The dubious Zelig behind Talk TV's Ghislaine Maxwell interview
The show was fronted by Jeremy Kyle but the interviewer, Daphne Barak, is not just an observer. Her friends and family are part of Epstein's web.
The interviewee was (in)famous: Ghislaine Maxwell. But the interviewer? There’s a high chance you’ve never heard of her and the marketing pretended she didn’t exist…
Daphne Barak presents herself as a former confidante to Amy Winehouse; she’s been pictured with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Bono and members of the Kennedy family; she secured interviews with Robert Mugabe; Fidel Castro; Saddam Hussein; Amy Winehouse and her family; Britney Spears’s ex-husband Kevin Federline and their children; and seemingly countless other celebrities according to her website (though many of the photos are not linked to publicly accessible footage of those encounters).
Barak and her partner, Erbil Gunasti, a former press officer for the Turkish government who worked for seven prime ministers up to and including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (who has been the country’s President since 2014), have produced many documentaries aimed at the American right-wing and co-wrote a book on the relationship between Trump and Erdoğan. Barak also claimed credit for connecting Bannon with Trump.
Inevitably both Barak and Gunasti are into hawking NFTs, including ones pegged to Winehouse and Maxwell.
Barak’s links to Murdoch enterprises are longstanding. A 2003 interview with Michael Jackson’s parents — Our son Michael Jackson: Uncut — was a collaboration between Barak and Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth through her production company Shine. Elisabeth Murdoch was an executive producer on the programme and Barak tweeted in 2018 after Joe Jackson’s death:
When Liz Murdoch and I started to film with Joe [for] our prime time special, ‘Our son, Michael Jackson’, I had no idea it’d lead to such a special friendship. I’ll miss him!!
Her latest scoop is a prison interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, but although she was bylined on print interviews published by The Sun and Mail on Sunday in October 2022, Talk TV and other News Corp outlets have promoted the onscreen version as though it were conducted by Jeremy Kyle. The interview aired on Kyle’s show on January 23, with commentary from him interspersed between the clips, but Maxwell didn’t talk to him; she spoke via video link to Barak with her brother Kevin Maxwell present.
Kyle made a big point of telling viewers that Ghislaine Maxwell wasn’t paid for the interview; it’s clear Barak was but not whether Kevin Maxwell was also compensated.
After the interview aired, Kyle spoke to Barak, introducing her as someone Maxwell has “known and trusted for the best part of 19 years”. But that’s a gross and, I suspect, deliberate underestimate; Barak first interviewed Maxwell in 1992, the year after she met Jeffrey Epstein.
A video of that encounter is on YouTube but the visuals are broken:
You can hear that Barak is the interviewer and she confirmed they met at that time in a piece for The Mail on Sunday in October 2022.
Another detail not mentioned by Kyle or in any of the press or promotion around Talk TV’s airing of the interview is that Daphne Barak’s cousin is former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, who is also connected to Epstein. For someone who seems to have been working as an interviewer and documentary maker for over 30 years, details of Barak’s biography are incredibly sparse. Her Wikipedia page was deleted in 2017 due to a lack of secondary sources (it’s archived here).
Confirmation that she is related to Ehud Barak comes from a 2004 report from Reporters Without Borders which says:
Libyan officials refused to allow the Israeli-American journalist, Daphne Barak (a cousin of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak), to enter the country when she presented her Israeli passport and she was deported the next day.
In 2005, Barak secured an interview with Robert Mugabe, which she sold to Channel 5 in the UK. Promoting that scoop, she promised an interview with “a leading royal [was] already in the can” but The Guardian said she was “remaining tight-lipped” about the person’s identity. It does not seem to have appeared.
The following year, Mohamed Al-Fayed was awarded a $10 million judgement against Barak — bitchily-described by The New York Post as “a self-described international interviewer of the ‘A-List’” — by default after she ignored the lawsuit. Al-Fayed claimed Barak had falsely presented herself as a CBS correspondent to trick him into talking about his son Dodi and Princess Diana, then ignored a contract that stated he could have editorial control over what aired. In 2007, British newspapers reported that Barak was “on the run” after being found in contempt of court for not attending hearings in a UK court case over the same incident.
Also that year, in a piece for The Daily Mail, Barak claimed she had been a confidante of Benazir Bhutto, suggesting the assassinated leader was obsessed with fad diets and Victoria’s Secret (introduced to her by Barak, of course). In 2009, after Barak published what she claimed was an interview with her in several international newspapers, Bhutto’s sister Sanam said:
I made none of the statements attributed to me in this piece. There was no interview with Daphne Barak and each insinuation is a complete fabrication. Daphne Barak was never a friend of my beloved sister Benazir Bhutto Shaheed. They first met for an interview fifteen years ago. Ms. Barak, being a socialite remained an acquaintance. She knows nothing about my sister nor about our family’s relationships. She was not, as was suggested, in any way an insider of the Bhutto family on any issue.
