MEYREUIL, France—Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, comes from a family by turns brilliant and accomplished, deceptive and doomed. Her backstory is full of sex and science, money and magical illusions. And today she is the world’s most wanted woman—at least by the media and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

She is the youngest child of the notorious and disgraced British media mogul Robert Maxwell, rumored after his mysterious death in 1991 to have been an Israeli spy. She was the alleged paramour-turned-pimp for Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile who reportedly committed suicide in his cell on August 10.

But there are no known criminal charges against her, only allegations in a civil suit. Indeed, there is speculation she may be cooperating with federal prosecutors. And while she might have decided to hide out here in Provence at her sister’s house in the shadow of Cézanne’s favorite mountain, she was spotted Thursday in California eating a burger while reading a book about CIA heroes.

Ghislaine Maxwell, in short, is a survivor.

“In moments of greatest adversity, that’s where they’re the coolest; it’s bred into the family,” an executive with one of Robert Maxwell’s media companies said after his drowning upended his media empire and forced his wife and children to clean up the mess. “Maxwell’s whole life was ‘Never panic.’”

As we looked for her in France in recent days, she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. But we did discover enough skeletons in the family closet (including those of her in-laws and their families) to fill a house of horrors.

We searched near her dead mother’s estate east of here—and even at the bottom of a cliff in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a few hours from Meyreuil, where her brother-in-law Al Seckel, giver of TED talks on optical illusions, reportedly fell to his death in 2015 after he was exposed as a swindler in Los Angeles.

We also looked at the family tree of her other brother-in-law, an American astrophysicist whose genius rocket scientist father Frank Malina at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California pioneered what would become NASA before he fled to France with J. Edgar Hoover's G-Men on his heels.

For Ghislaine, presumably, outer space is not an option. But in point of fact, she does know how to operate a lot of exotic machinery. In addition to speaking four languages and holding a degree from Oxford, she’s a trained private helicopter pilot, a submersible pilot and qualified to operate undersea robots. Much was made of the latter qualifications when she was fund-raising for her now defunct TerraMar oceanic environmental project, which shuttered after Epstein’s arrest last month. 

Ghislaine, who wanted to be seen as a visionary, liked to hang out with others who cultivate that rep, and was pictured with Elon Musk, whose Space X program is based in Hawthorne, just south of Los Angeles.

Ah, there’s a California connection again. 

But France is still where Ghislaine Maxwell’s family history begins. Both she and her mother, the elegant and long-suffering Elisabeth Maxwell, were born here. And while some French officials have called for an investigation into Epstein’s activities in Paris, where he had an opulent apartment, Ghislaine’s French connection goes back decades in the south. 

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It also grew out of the horrors of Auschwitz, which wiped out Robert Maxwell’s parents and siblings and eventually inspired his French Protestant wife, Elisabeth, to become a renowned Holocaust scholar.

And it includes Ghislaine’s very interesting American in-laws who moved back and forth between Provence, the Dordogne and the United States. Their roots involved the pioneering, often reckless rocket scientists of the 1930s who were called the “Suicide Squad” for their risky work at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Among their circle: L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; and Briton Aleister Crowley, known for black magic and a sex cult.

Maxwell family observers don’t find it strange that Ghislaine and some of her sisters were drawn to larger-than-life, certifiably strange men.

“They attach themselves to bizarre psychopaths like their father,” says a researcher who delved into the family years ago. “Ghislaine wasn’t the only sister to hook up with a weird guy.”

The daddy issues—and the mysterious death issues—began with Robert Maxwell, born into poverty as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia in 1923. He wanted a big family to recreate, in a way, the siblings he lost to the Nazis, and he very much wanted riches and fame. He achieved all of it, including a seat in the British Parliament. But two of his children died young and greed overtook his ambition. 

When Robert Maxwell mysteriously disappeared from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and his naked body was retrieved floating in the waters off the Canary Islands in November 1991, he already had been drowning in debt.

His business empire was on the verge of ruin and he’d stolen, Bernie Madoff-style, more than $400 million from his employees’ pension funds to forestall bankruptcy. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh had recently accused him of being a longtime Israeli intelligence agent in a book about Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, The Samson Option.

The conspiracy theories surrounding Robert Maxwell’s death rivaled those of Epstein’s today, although the official take was that he fell off his boat during an early morning walk around the deck. 

Epstein, whose pal, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak often crashed at his $77 million Upper East Side apartment in New York, also has been accused of unsavory connections to Israel.

“What are the driving forces that make people do things?’ Ghislaine’s mother Elisabeth asked about her husband in 1995 during a New York Times interview to promote her unusually candid autobiography, A Mind of My Own. In it she admitted Maxwell was a philanderer and often treated her badly—but she said she loved him.

