Jeffrey Epstein enabler, sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, wrote a recently 'unearthed' ‘cli-fi’ story in 2015

Epstein enabler, sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, wrote ‘cli-fi’ story in 2015

JUL 4, 2020,

• 
  
• 
  

This Epstein-Maxwell story gets weird. According to news sources, wealthy British socialite and alleged sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell,58, was arrested in the United States on July 2 and charged with sex trafficking minors for her former ”boyfriend,” the now-disgraced and late financier Jeffrey Epstein who committed suicide in jail (or maybe was murdered while in his jail cell, some say).

Maxwell, whose whereabouts had been unknown following Epstein’s alleged suicide while awaiting trial last summer, now faces six counts relating to his sex crimes and a possible sentence of life behind bars.

FBI agents detained the daughter of late British newspaper baron Robert Maxwell “without incident” in  New Hampshire where she had been hiding in plain sight for two years in a massive mansion.

Where the story goes “weird” is when it was discovered by several online literary sleuths that Maxwell fancied herself a ”climate fiction” writer and posted a ”cli-fi” short story on her Medium blog in 2015, titled “When the Oceans Failed.”

https://medium.com/matter/when-the-oceans-failed-4a85c32a2241

The short story was ”written by Ghislaine Maxwell, president and founder of The TerraMar Project, a certified helicopter pilot and deepworker submersible pilot, certified EMT, fluent in French, Italian and Spanish,” she told readers in 2015.

She also explained in an author’s note, still online for all the world to see, including FBI agents and various conspiracy nuts: “Ghislaine Maxwell is the founder and president of the TerraMa Project, a nonprofit organization that is on a mission to build a global community around a shared ownership and love of the oceans.”

Her short story begins: “2015 was the year I should have starting supporting ocean causes, sustainable fishing, alternative energy forms, a tax on carbon, and a ban on single-use plastics. Tomorrow is January 1, 2032 —  time for resolutions. I am going to support climate change initiatives and finally apply for my ‘Ocean Passport.’ I am no longer a climate change denier, and my voice does count. It’s time for me to take action.”

Maxwell’s story then offers:

“One Tuna Sold for $20 Million to Japanese Billionaire,” read one headline.

I remember thinking it was crazy when one tuna sold in 2013 for $1.7 million.

“Record Snowfall in Boston,” read another headline.

No kidding. I look out my window — it’s blocked by 13 feet of snow. The city is paralyzed. It was really bad when we had eight feet back in 2015.

“Quiz — Climate Change…”

”I stop reading, close my eyes, and feel the unease wash over me.”

”All you hear about is water scarcity, water wars, failing crops, record heat, cold, snow, and flooding. Were the ocean and its problems at the root of the climate change problem? I cast my mind back to when I became interested in all things ocean-related. It was in 2010, when I went on a cruise around the Galapagos.”

”What I learned then surprised me. I found out that the ocean was the largest feature on earth, that it created more than 50 percent of the oxygen we breathed, and that it fed 1 billion people a day,” Maxwell wrote.

See full short story here.

Perhaps in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell will have time to pen more climate fiction stories.

FULL TEXT

When the Oceans Failed

By Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell

Jul 27, 2015 · 6 min read

Illustration by Celyn Brazier

---

It’s December 2031, and my hand is tingling with an alert from Apple’s latest wearable technology. I’ve received a new e-mail: The Daily Catch has landed in my inbox with global news on all things related to water. I have two options: I can watch a hologram, or I can go old-school and read the articles.

“One Tuna Sold for $20 Million to Japanese Billionaire,” read one headline.

I remember thinking it was crazy when one tuna sold in 2013 for $1.7 million.

“Record Snowfall in Boston,” read another.

No kidding. I look out my window — it’s blocked by 13 feet of snow. The city is paralyzed. It was really bad when we had eight feet back in 2015.

“Quiz — Climate Change…”

I stop reading, close my eyes, and feel the unease wash over me.

All you hear about is water scarcity, water wars, failing crops, record heat, cold, snow, and flooding. Were the ocean and its problems at the root of the climate change problem? I cast my mind back to when I became interested in all things ocean-related. It was in 2010, when I went on a cruise around the Galapagos.

What I learned then surprised me. I found out that the ocean was the largest feature on earth, that it created more than 50 percent of the oxygen we breathed, and that it fed 1 billion people a day. That the ocean governed our weather, created most of our rain, employed 200 million fishermen, and churned out $2.5 trillion a year in economic activity, making it the seventh-largest economy in the world in 2015. From that moment on, I started paying attention to news about the ocean.

In 2014 the Global Ocean Commission, created by a nonpartisan group of politicians, business leaders, and scientists, reported:

“Peer-reviewed scientific studies have underlined the interconnectedness between the planetary climate and ocean systems, and the central role that the ocean is playing in protecting us from the impacts of climate change.”

