The Epstein-Maxwell Family Saga

I started out tonight digging into the family trees of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. My sibling is a genealogist and always looking to get me involved, so when they sent me a family invite I thought it might be an interesting opportunity to look into the backgrounds of both families, beyond what most of us already know.

Seymour and Pauline Epstein (right) - year unknown

There's not much in the way of records for Jeffrey Epstein's parents, Seymour Epstein and Pauline (Paula) Stolofsky. Both were born in New York City in the early 1900s to Jewish families, married on March 27, 1952, and lived a middle-class life in the Sea Gate neighborhood of Brooklyn, near Coney Island.

Seymour Epstein’s Draft Registration

Seymour never graduated high school and enlisted in the military a few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor at Camp Upton in Yaphank, NY. He was listed as having "unskilled occupations in manufacture of automobiles." After the war he worked as a laborer for the New York City Parks Department.

Seymour and Pauline Epstein’s Marriage Record

Pauline stayed at home when her son Jeffrey was born in 1953, but occasionally worked as an educational aide when both her sons were old enough to go to school. Seymour passed away in 1991, and Pauline in 2004, and both are buried in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.

Robert Maxwell and family, including Ghislaine (front) - Daily Mail

Most people know about Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert, who paved the way for Ghislaine's life of the rich and famous, fraudulent, and criminal. Also of Jewish descent, Robert escaped Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and served in the British Army in World War II. After the war he worked in publishing, founding Pergamon Press, and served as a member of Parliament for six years, spending his free time buying up newspapers and publishing companies. He married Elisabeth "Betty” Meynard, a French Protestant, in 1945, and they went on to have nine children, including the youngest, Ghislaine, in 1961. Two of their children died, one from leukemia, and another 7 years after a car crash that left him in a coma.

Robert Maxwell is alleged to have given the Israelis secret support, including hush-hush contact with Czechoslovakian communist leaders and distributing bugged software to governments and global financial institutions. The Foreign Office, part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the U.K., suspected Maxwell of being a secret double or triple agent for not only the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), but also the Soviet KGB, and Israeli Intelligence Service Mossad. [Wikipedia]

During his career Robert Maxwell embezzled an estimated £460 million from the Mirror Group pension funds, he engaged in fraud to inflate share prices of his companies, including Pergamon Press, and falsified bank records and documents to deceive investors into thinking his businesses were highly profitable.

Robert Maxwell in front of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine

On November 5, 1991 Robert Maxwell’s body was found floating naked in the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands, and official reports said he’d had a heart attack and likely fell over the side of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. However, others speculate he was assassinated.

"At some point later that night, he walked, naked, to the stern of the yacht, perhaps to urinate, as was his custom. Then, by accident, volition or force, he fell into the water." - Noah Kirsch, Forbes

The Lady Ghislaine was later purchased by Anna (dePeyster) Murdoch, then-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and renamed the “Dancing Hare.”

Betty Maxwell - The Telegraph

Betty Maxwell, on the other hand, worked as a Holocaust researcher and established the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She was a proponent of interfaith conversations, being in an interfaith marriage herself, and met her husband Robert working as an interpreter for the Welcome Committee after the Liberation of Paris. She was awarded a PhD in French Literature from the University of Oxford at the age of 60, and spent much of her time researching her husband's relatives who had died during the Holocaust. After the death of her husband, two of her sons, Ian and Kevin, were arrested for fraud related to Robert's embezzlement of Mirror Group pension funds, but it's believed Betty knew nothing of her husband's exploits.

"Elisabeth lost her pension, all her property, and only her children continued to support her. She was a wonderful person, kind and supportive, quite contrary to her husband, whom she loved despite everything." - Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust historian

Elisabeth went on to write an autobiography, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, and she stated later in a New York Times interview that her marriage wasn't all it seemed.

"The worst years of my life were 1981 to 1991. I was at his beck and call with no kudos, nothing was right. What saved me was my work on the Holocaust." - Elisabeth Maxwell

She passed away in 2013 at the age of 92, after having received the Eternal Flame Award at the Anne Frank Institute of Philadelphia. She is buried in France. Robert Maxwell is buried in Jerusalem at the Mount of Olives.

It might appear easy to see where Ghislaine gets her “winning” ways. However, Jeffrey's family is still a mystery, and I've found myself wondering what dinner was like at their kitchen table. Does a child become that cunning and cutthroat solely on their own, based on experience? Or is it a seed planted very early on, as his little brain is still forming and developing, understanding language and dynamics between the adults around him? Or is it just that as human beings we can't survive after a certain level of money and power, because we were never meant to?

Vanity Fair

Be that as it may, this wasn't the thing on my mind as I sat down to write this article. I'd pulled the Epstein family tree, their documents, work history, found microfiche marriage records at the New York City Clerk's Office, and hunted down any information that I'd never read before.

Ancestry gave me a lot of information that I can't really verify, including this family tree that lists a "private living" relative between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (I mean, or one of her sisters, I suppose).

Another Epstein tree said he married a woman named "Kathleen L. Suter" in 1977, divorcing in 1978, and there are marriage records at the County Clerk's office that seem to back this up. However, was there only one Jeffrey E. Epstein living in New York City in 1977? And the only Kathleen Suter he knew was an old high school friend listed in Barry Levine's 2020 book, The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

So much more digging to do, more researching, more figuring out how two kids from middle-class beginnings can turn into masterminds behind a billion-dollar sex-trafficking ring that enveloped politics, academia, and Hollywood.

Stay tuned, we're not done here.

Ellie is an author, editor, and owner of Red Pencil Transcripts, and works with filmmakers, podcasts, and journalists all over the world. She lives with her family just outside of New York City.