As Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial approaches for the alleged trafficking of underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein, her family and lawyers are mounting an aggressive push to defend her name—and they’ve found vocal allies in an unexpected place. While Maxwell is known for past ties to prominent Democrats such as Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea, her cause has attracted right-wing figures, including provocateur Jacob Wohl and a British blogger who has criticized Black Lives Matter and who has recently emerged as a chief defender of the posh socialite.
Last month, Maxwell’s brother Ian granted an extensive and exclusive interview to Jay Beecher, a scribe for right-wing websites in England.
“Simply put, her present media image is a 180 degrees from who she really is,” Ian Maxwell said in a June 20 story on Beecher’s site VoteWatch, weeks after the sibling had granted sit-downs to only a handful of mainstream outlets including the Washington Post, ABC News, and the BBC. “Since the start, with occasional and notable exceptions,” Ian added, “the media’s reporting of Ghislaine has been as one-sided as it has been wrong.”
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In VoteWatch, the Maxwells and their lawyer David Oscar Markus seem to have discovered a particularly friendly platform, one that’s published lengthy reports attacking the credibility of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s accusers, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, and Sarah Ransome. The site laments the “toll on Ian and his family” that the “media circus and courtroom dramas” have supposedly inflicted, and even quotes Ian plugging a book by Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who was Epstein’s friend and attorney and who helped broker the financier’s 2008 plea deal in Florida. (Dershowitz, whom Beecher has repeatedly defended online, was also a mentor to Markus in law school.)
Beecher is also behind a second website called the Maxwell Files, which appears to share a sympathetic view of the beleaguered British socialite and her relatives with headlines like: “Ghislaine Maxwell’s Siblings Launch New Website To Counter MSM Fiction,” using an abbreviation for mainstream media, and “WATCH: Ian Maxwell Asks What YOU Would Do If You Were His Sister.”
Meanwhile, the self-styled “journalist and campaigner” has jumped into Twitter threads posted by the Maxwell family handle @RealGhislaine, as well as by Markus’ account, to fight their critics and trolls. “Epstein was a monster,” Beecher tweeted to one user on June 27. “But 1. Why do you believe in guilt by association? 2. Why didn’t you reply to my earlier question? (Be honest - until then, did you believe Virginia Giuffre?). & 3. Please name the accusers whom the prosecution are using against Ghislaine Maxwell.”
On March 22, Beecher shared a tweet urging people to follow Maxwell’s family account after writing, “As many of you will have seen, I’ve been very vocal about Virginia Roberts’ proven lies, our media’s bias, and the complete falsehoods printed by tabloid newspapers. The truth is coming out (much more will be out soon, so stay tuned).”
The @RealGhislaine account has retweeted Beecher and his work several times, including one April post that opined Maxwell’s relatives “don’t deserve to be attacked simply for doing what anyone else would do—defend a family member they love.”
Last year, Beecher penned one 90-page report impugning Giuffre, who has accused Maxwell of grooming and abusing her and other young women in Epstein’s orbit. (In 2015, Giuffre filed a defamation suit against Maxwell, which was settled two years later. A federal judge unsealed court records in that case in 2019 and the documents continue to be publicly released on a rolling basis.)
In his report, titled “We Need to Talk About Virginia,” Beecher repeatedly takes aim at Giuffre, writing: “Due to her shocking accusations against a seemingly ever-growing list of famous faces, Virginia Roberts-Giuffre has stolen the limelight in the ongoing Epstein saga—overshadowing Epstein’s many victims with her sensationalist media interviews.”
In his July 6 piece titled “Prince Andrew—The Shocking Truth,” Beecher again targets Giuffre. “After the death of Jeffrey Epstein, Virginia’s claims were largely used to orchestrate a witch hunt against Ghislaine Maxwell, based on what many are beginning to refer to as ‘guilt by association,’ and despite her never being a suspect in the FBI’s initial investigation nor accused by any party,” Beecher writes. “Although not proven to have committed any crime, Maxwell is now locked away in solitary confinement.”
