(Right) Ghislaine Maxwell © Global Look Press/ Corredor99/MediaPunch via www.im (Left) Boris Johnson © Global Look Press/Keystone Press Agency

Ghislaine Maxwell, charged with aiding and abetting the sexual predations of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, once rested a high-heeled boot on Boris Johnson’s thigh at an Oxford common room, the prime minister’s sister has revealed.

It’s hard not to feel a batsqueak of pity for Ghislaine Maxwell - 500 days and counting in solitary confinement, Rachel Johnson wrote in The Spectator, where her brother worked as editor before his rise to power.

Johnson describes Maxwell as a shiny glamazon with naughty eyes holding court astride a table at the junior common room at Balliol college, while resting her high-heeled boot on my brother Boris’s thigh. Maxwell gave her a pitying glance and invited her to a party that was eventually disbanded by her father, Bob, coming out in a towelling robe and telling us all to go home.

Bob Maxwell, who was rumored to have worked with Israeli intelligence, was found dead in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991, having presumably fallen overboard from his yacht ‘Lady Ghislaine’ off the Canary Islands. He was buried in Israel.

His daughter Ghislaine was arrested in the US in July 2020, and charged with six federal crimes, including sex trafficking, enticement of minors, and perjury, in relation to her dealings with Epstein. The controversial financier pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of minors in 2008 but was given a lenient settlement. He was arrested in July 2019 when new details of abuse - also implicating Maxwell - emerged, and was found dead inside a New York jail a month later, officially due to suicide.

Maxwell’s trial is scheduled to start at the end of November. In her first interview with the media since the arrest, she told the Daily Mail last week that her conditions inside the Brooklyn jail were a living hell of solitary confinement, rotten food, and sleep deprivation.

I have been assaulted and abused for almost a year-and-a-half, she said, complaining that the lights in her cell were never turned off, and that creepy guards would stare at her while she showered. Maxwell also insisted she was innocent and played no part in Epstein’s crimes, which she said she would prove in court.