The Decoder: Ghislaine Maxwell’s First Prison Interview And Its Impact On Her ‘Dear Friend’ Prince Andrew

She's much more comfortable now in her slightly more permanent digs of Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tallahassee, the impeccably Oxford-educated 80s It-Girl and convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell. She can bend the language to elide damning detail while seeming to offer it, she can paint an image with shadows of connotation and denotation. Mainly, though, the message we're supposed to get is that her appeal is underway, and somehow it's also communicated — without being said quite this way — that she's bravely fighting to clear her name. She's a busy woman, and a bit more together now, a year on since her conviction. Exactly that is what she has done in her first post-conviction interview, one that she and the prison authorities of both institutions decided should be given to Israeli filmmaker Daphne Barak.

As we know, a couple of minutes of the early teaser footage has aired on CBS — still, somehow, an amazing broadcast institution with a solid historical connection to Britain since Edward R. Murrow broadcast from WWII London. But the main course of Ghislaine Maxwell both in the Metropolitan Detention Center (awaiting trial) and remotely interviewed post-conviction in federal hands in Tallahassee will be coming on Paramount Plus. From what we know of the two minutes and then some on CBS, Ms. Barack will apparently be giving Ms. Maxwell a large amount of rope. The jury's out on what Maxwell will ultimately do with it, but the indications are clear enough that we're about to get Ms. Maxwell's “side of the story,” without, of course, actually receiving a workable alternative narrative.

The reason for that sort of sleight of hand — meaning, the act of “giving” a “first” interview but supplying so much as nothing of substance that is new — is that Ms. Maxwell's appeal is genuinely under way, and why tip her hand to the Feds on TV about anything her lawyers will be arguing.

The second reason for her current, on-air sleight of hand in delivering any kind of coherent story is that she faced this exact same narrative difficulty at trial, and it resulted in a heavy, swift conviction before Christmas last year. Bluntly put, Ghislaine Maxwell's difficulty is that she can't supply much of substance in a competing narrative to that of the charges against her because there is no competing narrative to supply. The millions of pages of federal evidence stood as a damning bulwark against anything she might try to say. This is why her lawyers were largely reduced to impugning the witnesses and their narratives last November and December, and why Maxwell's conviction was so swift.

She's much more comfortable now in her slightly more permanent digs of Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tallahassee, the impeccably Oxford-educated 80s It-Girl and convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell. She can bend the language to elide damning detail while seeming to offer it, she can paint an image with shadows of connotation and denotation. It's exactly that is what she has brilliantly done in her first post-conviction interview, one that she and the federal Bureau of Prisons decided should be given to Israeli filmmaker Daphne Barak.