Ghislaine was left untethered.
Robert Maxwell's special assistant, Mike Tully, suggested it may have made her especially susceptible to the charm of financier Jeffrey Epstein.
"Perhaps she had devoted the same sort of acclaim she had to her father to Epstein instead."
Maxwell meets Epstein
Oxford-educated and privy to elite inner circles, it is no surprise Ghislaine caught the attention of the clout-chasing Epstein.
By the early 1990s, the pair were romantically linked, raising eyebrows over the odd match.
Journalist Petronella Wyatt told the 2022 documentary Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich that it appeared as if Maxwell couldn't feel secure without money.
Likewise, Epstein craved access to the upper echelon in which she moved.
In short, the pair became inseparable.
"It wasn't a normal relationship but it was the kind of relationship she obviously needed," Wyatt said.
Fellow socialite Christina Oxenberg told the documentary that Maxwell once asked her to ghostwrite her autobiography because she wanted Epstein to marry her.
Oxenberg then claimed Maxwell disclosed something far more sinister.
"She says she picks up three girls a day for Jeffrey and the phrase that she used, which she thought explained it all, was, 'I cannot keep up with his needs,''" she said.
Oxenberg alleged these girls — adding she didn't know they were children — were offered a few hundred dollars for massages.
"[Maxwell] says — and this is such a reveal — 'they are nothing, they are trash,'" Oxenberg added.
"And it tells you everything."
Maxwell 'fed a monster'
Maxwell would eventually be phased out of the girlfriend role but remained Epstein's "best friend".
Later, hundreds of emails between the pair would be reported by Bloomberg that showed Maxwell being a named director on one of Epstein's main revenue-generating companies, trading stock in a company they were both invested in, and discussing a shared fertility procedure —long after she claims she disassociated from him.
In reality, this new role also likely meant she was an accomplice to Epstein's depravity.
Liz Stein, a then-21-year-old aspiring fashion student, first met Maxwell in the New York department store she was working in.
Maxwell quickly lured Stein in with a false sense of friendship and asked her to drop off her purchases at a nearby hotel.
When she came by, Stein was introduced to Epstein.
It marked the beginning of a years-long abuse cycle.
"That night in the hotel was the first of many times they sexually assaulted me," Stein said during Maxwell's 2022 trial.
"I was trapped. I was assaulted, raped, and trafficked countless times in New York and Florida."
Virginia Giuffre was only a high-schooler when she was allegedly recruited by Maxwell at Trump's members-only club, Mar-A-Lago.
Giuffre alleged Maxwell helped convert the teenager into a "sex slave" through 1999–2002.
In an interview with The Miami Herald, Giuffre said "the training started immediately".
"It was everything down to how to give a blow job, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants," she said.
"A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself."
Giuffre also alleged Maxwell's involvement extended to trafficking the teenager to her friend, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
He has repeatedly denied those allegations.
Attorney Brad Edwards said Maxwell ultimately "fed a monster" in Epstein.
"Without her help, he could have never have pulled off such an elaborate scheme and abused so many."
A life of luxury collapses
By 2019, the cracks had already appeared in the pair's entitled existence.
More than a decade after Epstein first entered a controversial plea deal for charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from someone under 18, he was again arrested.
However, this time he faced federal sex trafficking charges.
Then, months later, Epstein was found dead inside his prison cell.
With investigators ruling his death a suicide, attention soon turned to those remaining.
But Maxwell was nowhere to be found.
Lawyers for Maxwell's victims embarked on a cat-and-mouse chase while tabloid paper The Sun slapped down a 10,000 pound reward for information about her whereabouts.
"She's our Waldo, and we're gonna find her," DailyMail.com's executive editor Candace Trunzo remarked at the time.
Even with Maxwell's connections, the intense spotlight meant it was only a matter of time before she was found.
By July 2020, the search was over.
FBI assistant director William F Sweeney Jr said investigators found Maxwell in New Hampshire, having "slithered away to a gorgeous property".
He noted her traumatised victims had never been granted that same escape from reality.
Maxwell was soon charged with numerous counts of trafficking young women and participating in abuse.
"She pretended to be a woman they could trust," Manhattan Attorney Audrey Strauss said a day after her arrest.
"All the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and, in some cases, by Maxwell herself."
After a month-long trial, she was convicted of sex trafficking, conspiracy and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity in 2021.
And in 2022, at age 60, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
"This sentence sends a strong message that no-one is above the law and it is never too late for justice," US Attorney Damien Williams said in response.
Maxwell's role faces fresh interrogation
On Tuesday, Maxwell was due to testify under oath before the congressional committee investigating the federal government's handling of the Epstein files, but instead pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights, which allow citizens to decline to speak to authorities.
But she said via her lawyers that she was prepared to speak if granted clemency by President Donald Trump.
Maxwell's lawyers have previously pushed the US Supreme Court to overturn her sentence, on the basis that Epstein's plea deal should have protected her.
Officials from the US Department of Justice met with Maxwell in July to shed new light on the extent of Epstein's trafficking ring.
At the time the interviews were taking place, her lawyer, David Markus, called on Trump to grant Maxwell clemency.
When asked in October if he would consider a pardon, the president said he'd have to "take a look at it".
"I wouldn't consider it or not consider it. I don't know anything about it. I will speak to the DOJ," he said.
The transcripts from those July conversations have now been published.
So far, the only change in Maxwell's sentence is her move to a lower-security prison in Texas.
As one victim told Vanity Fair in 2020, "Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became".
"He had the money, but he didn't know what to do with it. She showed him."