Still, Maxwell has faced accusations from multiple women other than Giuffre, including Farmer and her sister, Annie, Ransome, and a woman referred to as Jane Doe, whom Epstein and Maxwell allegedly recruited at a Michigan arts boarding school when she was 13 in 1994. Accusers Chauntae Davies and Teresa Helm also say Maxwell recruited them into Epstein’s world.
In an email, the Maxwell family told us that Ian granted Beecher an interview but doesn’t know him personally outside of his reporting on the case. “Our attention was drawn to Jay Beecher’s publishing on social media due entirely to his own independent research on unchallenged allegations to do with our sister,” the Maxwells said. “This is our sole focus as far as he is concerned.”
Asked about Beecher’s controversial Twitter posts, they added, “We are unaware of what Mr. Beecher has written on Twitter so cannot comment on that. In his writings about our sister, however, Mr. Beecher has obviously done his homework and also has a clear regard for the presumption of innocence and due process and we are grateful for that.”
“We support any journalist who challenges obviously contradictory or false statements that contribute to a false and defamatory narrative regarding our sister,” the family said in the email. “We support journalists who challenge credentials of so-called ‘friends,’ ‘contemporaries,’ and ‘alleged victims’ who purportedly speak with authority about our sister but in fact never met her and certainly don’t know her.”
When reached by The Daily Beast, Beecher said, “Whilst I fully accept that Jeffrey Epstein was a monster and a paedophile, the media, including blog site The Daily Beast, has taken its own partisan stance on the credibility of the accusers of Ghislaine Maxwell, have printed falsehoods in their click-bait articles, and have published claims made by self-described victims such as Virginia Giuffre that have since been proven to be complete fabrications.”
“No due diligence has been exercised on their part, and emotive fiction has been favoured over factual information,” Beecher said in an email. “My coverage of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial has, and is, providing the facts that they refuse to print—facts that prove Virginia Giuffre is a liar, has lied under oath, and continues to change her story in an evident bid for cash and fame.” Those facts, he says, include supposed contradictions from Giuffre in a 2016 deposition and her memoir relating to an alleged visit to New Mexico with Prince Andrew, and lies “about being trafficked to a string of celebrities.”
On Twitter, critics have accused Beecher of being a shill for the Maxwell family or a fan of the Duke of York. The conservative writer denies both. Beecher says he funds VoteWatch himself, with “occasional minor help from public donations.”
Beecher added that he’s determined to print the truth, “no matter how unpalatable some may find it.”
“I believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty—the presumption of innocence is crucial to a fair justice system. Sadly, many forget that, and choose to resort to sensationalism and blindly believing, without facts, all accusations,” Beecher said.
Beecher has questioned the legitimacy of the highly publicized photo of Prince Andrew at Maxwell’s London home with his arm around Giuffre’s bare waist, saying the image had signs of “photoshopping.” In the image, Maxwell smiles in the background. (The duke himself claimed he cannot explain the photo, has no recollection of it being taken, and questioned its authenticity.)
Last August, Beecher tweeted a string of questions at Giuffre, accusing her of lying “about numerous things while under oath.”
Giuffre dismissed him with a waving hand emoji and replied: “Why don’t you get a life and look within before casting stones at glass houses. Everything I’ve said has been confirmed- bye bye.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Giuffre told The Daily Beast, “No one can or should take Jay Beecher seriously. He’s not a credible journalist.”
“The truth will prevail,” she added.
Before his latest turn as a staunch defender of the Maxwell family, Beecher was best known as a right-wing Twitter agitator (he disputes a “far-right” label) who has a history of using the platform and his website to slam Black Lives Matter and activists and writers of color for being “racist” against white people. Online, he’s been accused of racism and misogyny himself—claims he denies—and pressured at least one woman’s employer until they fired her over a race-related tweet from her nonprofit’s account. On June 22, Beecher tweeted, “BLM and their supporters are dangerous, racist vermin.”
