As Ghislaine Maxwell barked ‘Stop!’, the chauffeur slammed on the brakes and looked around to see what had caught her attention. It was a young blonde girl — perhaps aged 14, he thought.
In fact, Virginia Roberts was 15 but she looked younger in her white uniform. She had just come out from the spa of Donald Trump‘s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, where she was working as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant.
Business had been slow that Tuesday in 1998, so she had gone outside to read a book on anatomy. Having watched the club’s masseuses at work, she had set her heart on becoming a massage therapist herself.
Sitting in the warm sunshine, she looked up to see a good-looking woman in her late 30s walking towards her. To her surprise, the woman introduced herself, then asked Virginia about the book she was reading.
It was Virginia’s first encounter with Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite daughter of the disgraced British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell and procuress for billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
