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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 663 Filed 06/15/22 Page11of77 presence the children would, so to speak, be put on trial, and the “Maxwellian Drama” would begin. The ordeal occurred every Sunday at lunchtime. The conversation would start normally, until Mr. Maxwell selected one child to answer his questions on a particular topic in accordance with the rules of life he has encapsulated into mnemonics and drilled into them, e.g., the 3Cs (Concentration, Consideration and Conciseness) or WWWH (What? Why? When? and How?). If the child stumbled, didn’t speak on point, or gave a wrong answer, Mr. Maxwell would demand them to answer which of the principles they had forgotten to apply and the reason for that failure. The dressing down was always painful in the extreme with everyone around the table feeling uncomfortable. Mr. Maxwell, a man of large physical stature with a booming voice, would explode, threaten, and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp. Mr. Maxwell was relentless, with children ending up in tears, punishments being doled out, and the whole family in utter distress. Mr. Maxwell employed corporal punishment on his children. Ghislaine vividly recalls a time when, at age 13, she tacked a poster of a pony on the newly painted wall of her bedroom. Rather than mar the paint with tape, she carefully hammered a thin tack to mount the poster. This outraged her father, who took the hammer and banged on Ghislaine’s dominant hand, leaving it severely bruised and painful for weeks to come. Out of the Home and Off to Boarding School Within a week after Ghislaine’s seventh birthday, Michael, then 23 years old, died, further disrupting the family. By age eight, Ghislaine was sent off to boarding school, at a time when it was uncommon for girls, let alone girls of primary school age, to be boarded. The school was hours away from home, and she returned only during school holidays and at the end of the school year. 10 DOJ-OGR-00010457