One glance at the fates of the Maxwell children and you will see that it’s hard not to believe the nine sons of media mogul Robert Maxwell are cursed.
The most famous of them all is Ghislaine, his youngest and favorite. This disgraced socialite is currently on trial for several charges in relation to her ex-love Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking of minors.
Maxwell denies any charges and could face a maximum of 80 years imprisonment if convicted of sexual abuse, procuring young girls to Epstein, or other sex crimes that date back many decades.
Ian Maxwell (65, seventh Maxwell child) has long been an outspoken supporter of Ian’s sister.
Ian has had a lot of court experience. In the 1990s, he and younger brother Kevin stood trial for their part in their father’s £460 million Mirror Group pension fraud.
And what about the Maxwell siblings?
MailOnline examines the fates of Ghislaine’s eight siblings. This includes the genius scientist brother, who fled to Argentina in search for his father and Maxwell the bullied children, as well as the twins that became millionaires at dotcom, and the sad sister who passed away during childhood.
Robert Maxwell (back row) photographed with Betty Maxwell (sitting with their youngest daughter Ghislaine, on her knee), and seven of their eight children in Headington Hill Hall Oxford. Ian, then 11 years, was attending preparatory schools with his sister Christine (3), and Isabel (now 4) was in grammar school. Kevin (8), was still at preparatory school. Anne (2) was also attending the university but at St Hugh’s College. Philip (1), second oldest son, was in his second year as an undergraduate at Balliol College. Michael, Michael the oldest, died in his final days after an accident.
Ghislaine and six of her siblings, living or deceased, visited Ghislaine in June 2019, (pictured left). Ian Maxwell, Ian Maxwell’s older brother (top right), shared the photograph in March 2021. Ghislaine, with Scott Borgerson her husband, was arrested one month later. L-R: Anne, Kevin and twins Isabel, Christine and Philip. Ian is the father.
Michael, the tragedy first-born son who was killed in his 20s
Robert Maxwell wed Elisabeth Betty Meynard on May 15, 1945, and they had nine children in the subsequent 15 years.
In a 1995 interview, Elisabeth talked of how they were recreating his childhood family who were killed in the Holocaust.
Soon after they married, their eldest son, Michael was born. His life would be short.
Michael, aged 15, sustained severe injuries when his driver lost control of the steering wheel just 48 hours after Ghislaine’s birth.
Michael went into a coma. Never regained consciousness. He He died eight years later.
Philip (73), the genius scientist and fugitive to Argentina.
Poor Philip (left in 1971), as his friends called him, was an eminent scientist and mathematician. He won a scholarship at Balliol College Oxford aged 16. His family fled Argentina. Although it is unknown where he currently lives, he was there to join his siblings at their 2019 reunion (right).
Poor Philip was, as his friends knew him, a genius scientist and mathematician. At just 16 years old, he won a scholarship for Balliol College.
Philip hated his domineering father, so he fled Argentina immediately to flee. [him] as possible’.
Robert was not happy with the marriage of Nilda (an Argentinian girl) to Robert.
The marriage didn’t last — Nilda moved out taking their daughter Marcella with her and a second marriage also failed.
Philip was last heard of living in a £65-a-week flat in North London trying to be a writer. Who is the subject? The subject’s bullying father.
For a 2019 London reunion, he was reunited with his siblings
Anne was ex-actress and called ugly by her father
Anne Maxwell, Anne’s eldest child, wanted to become an actress and then retrain as a teacher. Because of her beauty, she was subject to bullying from her father. Photographed in 1968, and 2019.
Her dad was quick to respond when she lost her promising acting career. Your acting career is both failing and ugly.
Anne studied French and Italian at Oxford. She then worked in a series of television before abandoning her stardom dreams.
Then, she trained as an educator in Montessori, and then married an osteopath. She is currently a hypnotherapist working under another name in Surrey.
After the death of her father at the tender age of 68, she has been quiet.
Isabel (71), a fireball who lost her Internet fortune
Isabel, described in The Jerusalem Post (left in 1968; right in 1992), was described as “a fireball” who is ‘always on your face’. She made a lot of money in the dotcom boom and was even called a Maxwell.
Isabel is the Maxwell of Maxwell, as she was once described by The Jerusalem Post.