Around the same time there was a bipartisan U.S. report called “Risky Business” that predicted that annual property losses from hurricanes and other coastal storms would hit $35 billion. Shifting climate patterns would result in declines in crop yields of up to 14 percent, costing corn and wheat farmers tens of billions of dollars. And heat wave-driven demand for electricity would suck an additional $12 billion per year from utility customers.

Then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel stated,

“Rising temperatures, changing precipitation, climbing sea levels, extreme weather will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters.”

Check. Check. Check.

It was becoming obvious that burning fossil fuels created excess carbon, which was absorbed by the ocean, leading to greater acidity. This, in turn, reduced the availability of calcium carbonate, a building block for coral skeletons, shells for shellfish, and many other marine organisms. In 2012, shellfish hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest reported that production decreased by more than 40 percent over the preceding decade due to the acidic conditions.

Dead zones, areas where no fish could live, were proliferating. By 2015 there were about 450 around the world; the largest, found at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico, was the size of Connecticut.

Sea life was under pressure, evidenced by large numbers of baby sea lion strandings in California in 2015, which experts attributed to changes in food availability. Sea bird populations were off by 70 percent from the 1950s for the same reason.

I remember reading that the oceans’ apex predators — those at the top of the marine food chain, like sharks, tunas, and cod — were depleted by more than 90 percent. It should have been no surprise that seafood fraud was endemic. Nationwide studies concluded that 33 percent of seafood was mislabeled, and every sushi venue tested in the nation’s capital sold mislabeled fish. In New York, tilefish — a fish on the FDA’s do-not-eat list due to its high mercury content — was discovered posing as halibut and red snapper.

With warming oceans, fish species migrated to cooler waters, threatening local fishing communities. Black sea bass, once most abundant off the coast of North Carolina, were being caught as far north as the Gulf of Maine.

Weather agencies all agreed: 2014 was the hottest year on record. NOAA assessed the 2014 annually-averaged temperature at 58.24 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.24 degrees above the twentieth-century average. A heating world was melting ice caps and glaciers. By 2015, the Arctic had lost three quarters of its volume and half of its thickness.

With 15 of the world’s 20 megacities built up around old port towns and 60 percent of the entire world’s population living in a coastal zone, how could I not have thought that rising oceans would eventually become a problem?

One of the first cases of mass displacement triggered by rising seas occurred in the first decade of this century, when villagers on Tegua, a small community in the Vanuatu island chain, were relocated to higher ground. Next, low-lying Kiribati, another Pacific Island, purchased land in Fiji, which Kiribati’s president classified as an investment in the event the entire nation needed to move — a prescient calculation, it turned out.

Climates patterns were obviously shifting; where rainfall was once reliable, it was less so. Swaths of Americans began suffering from drought, along with people in other parts of the world. California enacted historic drought-introduced water rationing, while Texas and Oklahoma set rainfall records. Cities worked hard to supply water to their citizens; Beijing’s tap water was piped in from 850 miles away.

Despite the many signs of trouble in the ocean and elsewhere, climate deniers and their rhetoric helped soothe my conscience. We were told that the changes were part of the planet’s life cycle, and that there was no proof that they were manmade.

Senator Inhofe, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, claimed in 2015 that the thought of human-induced climate change was egotistical:

“The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful, they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.”

But the problems kept compounding in the following years. By 2025, a heating ocean had led to escaping plumes of methane, which had previously been stable on the ocean floor. Reported as a problem back in 2014, methane was known to be a potent greenhouse gas, around 20 times more efficient at trapping radiation per molecule than carbon dioxide. Changes in global ocean temperatures caused the hydrates to destabilize.

A heating planet was leading to other problems that I had hitherto chosen to ignore. In 2015, when scientists estimated that more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 virus particles existed in the world’s seas, they outnumbered all cellular life forms by roughly a factor of 10. While everyone looked to China or India, the most grossly overpopulated areas of the world, for the next deadly virus to emerge, no one thought it would come from the heating ocean. The World Health Organization announced the discovery of a new deadly virus in 2029, just two years ago.

With hindsight, I could see the pattern building from the turn of the century and accelerating with every passing year. With pressure wrought by a failing ocean, a restless, thirsty, hungry, poor population grew. Collapsing states led to ideal conditions for terrorist groups to take root yielding a large number of marginalized and disenfranchised people from which to recruit. No wonder ISIS became so powerful.

2015 was the year I should have starting supporting ocean causes, sustainable fishing, alternative energy forms, a tax on carbon, and a ban on single-use plastics. Tomorrow is January 1, 2032 — time for resolutions. I am going to support climate change initiatives and finally apply for my Ocean Passport. I am no longer a climate changer denier, and my voice does count. It’s time for me to take action.