“I hope one day there will be a balance. That time passes, passions fall and eventually some truths emerge,” she said. “It was really a Greek tragedy that his path should have finished the way it did.”

Two of Maxwell’s sons, Kevin and Ian, were investigated for fraud involving their father’s empire after his death and both were cleared in 1996, although at one point Kevin was banned from running a company in the U.K. for eight years. Both landed back in court in 2015 and 2016 facing bankruptcy issues involving another U.K. financial company to which they owed money.

Maxwell biographer Tom Bower was sympathetic to the Maxwell kids, calling their problems, “the tragic legacy of a crooked father. His children just inherited an awful pack of cards.” 

Ian Maxwell, now 63, broke his silence about his father in an interview last year with the Sunday Times of London.

“The embrace was suffocating and so loving and everything came your way,” he said. “But then if you were far away in disgrace or you had blotted your copybook, no matter what you had done you were cast out.”

The Oxford-educated Ghislaine, who used to be referred to reflexively as a “British socialite,” reportedly was her father’s favorite. But two of her sisters, the twins Isabel and Christine, now 69, are the most accomplished of the family. They are internet content pioneers who started Magellan, one of the first search engines, and were featured in Michael Wolff’s book, Burn Rate, about his foray into early startups.

The sisters (Christine was said to be the brains behind the operation) made millions when Magellan was later sold to the Excite search company. 

Curiously, Isabel followed in the family tradition of filing for bankruptcy in December 2015 despite having been a multi-millionaire. That move may have been related to the untimely demise at age 56 of her third husband, the infamous con man Al Seckel who, she later found out, was not legally her husband since he was still married to his first wife. In 2015, when he reportedly died, he was potentially on the hook for millions.

Seckel was the subject of an extraordinary 5,000-word investigation earlier that same year by The Tablet’s Mark Oppenheimer that laid bare decades of a convoluted and litigious life as the “world’s greatest collector of optical illusions.” 

Seckel, the son of a refugee from the Nazis, moved to L.A. and used his wile and charm to pass himself off as an Ivy League graduate and double doctoral candidate at Caltech. 

Soon, Seckel zeroed in on the movers and shakers. “An age before Silicon Valley had captured the geek imagination,” Oppenheimer wrote, “Caltech and the surrounding aerospace industry was the frontier of nerd power and glory.” 

Seckel befriended and bewitched the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann among other neuroscientists, as well as academics and even magicians like James Randi.

Seckel then used those contacts to sell rare books to prestigious customers who were often hoodwinked out of thousands in bad deals. He moved on to co-opt the burgeoning field of optical illusion, popularizing the art of manipulating images by using research from others in books he wrote. 

(His daughter, Elizabeth Seckel, has built on her father’s work in optical illusion by pioneering something called “mirror box therapy.” Seckel brought her method, sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, to Haiti after the earthquake in 2012 to help recent amputees with their phantom limb pain.)

In 2010, Seckel hosted a scientific conference on Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous private island with Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow, who was Stephen Hawking’s co-author, and MIT’s Gerald Sussman. 

Oppenheimer told The Daily Beast this week that there was “no evidence” that Seckel or any of the scientists at the island party were involved in any sexual activity with young girls.

In 2004 Seckel gave a TED talk that’s been viewed almost 2.5 million times about “perceptual illusions that fool our brains.” 

Because of Seckel’s shady past, it was not surprising that vague reports of his death—a perceptual illusion perhaps?—began popping up just weeks after Oppenheimer’s July 2015 story exposed him to hordes of creditors. 

A paid obituary was published on Legacy.com, supposedly after appearing in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, but it does not appear on the paper's website. One report has circulated around various Seckel-obsessed corners of the internet that his body was found at the bottom of a cliff near the home in France where he had moved with Isabel.

But The Daily Beast could not locate any officials in the town where Seckel was last known to live who had any report of his death. Oppenheimer and others said they have not yet found proof, either. The Daily Beast was unable to reach Isabel Maxwell or Elizabeth Secker for comment.

Christine Maxwell and her astrophysicist husband Roger Malina have, until recently at least, divided their time between their home here in Meyreuil and Dallas, Texas. Malina teaches at the University of Texas there and Christine is a doctoral candidate in the humanities department, a UT spokeswoman told The Daily Beast. Malina was also a director at an astrophysics center in Marseille until last year.

Roger Malina is the son of Czechoslovak-born Frank Malina, an early Elon Musk type who was part of the ragtag group whose daring rocket experiments in 1930s Pasadena led to the formation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in L.A., the precursor to NASA.

Frank Malina’s best friend, Jack Parsons, was the most charismatic of the group. He led a double life with non-scientist friends like L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, and other sci-fi classics. Parsons also joined an occult group involving the dark arts and sex fetishes founded by Aleister Crowley, an English occultist and magician. The book and CBS TV series Strange Angel are based on Parsons’ life.