After graduating with an Oxford degree in Modern Languages, and a Masters from Edinburgh, she decided to become a television reporter.
She moved to California in 1981 to become a TV producer, and then she made a 1968 film starring Neil Young. She said that it wasn’t ET. . . It is more of a love labor.
However, technology was her way of life. Christine and her twin sister founded Magellan, the first search engine for internet information, in 1992.
At one point worth £50million, Isabel, above in 2019, was declared bankrupt in 2015
In 1996, they sold it for shares in a rival company Excite — which rocketed in value, giving the sisters a joint £100 million fortune and landing them a place on the Sunday Times Rich list in 1999.
But her fortune began to wane and she was declared bankrupt by the court in 2015.
Her marriages were two. Dale Djerassi was her first husband. She had a son. After that, she married David Hayden (Magellan cofounder).
Al Seckel, her illusionist husband, was once an important player in California’s literary, academic, and celebrity scenes. He is known for hosting parties for the very wealthy and well-known. Jeffrey Epstein was a close friend.
Two men set up a science conference called Mindshift, which was held on Epstein’s Little Saint James island in 2009.
Seckel and Isabel’married” in Malibu in 2007, but the union was not legal because he forgot to file papers to annul his third marriage (to Denice Lewis who is a former model and appeared in Cliff Richard, Elton John, and Bryan Ferry music videos). In memorial paintings where the ashes are mixed with pigment, she became an artist.
Similar to Seckel, Seckel also failed to pay countless loans over the years which led inexorably into legal proceedings.
Seckel, a 15-year-old boy from France, was discovered dead beneath a rock near their house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. Isabel lives still in southern France.
Christine, 71, dotcom boom millionaire
Christine was not like her twin sister Isabel.
Christine, unlike her twin sister Isabel was a businesswoman and worked for years for her father. She even wrote a bestseller for Pergamon.
After attending senior school at Milham Ford School in Oxford, she entered Pitzer College, Claremont, California, graduating in 1972 with a BA with a major in Latin American Studies and Sociology.
In September 1973, Maxwell enrolled at Oxford Brookes University’s Lady Spencer Churchill College of Education and obtained a post graduate teaching certificate the following year.
Christine is still employed at The University of Texas. Photo taken at the 2019 reunion
Later, she earned her master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Christine worked as an editor at Pergamon Press Publishers. She was co-founded in 1970 by her father and continued to work for him in the 1980s. Also, she worked as an Oxford teacher.
In 1998 she gave a rare interview and spoke about the many years in her father’s publishing company. She said, “Both my parents had strong work ethics, which they instilled into me and my siblings when I was very young.
‘They also communicated a very clear understanding that advantages always come with responsibilities — that there was no such thing as a free ride.’
With her father’s Pergamon Press in 1977, she published The Dictionary Of Perfect Spelling. This book had 20,000 words. It was an international bestseller that has been repeatedly reprinted.
Their success during the dotcom boom dominated the 1980s, 1990s like her twin. Christine bought Information on Demand in 1982, one of the first information brokers. Later, Research on Demand was renamed.
Christine was the co-author of one the first printed reference guides for the Internet, The McKinley Internet White Pages.
Chiliad is her latest venture.
Christine She is married and has three children with Roger Malina.
Christine is listed on Linked In as a Program Manager of Learning Technologies, The University of Texas. She also works with big data company Techtonic Insight Inc.
Karine was diagnosed with leukemia when she was a young girl.
Robert and Elisabeth lost their sixth child Karine to leukemia at the age of three in 1957.
The parents’ grief at her death had an impact on how they would view Ghislaine, their next child, four years later.
Ian Maxwell, an interviewer, explained that Karine’s passing upset the family’s balance of “four boys and four daughters”.
So when my parents got another little girl, I was able to say “So” [Ghislaine]”It was magic. It allowed the four boys (and four girls) to be replicated,” Ian explained. She was also born on Christmas Day, adding to that sense of miracle.
Ian, 65 years old, is the ‘fall guy,’ who defends and supports his sister
Robert Maxwell pictured with his son Ian (left), who was taunted mercilessly by his siblings, and youngest son Kevin (right), who became Britain’s biggest ever bankrupt when a £407million bankruptcy order was made against him
Ian was married to Laura Marie Plumb who was a former American college basketball star.
