19 YEAR OLD ARTICLE, "How GHISLAINE rose from the ashes - Maxwell's heirs building a new business empire" The father of Ghislaine Maxwell wanted her to be married to JOHN F KENNEDY JR.  What a nightmare that would have been. "FOR Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, it was an exquisite moment of triumph and redemption. As she sat in the front row of Fashion Week’s Ralph Lauren show, all eyes were on her and the man at her side: Britain’s PRINCE ANDREW.. As necks craned to see, as cameras flashed and motor drives whirred, the favorite child of the former New York Daily News owner smiled regally and quietly savored the attention. Just a short time ago people spat the name Maxwell — if they spoke it at all. Now, the public gesture of friendship by Britain’s most eligible royal was a signal to the world that the once reviled Maxwells were back. And beautiful. And 39-year-old Ghislaine is their public face. “Ghislaine couldn’t have done in Britain what she has achieved here. Every step would have been scrutinized and criticized,” said a family friend. “She has kept just the right profile. Being out with Prince Andrew was a startling social coup. It made everyone stand up and take notice.” It is nine years since Robert Maxwell disappeared from the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, into the inhospitable waters of the Atlantic. He left behind a media empire in ruins, crushed by debt and pillaged by his own avarice. He had looted $600 million from the pension funds of his employees in a vain attempt to keep the empire afloat, and thousands of families would suffer as a result. It is widely assumed that Maxwell committed suicide rather than face the inevitable consequences. An inquest called it an accident. Either way, he left his seven children to shoulder a heavy burden of ignominy and shame. Incredibly, they have rebuilt another fortune on the smoking ruins of the first. Robert Maxwell saw himself as Britain’s Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power on a global scale. Like Kennedy, he expected much of his children and pushed them hard. “He would interrogate them at the dinner table about history or geopolitics,” said a once-regular guest in at the sprawling Maxwell estate in southern England. “He could reduce them to tears if they didn’t know an answer. He could be a cold man and the temperature in the house dropped noticeably when he was there.” The colder he was, the more his youngest daughter tried to please him. Maxwell even dreamed that he might one day forge an alliance with the Kennedys by MARRYING GHISLAINE to JFK JR. The two became close friends and remained so until Kennedy’s tragic death last year. Ghislaine has also been a guest at a number of Kennedy weddings and family events. GHISLAINE was sent to Marlborough, one of England’s top private schools, and to Oxford. Maxwell made her director of a British soccer club and set her up with her own fiefdom, a company that supplies corporate gifts. When in January 1991 he bought the tottering Daily News and rescued it from oblivion, she was sent to Manhattan to be the advance guard for his foray into New York society. A few months later he was dead. Of all his children, she took his death the hardest. She was unable to accept her father’s guilt and likely suicide and insists to this day that a dark conspiracy of Mossad renegades and Sicilian contract killers took his life. Ghislaine was already suffering emotionally. A long, passionate affair with Count Gianfranco Cicogna, the dashing scion of the aristocratic clan that owns the Ciga Hotels chain, ended painfully. She had hoped to one day be his Contessa. In a short space of time she had lost her lover, her prospects, her share of the family fortunes and her beloved father. “There’s a story that the Maxwell name was so detested in London that she had to walk around in a blond wig so people wouldn’t recognize her,” said a prominent New York socialite who has known Ghislaine for several years. “She was being treated like Marie Antoinette there. She wisely realized she had to make her life in New York where her father was less well-known and people care more about what you can do than who you used to be. She was like one of those European princes who have been deposed. But she had no title — and no money!" https://nypost.com/2000/03/23/how-ghislaine-rose-from-the-ashes-maxwells-heirs-building-a-new-business-empire/