---

Ghislaine Maxwell is the founder and president of the TerraMar Project, a nonprofit organization on a mission to build a global community around our shared ownership and love of the oceans.

In 2014, Ghislaine Maxwell spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, D.C. She was there in her capacity as the founder of the TerraMar Project, an oceanic conservation group she started in 2012, according to a C.F.R. spokeswoman.

The C.F.R. is one of the world’s most prestigious nonprofit think tanks. Among its officers and directors then were David Rockefeller, one of the modern era’s most revered philanthropists; Colin Powell; and Robert Rubin, the secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

The TerraMar Project was an organization with an opaque website and a founder who happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, the mysterious money manager who — in addition to being one of the C.F.R.’s “Chairman’s Circle” donors for at least six years — had pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Mr. Epstein spent the next year in county jail, becoming a symbol of the superrich getting away with crimes that seemed likely to send ordinary people to prison for far longer.

Ms. Maxwell herself would be a party to confidential settlements with at least two other people who said that they were victims of Mr. Epstein and that Ms. Maxwell was responsible for recruiting them.

She has never been charged with any crime, and continues to deny wrongdoing. (Attempts to reach her were not successful.) Even before these lawsuits and the C.F.R. talk, her involvement in Mr. Epstein’s operation was cited frequently in the press.

“We were unaware of the allegations against Ms. Maxwell at the time of the event,” the C.F.R. spokeswoman wrote in an email. The spokeswoman added that Mr. Epstein’s membership was revoked in 2009, because he did not pay his membership dues while in jail.

Mr. Epstein, after facing new charges of sex trafficking this year, died in jail on Aug. 10 from what officials said was suicide. And the TerraMar Project has been disbanded, though, according to The New York Post, an F.B.I. probe of it is underway. In the wake of Mr. Epstein’s death, attention now turns to the woman often accused of being his enabler, the striving socialite daughter of a disgraced billionaire.

Philanthropy as Reputation Management

According to tax filings from 2013 to 2017, the organization gave out no money in grants. A representative for the TerraMar Project said in a statement that the work of the organization included helping organize the March for the Ocean in Washington, a campaign to reduce the number of littered cigarette butts and publication of The Daily Catch, an oceanic conservation newsletter. The TerraMar Project also obtained a partnership with the luxury bedding company Yves Delorme on a collection of “water-inspired” sheets, pillowcases and comforters.

Euan Rellie, a British investment banker and society fixture who encountered Ms. Maxwell at events over decades, thought the charity as she explained it to him sounded at least in part to be a form of “reputation management.”

Christopher Mason, a reporter and a longtime friend of Ms. Maxwell’s, said he wondered if her primary motivation for starting the foundation was oceanic conservation or the conservation of Ghislaine Maxwell — creating a “respectable calling card” for someone “whose reputation was in jeopardy.”

And it was in jeopardy. The day before Mr. Epstein’s death, a trove of documents were released in connection with a defamation suit that Virginia Giuffre filed against Ms. Maxwell. Ms. Giuffre said that, at age 16, she was recruited by Ms. Maxwell and forced into being a “sex slave.” Ms. Maxwell called Ms. Giuffre a liar, was sued and settled.

In a deposition, a former maintenance worker at Mr. Epstein’s home described Ms. Maxwell scouting scores of massage spas and parlors in Florida, from Palm Beach to Jupiter, for Mr. Epstein. A college student said she was scouted by Ms. Maxwell, and that she was punished by Ms. Maxwell when she failed to sexually satisfy Mr. Epstein. Now, Jennifer Araoz has filed suit against Ms. Maxwell and others, saying that she was recruited as a freshman in high school and raped by Mr. Epstein.

A Lack of History of Activism

Image

The Limitless, docked in Saint Martin.Credit...Travis Rowan/Alamy

Ms. Maxwell had negligible experience as an environmental activist. Her preferred method of oceangoing was aboard a luxury yacht, which, according to Mr. Mason, was for her the pre-eminent symbol of “status and freedom.” It was through boating that she drew her inspiration for the foundation.

She spent much of her time in the late 1980s on the Lady Ghislaine, a nearly 200-foot boat owned by her father, the media mogul Robert Maxwell. It had a Jacuzzi, a sauna, a gym and private disco. Deep in debt, he bilked the pensions of thousands of his employees, and his body was discovered in the ocean off the Canary Islands, where he had taken the Lady Ghislaine in 1991.

The death was ruled an accident. The family reportedly lost almost everything, including the boat.

Ms. Maxwell, then living in New York, became known for her romantic relationship with Mr. Epstein, who was an all-purpose adviser for the billionaire Leslie Wexner. (Mr. Wexner said in a letter to the Wexner Foundation that, in 2007, he discovered misappropriation of his funds by Mr. Epstein.)