Taunted mercilessly at home — his father would ridicule him in front of visiting friends – Ian still decided to join the family business.
His poor treatment of him continued, and he was unfavourably compared to Kevin, his younger brother.
In the aftermath of their father’s death, Ian, then 35, and Kevin, 32, assumed control of the company and stood trial for their part in their father’s £460 million pension fraud.
The Maxwells were not acquitted. However, the Maxwell name was in tatters for several years. There were no overseas business opportunities.
Ian has given a number of interviews on his sister’s trial and case in recent months, bemoaning the treatment she has received. Image: Good Morning America, March
Ian was married to Laura Marie Plumb, an American college basketball player and model.
When she was working to establish a television cable company in London, they met. The couple married in 1991 — the year of Robert Maxwell’s death — and the ensuing media attention put Laura under great strain. She was seen sobbing on the day Ian and Kevin were detained. In 1996, the couple split.
He married Tara Dudley Smith next, who was the daughter of an ex-Army officer and Jockey Club steward. That relationship ended too. Cecilia French was his Director of Public Protection in the Home Office. He eventually found love with her.
Kevin and Ian recently felt the desire to help the greater good after exploring business opportunities in energy, telecom, property and other areas.
Three years ago in the middle the Greek financial crisis they created an organization similar to Prince’s Trust in Greece. This organisation has helped launch hundreds of businesses and raised millions of euro.
Maxwell, along with his brother Kevin, announced that they had established a UK think-tank called Combating Jihadist Terrorism in September 2018. The goal of this group was to better understand terrorism and its causes.
In recent months, he has been giving interviews about his sister’s case and trial. He also bemoaned the way she was treated.
In March 2021 he told The Times Epstein had ruined his youngest sibling’s life — and she is paying for the US authorities’ failure to prosecute him.
Kevin (62), Britain’s largest ever bankrupt
Kevin, the smartest and most influential son of his family and the driving force behind it all, was devastated by his father’s passing. He said that he had’missed him’ and his ability to rule.
Kevin Maxwell, the only Maxwell brother to ever express public remorse for Robert Maxwell’s crimes. He also spoke out about the “moral burden” he will carry for the rest his life. Pictured: Kevin (right), with Ian, their brother at the 2018 launch of their think-tank.
Kevin, who was the most intelligent son in the family and the driving force of their household, felt devastated at his father’s passing. He stated that he had’missed’ his authority and presence. He confessed to feeling completely in awe.
Kevin Maxwell, the only Maxwell sibling to ever express public remorse for Robert Maxwell’s crimes. He made mention of the “moral burden” that he will carry for the rest his life.
Pandora Warnford Davis, his first wife, called Robert her father-in law the “fat fraudster”.
Kevin is pictured here in 2019. Kevin dreamed about making a fortune during the late 1990s. However, that was not to happen.
When, in June 1992, Kevin was arrested and charged with fraud after hundreds of millions disappeared from the Maxwell empire’s employee pension funds, she appeared at the window of their home at dawn and shouted: ‘P*** off, or I’ll call the police!’ Only to discover that they were actually the police when she called them in the wee hours of the morning.
After 23 years of marriage and seven children, they separated in 2007. Pandora last saw her living in Oxford renting a room on Airbnb.
Soon after his arrest, Kevin became Britain’s biggest ever bankrupt when a £407 million bankruptcy order was made against him.
Following the obligatory three year period, the bankruptcy was declared exempted in 1995.
And, after an Old Bailey trial that cost taxpayers £12 million in legal aid, he was acquitted of fraud a year later — even though a subsequent Whitehall report concluded Kevin bore a ‘heavy responsibility’ for what happened.
Telemonde was founded in the USA by Telemonde. He hoped it would become the Maxwell-comeback story. But it was not.
When Telemonde floated in 1999, Kevin looked on course to becoming a multi-millionaire; on paper he owned a seven per cent stake, worth £16 million.
But by 2001, the company had debts of more than £100 million and failed. Kevin decided to move into commercial properties of very high quality.
In 2011, his venture was ruined when he was removed from the board of directors for 8 years.
In 2018, the brothers co-founded their thinktank.