Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Apr 28, 2026
As President Donald Trump considers a pardon for convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (with a majority of Republican members of the House Oversight Committee publicly favoring the move) two of her older sisters, fraternal twins who built surveillance and data-mining systems used by the FBI and Israeli intelligence, have received little public scrutiny.
Isabel and Christine Maxwell, 75, were born August 16, 1950, in Maisons-Laffitte, France. They are daughters of Robert Maxwell, the British media tycoon whose 1991 funeral was attended by six sitting heads of Israeli intelligence services and eulogized by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated Maxwell had “done more for Israel than can today be said.” Biographers Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon documented Maxwell as a high-level Mossad (Israeli intelligence) asset who used his empire to distribute PROMIS — a stolen, backdoored Department of Justice database system Maxwell sold to nations, intelligence agencies, and other institutions worldwide, including U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico.
Both twins worked at Information on Demand, the company Robert Maxwell used to distribute PROMIS software inside the United States. Robert Maxwell purchased the company in 1982. Christine Maxwell headed it from 1985 until her father's death in 1991, during which period she helped sell the bugged software to several Fortune 500 companies. Isabel Maxwell also worked there. The FBI opened an investigation into Information on Demand in October 1983. The FBI's own sources, cited in congressional records, indicated that top DOJ officials conspired to obstruct related PROMIS investigations during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese, under President Ronald Reagan.
Christine Maxwell
In 1982, Christine Maxwell acquired Information on Demand.
After co-founding the early search engine Magellan with Isabel — sold to Excite in 1996 — Christine co-founded Chiliad, a software company specializing in federated search across disparate databases. She also partnered with CIA official Alan Wade to market Chiliad’s homeland security software to the U.S. national security state.
Christine Maxwell also served as a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, the private complexity-science research center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded by nuclear weapons scientists, that Jeffrey Epstein used as his primary intellectual justification for purchasing Zorro Ranch. Epstein stated publicly that he bought the ranch in order to be near the institute's scientists.
Ghislaine Maxwell told investigators in a 2025 deposition that it was she who led Epstein to New Mexico and encouraged him to buy the ranch. Her sister Christine, she has said, connected Epstein to the Santa Fe Institute and its head at the time, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, in the 1990s. Robert Maxwell’s foundation, through Christine, had donated $300,000 to endow a Maxwell Professorship at the institute beginning in 1990 — three years before Epstein bought Zorro Ranch. Christine Maxwell's trusteeship at the institution that served as Epstein's stated reason for planting himself in New Mexico has not been widely reported, if at all.
Following the September 11 attacks, the FBI contracted Chiliad to build and operate its Investigative Data Warehouse, the agency’s primary counterterrorism database, enabling searches across millions of classified documents from multiple agencies. According to a 2008 Business Wire report, the system connected to databases of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon, with 8,000 active FBI user accounts executing one million searches per month. Christine Maxwell served as a board director of Chiliad as recently as August 2019. No public record of a counterintelligence review of that contract exists, and no public record documents when or whether it ended.
Christine is married to Roger Malina, a physicist and astronomer who holds dual appointments as distinguished professor of arts and technology and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas. The marriage places Christine in Dallas, where public records show the couple own an apartment less than three hours from Ghislaine’s current prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Public records also show Isabel has used the same Dallas apartment as a base.
Roger Malina’s lineage is its own thread. His father, Frank Malina, was a rocket propulsion engineer and the second director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — one of the builders of America’s early space program. The FBI labeled Frank Malina a socialist during the McCarthy era and forced him to flee to Paris, where he became a kinetic artist and founded Leonardo Journal, the peer-reviewed publication at the intersection of art and science that his son Roger now edits for MIT Press. Leonardo Journal was first published by Pergamon, Robert Maxwell’s company. The son of the man the FBI surveilled and drove into exile married the daughter of the man who allegedly sold backdoored software to American intelligence agencies, and that man published the magazine his father founded. Roger Malina has spent his career at the institution his father helped build, now embedded at a Texas university three hours from the prison holding his sister-in-law.
Christine and Roger Malina’s sons extend the family’s reach further. Their son Xavier worked on the Obama-Biden 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently served in the Office of White House Personnel at the Executive Office of the President, before becoming a lecturer at UC Berkeley and a product analyst at Google. Their son Yuri co-founded SwipeSense, a venture-backed healthcare startup whose technology was used for contact tracing and electronic monitoring in hospitals, acquired by SC Johnson in 2020. Public records show Yuri Malina also holds a patent jointly with his aunt — convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell — for a wearable gel sanitizer dispenser.
Isabel Maxwell
After her father’s death, Isabel Maxwell became president of CommTouch, an Israeli-American email security firm, in 1997. The company went public on NASDAQ in 1999 after receiving $20 million personal investments each from Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. CommTouch was later rebranded CYREN and focused on cybersecurity before ceasing operations in February 2023.
Isabel also served as president of iCognito, an Israeli web content filtering company later renamed Puresight, from 2003 to 2004. She joined the board of Israeli technology company Backweb alongside Gil Shwed, co-founder of Check Point Software and a veteran of Unit 8200, the Israeli signals intelligence directorate. She served on the board of the Shimon Peres Center for Peace and was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual closed-door gathering of senior Western intelligence and security officials.
In a parallel to her sister’s family connection inside a United States presidential administration, Isabel’s son, Alexander Djerassi, worked as a policy associate on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before being appointed chief of staff and special assistant in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs under Secretary Clinton. He served from 2009 to 2012, working on the Arab Spring and representing the United States at the Friends of Libya and Friends of the Syrian People conferences.