He continued his rhetoric in a June 14 Twitter post, writing: “FACTS: White privilege doesn’t exist. Black people have the same opportunities as white people. Many BLM supporters don’t want equality (which they already have), but special rights & privileges - i.e. inequality. Ironically, we’re witnessing the birth of ‘black privilege’.” (Beecher denies labeling BLM as racist against white people, despite previous tweets indicating such, and claims he rejects the movement for being “based on Marxism.” He again said terms used by BLM like “white privilege” and “whiteness” are “discriminatory” and fit “the very definition of racism.” He continued, “Racism against Black people is very real and should be challenged.”)
A former organizer with the far-right, anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP), Beecher launched his VoteWatch website last year to distribute “groundbreaking reports exposing media bias, left-wing extremism, and corruption in British politics,” which supposedly includes “electoral fraud.” The 34-year-old has also written for and previously served as an editor of Politicalite, a hyperpartisan news site that was temporarily banned from Facebook early last year, reportedly for violating the network’s policies against hate speech by circulating stories that supported anti-Muslim firebrand Tommy Robinson.
Beecher is not the first right-wing provocateur to back Maxwell. In July 2020, the Daily Mail reported that Maxwell hired Jacob Wohl and his lobbyist colleague, conspiracy theorist Jack Burkman, to dig up dirt on her and Epstein’s alleged victims. (The Maxwells deny ever hiring Wohl and Burkman.) “Every person, even those accused of the most odious of crimes, deserves representation and possesses the right to engage lobbyists to petition the government on their behalf,” Wohl told the Mail. “Otherwise, we cannot comment on client matters.”
According to the report, Maxwell paid Wohl and Burkman $25,000 to get Geoffrey Berman, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, fired from his job. The Mail published a lobbying disclosure form filed by Burkman’s firm on July 3—one day after Maxwell’s arrest in New Hampshire made international news and details of the LLC she used to purchase her rural hideaway were public record.
Wohl has a history of targeting Democrats and his previous attempted smears included hit jobs on presidential candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, which both failed miserably. Wohl accused Warren of having a sexual relationship with a Marine young enough to be her grandson at a press conference with a TV screen which displayed the graphic: “Elizabeth Warren: Cougar?”
Last week, Wohl reiterated the claims in the Mail report and told The Daily Beast that Maxwell’s attorneys reached out to Burkman’s firm.
The Maxwell family, however, told us this story isn’t true. “We can state categorically that neither our sister nor any member of the Maxwell family has ever had ANY association with this Jacob Wohl who has himself made these false reports for reasons best known to himself,” they said in an email.
And Beecher isn’t the only Maxwell sympathizer coming out of the woodwork as the heiress faces a November trial date and charges that she recruited and groomed four underage girls as young as 14 for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004.
Lady Victoria Hervey, a former flame of Prince Andrew, recently told a British talk show that she believed Maxwell was “brainwashed” by Epstein and “so in love with him that she lost the reality of what she was doing.” Hervey added, “It was a partnership they had. I think she got in way too deep and just couldn’t leave.”
In May, New York restaurateur Keith McNally was in hot water after posting an Instagram photo of Maxwell with the words: “Let’s not rush to judgement. Ghislaine Maxwell is currently innocent. She must be given a fair trial. Due Process is the core of democracy.” Three days later he clarified: “I was NOT defending Maxwell. I was defending her RIGHT to a fair trial. I HAPPEN TO THINK SHE WAS GUILTY, but I don’t KNOW It 100%.”
NXIVM sex cult publicist-turned-whistleblower Frank Parlato also published his own take on Maxwell’s indictment in April. “She may be guilty. She may be the monster she is described to be — but I need more proof,” he wrote on his website Frank Report. Parlato suggested the Maxwell case is “built on accusers whose identities are hidden from her, alleging crimes that happened decades ago, while the defendant is locked away in a dungeon, unable to defend herself.” (Maxwell’s family has shared Parlato’s work on their Twitter account multiple times.)