In an odd echo of Jeffrey Epstein’s reported desire to seed the human race with his own DNA, Parsons and Hubbard tried for a time to impregnate women to bring forth Babalon, a goddess described as the “Scarlet Woman” in the Themelic belief system to which Crowley subscribed. 

When Parsons died in a mysterious explosion at his home at age 37, he had stopped working for JPL and was for a time a consultant to Israel’s nascent rocket system. Media accounts at the time hinted at “sexual perversion,” “black robes,” “sacred fire” and “intellectual necromancy,” according to Vice—and there were also whispers that he might have been murdered.

Frank Malina, Christine Maxwell Malina’s father-in-law, was more of a straight arrow than Parsons and fared better, at first. But some historians say he was cheated of his rightful place as a true hero of the early space race because of years of harassment by the FBI who labeled him a socialist during the McCarthy years because he had campaigned against racial segregation, and raised money for republicans in the Spanish Civil War. After World War II he fled to Paris, where he became a painter and watched the space program soar from afar.

In a brutal twist, Wernher von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist who was brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, the government program that brought Nazi scientists to build American rockets, became the face of the early space program that some feel Malina deserved to have been.

Roger Malina blogs about his famous father on his website where he wrote last year: “Yes, Elon Musk, they triggered in the USA the work that led to your ‘strange’ vision—and they did it a stone’s throw from where your company SpaceX is currently headquartered. And you are dreaming the same dreams as the ‘suicide squad,’ as they were called, at Caltech in the 1930s.”

Looking back, that does seem a strange sobriquet, and oddly appropriate, if not for the rocket builders of 80 years ago, then for the Maxwells and those who were close to them.

I have become, it seems, something of a collector: old magazines filled with young starlets, Mason jars full of homemade concoctions, confidants who were once wayward lovers, and a cat who hasn’t lived with his rightful owner—my now grown middle child—for too many years. There is a row of empty ceramic planters lining my window sill, awaiting soil and seeds and a goodness that will never arrive.

Then there are the scars, both physical and emotional, that I have collected—too numerous, it seems, and too painful to count. Sometimes, I run my fingers across the blemishes—the nicks and pits and disfigurements—that litter my body. There are few mirrors in my house, lest I am forced to see the fullness of their bounty. Each one whispers its own story. Each one holds its own trauma, some petty and some profound, one and all a maker of all that is me. 

A thin brown keloid marks the spot along my right heel, sliced open by a broken bottle in the yard some 46 years ago when we lived in a Duck Hill public housing project. There are various other cuts and burns, some abrasions from scraping concrete, hopping fences and climbing trees. They remind me of the moments when I rejected my girlness, the femininity that left me vulnerable and afraid. I rarely think about them now or even about the small rise of skin on my back, where a man who swore he loved me shoved a blade into the meat of my shoulder as I ran screaming for my life. 

I tell myself that, for the most part, I have let them and the circumstances that wrought them go, and that some things, like the cat at my feet, must simply be embraced. There are a few, though, that have yet to heal. 

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—a 24-inch orange 10-speed with a black seat and matching vinyl-wrapped handlebars. I first spotted it on the lower floor of a Northwest Plaza department store. My godfather, Thom Puckett, promised that if I helped out around his Sinclair gas station, he would “see about that bicycle.” I swept the stockroom, grabbed extra cans of motor oil for my “uncle” Frank, and washed window shields for every customer that pulled up to a full-service pump. Puckett, who would later buy and teach me to drive my first car, made good on his word. 

It was 1980 and I had just finished sixth grade. I had been elected student council president in an all-white school. The gravity of that missed me. They were simply my friends. Some still are. We played together in a creek awash with nuclear waste, ferried cakes to celebrate Mrs. Bateman’s birthday, and learned to swim at Tiemeyer Park. 

I could not know it then, but the world was changing around me as the evening news carried stories of an Olympic boycott, a child born from a test tube, a presidential election, and American hostages in Iran. I remember witnessing a solar eclipse from the back playground at Buder Elementary School, our makeshift viewfinders fashioned from shoeboxes. Even then, I was mesmerized by it all. Johnny Carson was the king of late night television. CNN aired its maiden newscast. My older sister got married and had a baby that summer.

Weeks after Mt. St. Helen’s spewed its lava, smoke and ash into the sky, I pulled the bike from the side yard and left our small pale green house on St. Christopher Lane. It was morning, the sun still low but already burning away the dewy air. My legs, even with the saddle lowered flush with the frame’s top tube, were barely long enough to reach the pedals. I was headed to summer camp, a free city-run program at Schafer Park. It wasn’t far. Maybe a half mile. I proudly parked my bike alongside the gazebo and spent the day playing checkers, swatting tennis balls and stringing colorful beads.

