Private jets, exclusive parties, jail: Ghislaine, was it all worth it?

But that’s all intellectual and my pedestrian mind just can’t actually grasp the reality.

What kept a lot of us glued to the Maxwell trial was that its backdrop was a world of super wealth and privilege. Private jets. $100 million New York mansions. Islands. Former presidents and Bill Gates. Money, money, money.

Of all the details and testimony heard during the trial, what I found most fascinating was the 58-page manual given to staff at Epstein and Maxwell’s homes. The checklist detailing how Maxwell’s bathrooms had to be stocked was extraordinary, from a Braun electric toothbrush to La Mer moisturiser, Clarins body shaping cream and Frederic Fekkai apple cider shampoo.

But below her upper echelons gloss, Maxwell is no different to the cliché of the trailer trash prison bride, women who fall for bikies or gangsters or bad apples who knock off the local fish and chip shop or steal Guide Dog vans.

Her upbringing in a 53-room Oxfordshire mansion, her access to the Queen’s Balmoral log cabin, doesn’t disguise that she chose a hideous man as a boyfriend, ignored that he was a sexual predator, aided and abetted him. She was drawn to the supercharged version of losers our girlfriends married, the ones who splash people at the beach and try to kiss on the lips.

And, truth is, maybe Epstein was drawn to someone as repugnant as himself. It’s not always men who are shit blokes.

The verdicts hijacked my beach book reading, and then I got sucked into details of Maxwell’s co-dependency with Epstein. They met at a party in New York soon after the mysterious 1991 death of her newspaper tycoon father Robert Maxwell. Like Epstein, he was a criminal who stole millions from his companies’ pension funds.

As the story goes, the confident, gregarious Maxwell had arrived in the US with just $100,000 in the bank. The socially awkward, former working class Epstein was wealthy beyond imagination. He needed her Filofax of contacts. She needed to be lady of the house.

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The relationship was “entirely transactional”, said Manhattan society columnist R Couri Hay, “She wanted someone like her father who was rich and powerful.” Author Conchita Sarnoff, who mixed in the same circles, saw it differently: Epstein “grew to love” Maxwell but lost respect when she continued to “cave in to his demands.”

A woman who could have had a comfortable life by anyone’s standards has lost her liberty, reputation, future. She’s paying the price for hitching her wagon to an awful ex who enabled her own amorality. Schadenfreude be damned, there are no winners.

Ghislaine, was it worth it? Wouldn’t have thought so.

Kate Halfpenny is founder of Bad Mother Media.