In May 2011, Barak tweeted:
So glad, my friend Aaron Carter is joining me, for a charity gala in Marbella. What a perfect place, to kick off his upcoming record?!
Two months later, she published an interview with Carter in OK! which included the claim that Michael Jackson had given him cocaine in 2015. But the quote was fabricated and the video of Barak’s interview with Carter showed that:
Kitty Empire’s 2010 review of Barak’s Amy Winehouse cash-in book Saving Amy gives a perfect description of her modus operandi:
Barak is a prolific networker – at least, that's the polite term. She appears to be cosy with the Clintons, has done Mugabe and Mandela, and was tight with Benazir Bhutto. She knows little about London cabbies, however, and does not contextualise Amy's self-destructive behaviour in the jazz tradition. Even more damningly, she fails to interview anyone of Amy's generation – her brother Alex, or her best friend Juliette, to name two – who might shed better light on Amy's demons than, say, Jane Winehouse, Mitch's current wife.
Barak's access is impressive, though. She has a ringside seat throughout 2008-9, when legal troubles compounded Amy's health problems. Barak's modus operandi is to befriend her subjects. She takes Mitch to dinner with friends, where the other guests – all "top lawyers" – lend a hand when a crisis unfolds. Blake Fielder-Civil – Amy's then husband – has absconded from rehab and turns up at the hospital where Amy is being treated. Barak is there for Mitch, too. "I tell him: 'Mitch, collect yourself. Be calm.' And he follows my advice."
That Barak’s background as a ‘journalist’ is chequered and her history of fabrications and exaggerations is so blatant would just be grim — but not unsurprising for someone paid by News Corp — were it not for her long-term relationship to Maxwell and her cousin’s connection to Epstein.
Ehud Barak was the Prime Minister of Israel for a very short time (July 1999 to March 2001) but served as the country’s Defence Minister from 2007 to 2013 (as well as a previous term in the role concurrent with his premiership). Prior to entering politics, he was Chief of the General Staff, the supreme commander and head of the Israel Defense Forces, from 1991 to 1996, having had a long military career prior to that, which included commanding a number of famous/infamous special forces operations.
Barak was the person who introduced Harvey Weinstein to Black Cube, the private spying organisation run by former Israeli secret service agents, who the rapist film producer engaged to suppress testimony about his crimes.
In his book, Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious – Twenty Years of Columns, Essays and Reporting, Michael Woolf says Ehud Barak was “a frequent guest, almost a fixture” at Epstein’s mansion in New York and attempted to rehabilitate the sex offender’s image, with the help of his cousin Daphne’s friend Steve Bannon. In Woolf’s account, Barak enters Epstein’s home saying:
I just assumed they were taking Jeffrey away. But he’s still here, so? We have nothing to worry about. The secrets are safe.
The same year that conversation is alleged to have taken place — 2019 — Epstein was arrested; Barak told The New York Times he had been introduced to Epstein by another former prime minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, and that he…
… never took part in any party or event with women or anything like that… He was hardly reviled by American society, so how was I to know?
Barak said he had met Epstein “probably a few dozen times over the years”. Epstein was first convicted of sex offences in 2008. Barak entered into business deals with him in 2015 and visited his home on several occasions after that.
In June 2020, Ehud Barak was named in court documents as one of the men Virginia Giuffre said she had been forced to have sex with by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Barak denied the claims and told The Daily Beast:
Despite the fact that there was no wrongdoing on my part, and that there is not even the faintest suspicion of wrongdoing on my part, I’m not going to address these questions because, in the current political environment in Israel, the mere fact of my response to such a question is churned up as spin in the political game.
The previous year, when MailOnline published images of Barak entering Epstein’s New York mansion in 2016, he demanded it retract the “libellous” article. The publication stood by the story and Barak did not follow through with his threat to sue.
So we have Talk TV airing an interview enabled by Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother Kevin and conducted by Daphne Barak, who has been an acquaintance/friend of Maxwell’s since at least 1992, and whose cousin was a friend and business associate of Jeffrey Epstein, accused of participating in his crime. The channel did not provide any of this context; The Times’ report on the show says…
Maxwell told Jeremy Kyle for his Ghislaine Behind Bars broadcast that she had ‘no memory’ of [Prince] Andrew meeting [Virginia] Giuffre and claimed that a photograph of the three of them was faked.
… when, in fact, Maxwell didn’t tell Kyle anything. The news story is accompanied by a boxout that purports to take readers “behind the story”. It does the opposite by not giving any indication of how the interview was secured or detail about the interviewer’s background.