Still, Beecher seems to be one of the chief cheerleaders for Maxwell’s defense. And the political writer and instigator is no stranger to controversy in his home base of Peterborough, a city that’s a roughly 100-mile drive from London and where he’s registered companies including: Tigerlilly’s Modeling Agency and Mr Gold UK, previously called Cash4Gold UK, according to the U.K.’s registrar of companies. None of those entities appear to be active or have a web presence, and in response to critics highlighting his advocacy of Maxwell, Beecher previously tweeted that Tigerlilly’s was “a company myself and a mate registered while drunk one night when I was in my early twenties, and then abandoned once sober.” (Beecher told us the firm “never operated and didn’t have any ‘models’ on its non-existent books,” while the short-lived Cash4Gold stems from his stint as a “successful pawnbroker.”)
As a self-described “staunch Eurosceptic,” Beecher campaigned for the 2016 Brexit referendum and became the secretary and deputy chairman for UKIP’s Peterborough Branch—until he was booted in September of that year for what a UKIP spokesman described as “repeatedly making deliberate and demonstratively false allegations against other members of the party, and doing so to various media outlets.”
For his part, Beecher told the Peterborough Telegraph that he’d been “suspended for standing up to and speaking out against elements of racism, cronyism, corruption, and hypocrisy which I became privy to during the leadership race.” In early 2017, he self-published a free book titled Ukip Exposed: An Inside Story of Racism, Corruption and Hypocrisy, though a copy is no longer available on Amazon. One reviewer of the book fumed that Beecher’s “alleged insider revelations are nothing but hearsay” and added: “Any future colleagues of this man, political or otherwise, need to tread very carefully indeed.” (In 2018, Beecher tweeted that his book “was a MASSIVE mistake,” and he’d remove it from the internet. “I apologise from the bottom of my heart,” he concluded.)
Before he left UKIP, Beecher helmed the campaign of Lisa Duffy, a local politician hoping to replace former party leader Nigel Farage and who called for the U.K. to partially ban Muslim women from wearing a veil in public and shut down Islamic schools.
It’s unclear what inspired Beecher to zero in on Maxwell’s case, which is unfolding in a court more than 3,000 miles away from him.
While he’s quick to defend Maxwell as “innocent until proven guilty,” his own Politicalite bylines include a one-source story accusing British screenwriter and Byline Times editor Peter Jukes of sexually abusing a 12-year-old theater student in the 1980s. Jukes, who is crowdfunding a libel action against Beecher and adamantly denies the claim in the June article, has thus far raised more than $76,000. (Jukes was a regular contributor to The Daily Beast from 2012 to 2016.)
Jukes told The Daily Beast that Beecher’s alleged hit job came months after a Byline Times investigation into Beecher’s harassment of an educator named Aysha Khanom.
In February, Beecher helped to get Khanom fired from an advisory role at Leeds Beckett University after her nonprofit’s Twitter handle posted about former Brexit Party candidate Calvin Robinson’s comments on a BBC program; earlier this year, Robinson claimed activists labeled him an “Uncle Tom” and “house negro.”
The Race Trust, Khanom’s nonprofit dedicated to teaching racial literacy in schools, tweeted: “Does it not shame you that most people see you as a house negro?”
Beecher complained to the university, asking officials for comment, then wrote a story about her termination for VoteWatch. (Two other conservative outlets also published pieces on Khanom and included private messages she’d exchanged with another Twitter user calling Robinson “a mascot of white supremacy.”)
But Beecher wasn’t satisfied. For weeks, he lobbied on Twitter to get her sacked from her main job at a local school and tagged the principal in posts, including one that seethed, “I’m growing impatient now” and accused the school of failing to “condemn racism from one of its employees—of which I have full evidence to support.”