Isabel Maxwell’s first husband Dale Djerassi's father invented the birth control pill; David Hayden, her second husband, co-founded the search engine Magellan with her and her sister.
Her third husband was Al Seckel, Epstein's reputation manager and island conference organizer.
Seckel, an American self-described cognitive neuroscientist and expert in optical illusions, married Isabel around 2007. He had fabricated his academic credentials. He was later exposed as a serial fraudster who left behind a trail of debt, court actions, and bankruptcy when he and Isabel fled the United States for France around 2010.
Before the exposure, Seckel had made himself useful to Epstein in two documented ways. He co-organized the Mindshift Conference, a science gathering held on Epstein’s private island Little Saint James in 2010 and 2011, featuring scientists and cryptocurrency entrepreneur Brock Pierce. He also ran a paid reputation-management operation for Epstein post-conviction, coordinating efforts to suppress negative search results, manipulate Wikipedia to remove Epstein’s mugshot and references to pedophilia, and push down critical press coverage. Epstein paid him tens of thousands of dollars for these services. The operation is documented in emails spanning from at least 2009 through 2013.
Seckel died in 2015 at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff near their home in France. French authorities ruled the death a suicide, concluding he jumped as he was about to be publicly exposed as a fraud. Questions about the circumstances of his death persisted for years. He appears in 1,723 documents in the DOJ-released Epstein files.
Federal Record
When FBI agents arrested Ghislaine Maxwell in July 2020, they tracked her using an IMSI-catcher device monitoring a phone she used to call three people: her husband Scott Borgerson, one of her attorneys, and her sister Isabel.
In April 2026, seven days after Melania Trump issued a surprise White House statement denying personal ties to Maxwell and Epstein, Maxwell sent prosecutors a USB drive via FedEx containing a self-written motion to vacate her conviction and approximately 50 exhibits she described as substantial new evidence — filed past her legal deadline. Prosecutors called the motion meritless. The government has until June 5, 2026 to respond.
It should be noted that the new owners of Zorro Ranch, Mary Catherine and Donald Huffines, are also in Dallas. They tried to purchase the ranch secretly but were outed by The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper in January 2026.
In a parallel to the sons of the Maxwell twins, a Huffines son, Russell, was placed in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs as Associate Director of Agency Outreach in June 2025 — during the same period the family owned Epstein's ranch under a concealed LLC and Russell’s boss, Donald Trump, was weighing a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.
No link has been established between the Maxwell and Huffines families, though the Huffines have kept the two FCC licenses assigned to the bidirectional private, military/industrial grade microwave radio communications network on the ranch active, in the Zorro Development name, with Epstein’s former ranch manager, Brice Gordon, still listed on the license.
(Please note: Ghislaine’s other sister Anne is an actress who appears to live a quiet life.)
SOURCES
— Newsweek, “Will Trump Pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Bettors Think It’s Looking More Likely,” April 24, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-pardon-ghislaine-maxwell...
— Spectrum News, “Lawmakers push back against pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell,” April 24, 2026. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/.../ghislaine-maxwell...
— Forbes, contacted 25 Republican Oversight Committee members, April 25, 2026. Cited in multiple outlets.
— Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002.
— Yitzhak Shamir eulogy, documented in multiple biographies and news accounts of Robert Maxwell’s 1991 funeral.
— Whitney Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business: Espionage,” Unlimited Hangout, July 2020. https://unlimitedhangout.com/.../the-maxwell-family.../
— Whitney Webb, “Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl,” Unlimited Hangout, December 2021. https://unlimitedhangout.com/.../meet-ghislaine-daddys-girl/
— MuckRock / Emma Best, “The Undying Octopus: FBI and the PROMIS Affair Part 1,” May 2017. https://www.muckrock.com/.../2017/may/16/FBI-promis-part-1/
— The Inslaw Affair, Chapter 17, U.S. House Judiciary Committee records. https://ia801309.us.archive.org/.../Chapter%2017%20...
— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell
— Business Wire, “Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem, Hires Dan Ferranti as CEO,” March 3, 2008. https://www.inknowvation.com/.../chiliad-company-solved...
— InformationWeek, “FBI Shows Off Counterterrorism Database.” https://www.informationweek.com/.../fbi-shows-off...
— Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Report on the Investigative Data Warehouse.” https://www.eff.org/.../investigative-data-warehouse-report
— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia, board director of Chiliad as of August 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell
— Santa Fe New Mexican, “Jeffrey Epstein files shed light on ties to Santa Fe Institute scientists,” February 2026. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/.../jeffrey-epstein.../
— Christine Maxwell, Wikidata, employer listed as Santa Fe Institute. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18209212
— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia, former trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell
— Roger Malina, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Malina
— Frank Malina, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Malina
— NASA JPL, “Dr. Frank J. Malina (1912-1981).” https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/.../dr-frank-j-malina-1912-1981/
— Pasadena Now, “Frank Malina: JPL Co-Founder and Rocketry Pioneer Finally Gets His Due,” November 2022. https://pasadenanow.com/.../jpl-co-founder-and-rocketry...
— Leonardo/ISAST, “Our History” — Leonardo Journal first published by Pergamon Press 1968-1991. https://leonardo.info/history
— Adina Flores Substack, “Ghislaine Maxwell’s Family Moved to SF Bay Area for AI & Gene Studies,” June 2025.
— Yuri Malina personal website.
https://www.yurimalina.com
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