Robert and Ghislaine Maxwell would talk by ‘meowing’ at each other over the phone

A former secretary to the disgraced British press baron Robert Maxwell has described a bizarre phone call she overheard between the tycoon and his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, recently convicted of sex trafficking offences, in which the pair meowed at each other like cats.

Ex-Mirror Group secretary Carol Bragoli recounted the exchange – which played out on speakerphone during the mogul’s tenure as a red top newspaper proprietor in the 1980s – in the first episode of the BBC’s new three-part documentary series House of Maxwell.

“One day reception rang through and said ‘It’s Ghislaine’,” Ms Bargoli remembered. “And he says ‘Put her on’ and the next thing I heard was ‘meow’, and he went ‘meow, meow’ and she went ‘meow’.

“This went on for about ten meows and he suddenly said ‘What are you doing?’ and she said ‘Nothing’ and I thought ‘Yeah, that’s about right’.

“He definitely had a different relationship with Ghislaine than he had with the others.”

At the time, Ghislaine Maxwell – the youngest of nine children – would have been at, or recently left, Oxford University, where she attended Balliol College and studied modern history with languages.

After graduating, she became a director at Oxford United before moving to New York City in the early 1990s to support her father’s business interests across the Atlantic.

While there, she became a fixture of the Big Apple’s social scene, meeting and befriending the billionaire ex-Bear Sterns trader and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and later helping him to procure and groom underage girls for sex at his luxury properties in New York, Florida and Little St James in the US Virgin Islands.

Also offering insight into Robert Maxwell’s relationship with his daughter and her siblings in the programme was former Sunday Mirror editor Eve Pollard, who said: “He had great fondness for Ian and Kevin, and Ghislaine. It was the sort of love that could grab you by the throat as well as the heart, and you never knew which way it would go.”

Ms Pollard recalled Mr Maxwell pressuring her to give the young Ghislaine a job, prompting her to tell him: “I’m running a newspaper and I don’t think she wants to be a journalist.”

She said of Ms Maxwell: “She was very beautiful when she was young and she was clever. It’s always said she was his favourite child.”

But she also remembered her former boss’s apparent reluctance to spend time with his family at their Headington Hall mansion in Oxford.

“Bob, often, barely went home at the weekend, or went home for an hour or two, half a day, and then come back to The Sunday Mirror on a Saturday night. You’d think he’d stay in that lovely house with his children,” she said.

“And that would’ve been quite hard sometimes, I mean you want your father to be this lovely, cosy, father, to love you unconditionally.”

In November 1991, Robert Maxwell mysteriously disappeared from the deck of his luxury yacht – the Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter – off the Canary Islands. His body was later found floating at sea.

Whether he jumped, fell or was pushed has never been established.