Some time that afternoon, I started the way home, pushing my way up sloping St. Williams Lane. Clumsily switching gears, I felt a tug at my bicycle seat as I hit the top up the small incline. It was a familiar face—an older boy, maybe 16 or 17, named Chris. 

What unfolded next left a wound so deep and abiding that, until this summer, I could not speak it aloud. I told myself that, like the stack of cookbooks I never open, this was a chapter best left closed. I told myself it did not matter. 

I remember being led down a path that led to Hoech Jr. High School and through the parking lot to a house on the other side of Ashby Road, just south of Tiemeyer Park. He pushed me through the door of a screened-in back porch, yanked down my blue and white basketball shorts, and raped me on the slat board flooring.

I was eleven years old. 

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I remember the long walk home, the darkening sky above and the buzzing winged insects that danced around the streetlights. Long after the last of the sun had drifted from the sky, I sat on our painted concrete porch sobbing, waiting for somebody to come home. My panties bloodied, my arms and knees scraped. The pain seemed to come from everywhere. I waited there with my cat Lucky, afraid to go inside until my mother turned into the gravel drive. 

I was unmoored. I had no idea what that meant then, but it seems the only fitting word writing this now. I belonged nowhere, and to no one specifically. 

Nobody took me to see a doctor. Not for my injuries, not for the infection that came after. Nobody went to the police or even sat me down to talk through what happened. My mother gave me two pills—antibiotics I assume—and rubbed ointment on the boil. I remember the pitying look she gave me, and the anger she seemed to have for me. I could not help but to believe that whatever happened to me, wherever I had been, had been my fault. 

Looking back, I can only imagine what manner of hell might have been unleashed in our predominantly white, working-class neighborhood where we were one of only three black families. I cannot imagine what might have been said to an all-white St. Ann police department, which took a particular interest in my decidedly black teenage brother. Or maybe, my mother’s response was a byproduct of the horrors she experienced as a child. I can make no excuses for the care and protection I was not given, though I can now give them some measure of context. 

Part of me understands or at least wants to. Part of me wants to go back, to demand more and better for myself.

As I returned later to pull my bike from the opening of a tunnel along Coldwater Creek, where it had been ditched, I remember thinking, knowing that I was on my own. It was not the first time I had been molested and it would not be the last. The sexual violence that I endured during my formative years—at five when a neighbor boy in our housing project lured a group of my playmates into an upper bedroom, at 13 when an older cousin in the basement of my aunt’s house, through high school when a football coach preyed on me and my classmates. 

Sometime in 1981, I was sent to live with an aunt in East St. Louis, the crumbling town my mother had fought so relentlessly to leave. I slept on the living room floor for several years, often soiling myself in the night. When I wasn’t scrubbing floors, polishing furniture or lining a church pew, I immersed myself in books of every sort. The library in our bottoming-out neighborhood was my refuge, my safe harbor. I found Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin there. To them, and to an 8th grade honors English teacher, I owe my very survival. 

I was without my mother then, detached from all that I had known. My blackness was suddenly present and burdensome in ways I cannot number or name. The school smelled of piss, the lunches served in plastic wrappings and the texts missing full chapters. I won another race for student council president, joined the speech team—winning statewide competitions—and wrote essays that brought accolades. Anything to escape the lack and despair of the half burned-out school house. 

There are no repressed memories for me, only a tucking away. Some of the marks on my psyche are indelible, I know. But nothing was so hurtful as the sense of abandonment I felt then and even now. It has marred relationships with my closest family and undermined my ability to navigate the waters of intimate relationships. I learned to fight, early on, as a means of self preservation and I rarely leave home after the street lights come on. 

This summer, as I began pulling together old essays and penning a spiritual memoir, these are the things I know that I cannot avoid. If I am to speak of my life, of the joys and triumphs, the vulnerabilities, ailments and healings, of the rocky road made smooth by the might of my own faith that there has and will be better, there is nothing I can leave out.

I think now about the life that went unlived, the one that gathered layers of mold in the dark cabinets of desolation. I sometimes wonder what I might have been, but for the pus and scarring of sexual violence, how it formed and defined and confined me. Even so, I marvel in the journey itself, the things I learned to reject and accept, the withering of my faith and the solace I have created for myself in its absence. 

There is a strange peace in this, an odd sense of surety that I cannot shake. It allows me no hatred, no compulsion for retribution. The wounds are without salt. There is a comfort knowing that my tomorrows, if nothing else in this world, belong to me. What I choose to carry with me, to what extent what lay behind me colors the road ahead, is a decision that only I can make. 

“You wanna fly,” Toni Morrison wrote, “you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.”

At some point, I imagine I will get around to planting that herb garden. But, for now, I am content to bear witness to my own blooming. Though the scars remains, there is a life—I know—beyond them.