One of Mr. Epstein’s duties was handling contracts for the Limitless, a mammoth yacht bought by Mr. Wexner and designed by Bannenberg & Rowell. Ms. Maxwell was eager to get aboard when it was finished but never did, according to Craig Tafoya, its former captain.

“Ghislaine would always call me and say, ‘I’m coming down to use the boat with some friends. I would always tell her, ‘I have to call the owner. I can’t just let you on the boat.’ And she would never show up,” said Mr. Tafoya, who took this to mean that she never got permission. “She did that half a dozen times. And in talking to a guy who worked for Bannenberg, he said, ‘she does that all the time. She does it when she’s in front of all her girlfriends and wants to brag that she can go use someone’s yacht.’”

Her Plan B

Image

Plan B, in the Bay of Villefranche.Credit...TheYachtPhoto/Alamy

Ted Waitt is the tech billionaire co-founder of Gateway, Inc. who became Ms. Maxwell’s boyfriend after she broke up with Mr. Epstein.

Plan B, the yacht Ms. Maxwell helped him obtain and renovate, brought her to Croatia and the South of France. His check writing helped secure her place at conferences as they replaced benefit galas as the first-tier social gatherings of the late aughts. That was essential to getting the TerraMar Project off the ground.

When he met Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Waitt had a stringy, graying ponytail and wore drab suits. After she became his girlfriend, Mr. Waitt shaved his head, started wearing tinted glasses and became a virtual doppelgänger for Jason Statham.

There was even a submarine put aboard Plan B that Ms. Maxwell knew how to pilot. She began deep-sea diving, which she said is how she had discovered human-made debris all over the ocean floor.

Four people remember Ms. Maxwell talking of journeying to the center of the Pacific Ocean, in an attempt to find, she said, Amelia Earhart’s plane and body.

The conviction of Mr. Epstein and the subsequent bad press for Ms. Maxwell wore on Mr. Waitt, friends said. In 2010, they broke up. But Mr. Waitt had donated at least $10 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation. That helped Ms. Maxwell keep some access to the world of the Clintons. She used connections forged at their summits to help with the 2012 start of the TerraMar Project.

At Sea

Image

Crew members on the deck of the Lady Ghislaine in 1991.Credit...Dominique Mollard/Associated Press

“All the oceans are interconnected and related. It’s all one sea,” Ms. Maxwell said to a reporter for the Mother Nature Network in a 2012 interview. “It’s the one major area of the world where we can be one species with one home and one common destiny.”

The TerraMar website trumpeted the support of well-connected “founding citizens” like Richard Branson and Martine Assouline, a founder of the luxury coffee table books publisher that bears her name.

In 2013, Ms. Maxwell went to Reykjavik and participated in a conference for the Arctic Circle. Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer and a onetime Council on Foreign Relations fellow, also attended. He also appeared with her at the 2014 talk for the C.F.R., and according to numerous friends of Ms. Maxwell, became her boyfriend. (Three of those friends said she later described him to them as a “Navy SEAL.” Mr. Borgerson declined to comment.)

Around that time, the Clinton Global Initiative announced a “commitment to action” from the TerraMar Project. Little evidence exists that it amounted to much.

The tax returns of the TerraMar Project show that between 2013 and 2017 the organization received $196,000 in public support and paid out, in various expenses, more than $600,000, requiring loans from its president, Ms. Maxwell, totaling $549,093.

Image

Ms. Maxwell and his holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa at her apartment during a reception for a climate-change panel in 2014.Credit...Andrew Toth/Getty Images

The filings do not provide names of the firms or individuals to whom those payments were made; no programs were started for work in the field. No grants were given.

“Over all these returns, not a single dollar,” said Mike Crabtree, a tax partner at Boulay, a C.P.A. firm in Minneapolis. “The returns don’t really show what’s going on, where the money is going and what it’s being used for.”

In 2014, TerraMar’s accounting and legal fees were more than $50,000, an unusually high number given the size and activity of the organization, according to Mr. Crabtree. “I don’t know if ‘suspicious’ is the word I’d use, but to generate those kinds of fees a lot more would have to be going on than this would reflect,” he said.

As Mr. Epstein at last was charged in July with conducting a sex trafficking operation that investigators say resulted in the sexual assault of dozens of minors, the TerraMar Project shut down. It left a farewell message on its website, saying it had sought to “connect ocean lovers to positive actions, highlight science, and bring conscious change to how to people from across the globe can live, work and enjoy the ocean.”

 PS:......2014 NEWS from NYT

Search Results

Web results

Whatever Happened to Ghislaine Maxwell's Plan to Save the ...

www.nytimes.com › 2019/08/14 › style › ghislaine-maxw...

Aug 14, 2019 - The philanthropic works of Jeffrey Epstein's ex-girlfriend never materialized. Now, she's being sued by one of his victims. By Jacob Bernstein. Aug ...

You've visited this page 2 times. Last visit: 7/5/20