“I contacted him after a week of trolling my employer for him to stop, as my Dad has stage four cancer, and I take care of him and he was getting worse and the added stress of Jay Beecher was causing me a lot of anxiety,” Khanom told us, adding: “This man is void of any level of morality.”
Beecher denied Khanom’s claims that he refused to stop harassing her, and claimed Khanom said she’d issue an apology for the tweet. “Then, rather than doing that,” Beecher told us, “she issued a racist rant against myself and others before blocking me. Her claim that I refused to stop contacting her is a complete lie.”
The scribe doubled down on his accusations that Khanom was behind the “racist” tweet. “Aysha Khamon is a teacher who openly called a mixed-race political commentator a ‘house negro.’ This is racism and is unacceptable. Holding a public position, and particularly considering the fact that she is responsible for teaching children, means that it is in no way ‘unfair’ to try to hold her accountable for her demonstrable racism,” Beecher said, adding, “If The Daily Beast and the reporter writing this article chooses to defend racism, that is up to themselves and their conscience.”
When the Byline Times dug into the controversy and Beecher’s history with right-leaning causes, the story’s reporters say, the contrarian lashed out at them and tried to downplay his connections to Politicalite. He said he’d quit as editor of the site after it published a “conspiracy article about the Epstein case,” according to one of the reporters, Sian Norris.
Norris and her co-author, Nafeez Ahmed, suspect Beecher’s article on Jukes was payback for their Byline Times piece. Ahmed said, “I firmly believe that the story about Peter is little more than a confection invented in retaliation for pursuing our investigation which exposed the far right and racist sympathies of Beecher, Politicalite, etc.”
Beecher told us he worked for Politicalite for about six months and quit after it printed a false story claiming a media mogul abused a minor at Epstein’s home. The article, which was taken down, claimed the supposed incident was captured in security footage from Epstein’s home. But that video, Beecher says, did not show the magnate and actually came from a pornography site.
He denied his article on Jukes was retaliatory and said such claims were “completely unfounded and just a weak attempt to divert” from the fact that the Byline Times’ report defended a “racist teacher.”
“A man has accused Peter Jukes of historical child abuse,” Beecher added. “This is now part of ongoing legal action and I cannot provide much of a comment…”
In spite of his brash, reactionary online persona, Beecher does have supporters.
Wayne Fitzgerald, a Conservative party councillor and leader of Peterborough city council, told The Daily Beast that Beecher was an “outspoken” observer who “has a good sense of what’s right and wrong.”
Fitzgerald said he believes that while some view Beecher’s journalism as conspiracy theories, he was actually “asking questions rather than accepting the norm.”
“It’s always good that we as a society, and Jay is one of those people, we put those questions out there,” Fitzgerald said. “And if at the same time it improves his profile and gives him some income, why not?”
Beecher is likely supporting Maxwell and her defense team because he’s “contrarian,” Fitzgerald said, and wants to push back against the “woke society we are living in these days.”
“Even the Yorkshire Ripper had his admirers,” Fitzgerald joked, apparently comparing Beecher’s support of Maxwell to fans of British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who in 1981 was convicted of murdering 13 women and trying to murder seven more. He quickly added: “I’m sure Jay’s not one of those.”
Matthew Mahabadi, who in 2017 beat Beecher during a Peterborough City Council election, doesn’t share Fitzgerald’s enthusiastic view of the rabble-rouser’s antics.
Mahabadi, who was the Labour candidate, told us that Conservative hopeful Beecher was “aggressive” during debates and falsely suggested in an article on Politcialite.com that Mahabadi’s victory may have been the product of voter fraud.
The former councillor told The Daily Beast he sees Beecher’s backing of Maxwell as part of his “modus operandi” and believes he’s “obsessed with having some form of notoriety.”
“He’s latching onto issues which are extreme and trying to piggy-back them,” Mahabadi said.
“He’s a product of the social media algorithm setup now,” Mahabadi told us. “It’s all about generating clicks and likes through high emotion pieces. He’s found a niche in doing that.”
