By the time the friend ran into her on the plane, Maxwell and one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, had settled a lawsuit in which Giuffre accused Maxwell of recruiting her as a “sex slave” for Epstein and Prince Andrew, among others, when she was only 17. Now Maxwell was in the process of quietly withdrawing from the life she had made for herself. She shuttered the ocean-protection charity she had founded, the TerraMar Project, which left her with debts of $549,093. She even gave up her name, sometimes introducing herself to new acquaintances only as “G.” Yet here she was, on a commercial flight from Miami to New York.

For a moment, as the two friends chatted, the old Maxwell burst through: the Oxford-educated, knows-everybody-and-everything Maxwell, the woman who wanted to save the oceans but couldn’t seem to save herself from the men in her life. “Where are you living, Ghislaine?” the friend asked. “I lost touch with you.”

Maxwell suddenly went blank. “Oh,” she replied, “a little bit everywhere.”

“But where?” her friend pressed. Maxwell wouldn’t answer.

“Looking back,” the friend says now, “I personally think she knew that the shit was really about to go down.”