Ghislaine and Chris
I have written before about how I met Ghislaine Maxwell thirty-one years ago in both New York City and London. I do not know for certain when she met Jeffrey Epstein, but the New York Times reported that they met in the “early nineties”, so the chances are that I had the opportunity to meet her before she knew Epstein, much less before she went headlong into his sordid kiddy-porn world and eventually his employ as a purported procurer and arranger of illicit sexual deviations with young women. Reading bits and pieces of the testimony of one of these supposed abused young women, code-named “Jane” to keep her identity anonymous (good luck with that), made me shiver and lent a lot of credibility to the accusations when she said that she would take the young woman (then between fourteen and fifteen) shopping for clothes and would take her into Victoria’s Secret to buy simple underwear like white cotton briefs.
This immediately made me think of Wes Anderson and his movie Moonrise Kingdom. In it, he depicts a young woman, played by Kara Hayward, who is the young love-interest of a like-aged boy played by Jared Gilman. Both young actors were born within a month of one another in 1998 and the film was shot in mid-2011, making the duo thirteen or fourteen at the time. Wes Anderson made that movie based on his personal adolescent fantasies. He had Kara Hayward running around in her flower-print underwear but, not coincidentally, wearing white cotton briefs when she wore a short dress that allowed for the occasional glimpse of her tidy whities. I may have some lurking adolescent fantasies of my own to have noticed this, but then I went on to see Wes Anderson in the various premier shots of him with Kara Hayward (notably, not including Jared Gilman) made when the movie released in 2012 and showing him all cuddly with Hayward. It made me shiver and took a mild irritation I had always had with the quirky films of Wes Anderson and put him into the don’t-fly zone for me as a moviegoer. Kim feels that way about Woody Allen, but I must admit that on film Woody seemed to stick to fantasy fulfillment with young and cutesy, but at least street-legal, actresses like Mariel Hemingway (she was eighteen when he made Manhattan with her). White cotton briefs have always struck me as a clear sign of a perverted sexual bias and this testimony from “Jane” suggests that prosecutors feel likewise.
I am also reading about Chris Cuomo and his indefinite suspension from his cable news 9pm anchor role on CNN. It seems that the New York State Attorney General has released a body of evidence about his communications with his brother Andrew (then Governor of New York) and his staff relating to help he was offering and providing to chase down the many accusations of sexual predation that were flying hither and yon in the waning months of Andrew’s gubernatorial struggle. What initially seemed to the CNN management as being a mere breach of company policy by allowing his natural familial conflicts to override his objectivity as a journalist, were turned into a more pervasive effort on his part to actively seek to help his brother defend himself against the onslaught of the allegations. I can imagine that journalists like Cuomo know full well the power of the press to gather a head of steam around a salacious and high profile story and over-blow it into a full-on scandal, but I also imagine that Chris Cuomo, who seems well-grounded and sensible, also knows that his somewhat hyper-macho brother might have allowed his testosterone level and power addiction to get the better of him and his conduct.
That all gets me wondering about the upbringing of Ghislaine and Chris and what would cause them each to get themselves crosswise in this manner where they were not the main perpetrator of the purported vial misdeeds (though Ghislaine is also said to have participated in some of the sexual shenanigans that Epstein initiated), but rather were the loyal helpers and enablers. I, like most New Yorkers, grew up in a New York State where Mario Cuomo, father of Andrew and Chris, was almost God-like in his omnipotence in the state. The power of the strong Italian family that he surely built around himself did not make it hard to see his eldest son Andrew as a natural heir apparent to his throne of power. He first married a Kennedy (daughter of RFK), went to work in D.C. and became HUD Secretary at a young age under Clinton, became AG of New York State under Elliot Spitzer (this just gets more and more titillating, right?), then got the Democratic machine to anoint him to become Governor of New York for a total of ten years. Meanwhile, younger brother Chris (thirteen years Andrew’s junior) took his law degree in a journalistic direction and rode that skill and his family name to a degree of on-screen prominence at CNN that was surely helped by his family name and his big brother’s power stroke. Despite the dispossessed younger heir status of Chris, the strong Italian family connection certainly prevailed with him and his fraternal loyalty may have been strong, but there is no sense that the perversions of power that may have afflicted his brother ever translated into similar problems for him. He may have been blinded by loyalty, but he seems uninfected by the perversion itself.
Meanwhile, I knew Ghislaine (ever so slightly and briefly) because I knew her father. I spent three weeks holed up in a Buenos Aires hotel with him, acting as his financial advisor during the peak of his power as a London newspaper magnate who was trying to make a splash investing in Argentina at a time when President Menem of Argentina was getting lots of high-profile global attention. I watched how this man, Captain Bob Maxwell, went about his personal and professional business and learned a bit about the dynamic that made him so famous and infamous at the same time. He was a larger-than-life personality that was driven to excess in every quadrant of his life, from what I could see. I got to know him at the very end of his life (he was then about my age now….67) and before he got embroiled in a financial scandal that ended with his suspicious and still mysterious death drowning off his yacht in the Canary Islands. What I saw during those three weeks was a man who pursued his sexual appetites with his “personal” assistant, but she seemed at least to be of age. But what I also saw, since I met all of Captain Bob’s kids along the way, including Ghislaine, was an over-the-top promoter who taught his kids to be over-the-top promoters.
So there we have it, my analysis of the Maxwell and Cuomo family dynamics from a distant, but not ill-informed, perspective. One family promoted excessive family values like loyalty that might overlook or ignore signs of perversion and excess and one family promoted do-or-die obsession with self-indulgence and loyalty to one’s own whims and, perhaps, perversions. Different by quite a bit, but the end result still not great in either case for Ghislaine and Chris.