A piece in the paper’s Times2 supplement by Helen Rumblelow does name Barak and includes a picture of her:
Daphne Barak is the celebrity interviewer who secured this rare interview of Maxwell, and also says she is close to Andrew’s circle. She is asked by Kyle if Andrew is “delighted” at Maxwell’s intervention.
“I wouldn’t say delighted, I would say relieved,” Barak replies. “Somebody is supporting his truth, someone with knowledge, someone who was there,” she says.
When asked why Maxwell had given this rare interview, Barak responded: “The fact that it will help Prince Andrew.”
“I am very close to the most close people to him,” Barak says. “There is a feeling right now that he settled too quickly, he might have misunderstood that when he gave up the titles that they would not be given back to him. It’s a tough reality for him. If indeed he was forced to settle for something he didn’t do . . . is something that is being considered legally right now, that is something I can definitely confirm.”
That quote is Barak being careless and boastful; it hammers home something that should be crystal clear to you by this point: She is not a journalist here, she’s a PR operative and a player. “I am very close to most close people to him.”
In The Sun’s coverage, Barak’s name does not appear.
There is a drift in the British press towards the rehabilitation of Prince Andrew. In today’s Telegraph, Charles Moore writes a column headlined I believe that Prince Andrew may well be innocent; The Daily Mail runs a puff piece on one of Andrew’s daughters ('My son is going to be an activist from two years old': Princess Eugenie says she is teaching her son August, one, about climate change and has ditched all plastic products in the house); and The Sun runs multiple stories on Maxwell’s claims from the interview, including that the photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Giuffre is a fake.
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to have a lot of questions about the Epstein story and its aftermath.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, the corrupt media baron who died after falling/jumping/being pushed off his yacht, was suspected of having links to the British, Russian, and Israeli intelligence services. He received the equivalent of a state funeral in Israel, which was attended by the then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli President Chaim Herzog, and at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence. The New York Times report on the event noted:
Mr. Maxwell, who published The Daily News in New York, The Daily Mirror of London and other newspapers and owned book companies and other enterprises, was a British citizen and a strong supporter of Israel.
Yet his relationship with Israel had become a source of contention just before he died, with an American author suggesting in a new book that he had links with the Mossad, Israel's secret service. Mr. Maxwell called the portrayal "ludicrous, a total invention," and brought a libel action against the writer, Seymour M. Hersh, who in turn filed a countersuit.
Hersh received substantial damages and an apology when the suit was settled in 1994.
Julie K. Brown, the investigative reporter at The Miami Herald who broke the first Epstein stories, has said she believes that links between him and the Israeli intelligence community are “not far-fetched and need to be explored in further detail.” She told The Times of Israel:
Robert Maxwell certainly had those kinds of connections and Epstein had a close relationship with Robert Maxwell.
… neither the FBI nor the United States Justice Department have convinced me that Jefferey Epstein committed suicide.
Brown continued:
The FBI, the [US] federal authorities, and law enforcement authorities in Europe should all be looking at the financial and social connections Epstein had with all of these people. Epstein had a whole group of people helping him to [carry out these crimes].
[Epstein] did not do this alone. There were plenty of people that either knew about what Epstein was doing, or even participated in what he was doing. This was an international sex trafficking organization that was similar to an organized crime family — so it shouldn’t just end just with the prosecution of [Ghislaine Maxwell].
At the end of his programme yesterday, Kyle handed over to Piers Morgan who gabbled:
I’m not buying it… I met Ghislaine Maxwell once for a few minutes; very smart person. Too smart to have bought into this by accident.
“And the other thing, buddy, is all the other names in the famous black book…” Kyle replied, clumsily. Morgan’s name wasn’t in that book but he was pictured standing next to Maxwell. Perhaps that’s the reason her interview wasn’t broadcast during his show, the desperately in need of audience figures Piers Morgan Unwatched.
The Ghislaine Maxwell interview was about muddying the waters for Prince Andrew and keeping the attention away from the great and the awful about whom questions still need to be asked. Daphne Barak’s list of ‘friends’ crosses over with those in that black book and on the flight manifests of the ‘Lolita Express’ many times, not just in the names of her cousin and Prince Andrew.
Like Zelig in Woody Allen’s film of the same name — yes, we’re collecting all the world’s worst people in today’s edition — Barak has inserted herself into the lives and stories of famous and infamous figures for years. It’s just curious that her own story is so thinly told and News Corp’s so keen to ignore the implications of her involvement in its big scoop. Pull at the loose threads and this all starts to unravel.
Thanks to John Hill and Otterdam for reading the draft.
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