By Suzanne Downing -June 28, 2022
Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who traveled the Iditarod Trail by plane in 2014 with former Alaska Dispatch (Anchorage Daily News) owner Alice Rogoff, is now a convicted sex offender sentenced to 20 years in prison for trafficking of children with now-dead sexual deviant Jeffrey Epstein.
In December, a jury found Maxwell guilty on five counts of sex-trafficking. Maxwell had groomed and delivered young girls to Epstein, the millionaire financier and convicted sex offender who supposedly hanged himself in his jail cell in 2019.
Maxwell and former ADN owner Alice Rogoff were friends and colleagues back in the days when Rogoff owned and shaped the political landscape of the state, pushing Bill Walker into power as governor, and trying to get her hands on the Alaska Permanent Fund. Rogoff encouraged Walker to use the fund as collateral to borrow money for Alaska projects she was interested in, particularly around Port Clarence.
When Maxwell came to Alaska to spend time with Rogoff during the Iditarod Sled Dog Race in 2014, the year Walker became governor with the help of her newsroom, the two adventured across Alaska, as detailed a few days later in the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, when it tracked Maxwell down at a soiree in New York City.
Maxwell lived a fast lifestyle and Rogoff and Maxwell both had interests in Arctic issues. Both presented themselves as Arctic experts, although neither had any true expertise.
“Maxwell traveled across hundreds of miles of icy wilderness to the finish line in Nome, where thousands of fans of ‘the last great race’ cheered on the mushers and their dogs,” the Post reported. They flew the race route in two of Rogoff’s private Cessna 206s. Three years later, Rogoff, who obtained her pilot’s license during her time in Alaska, crashed one of planes while visiting former Sen. Clem Tillion in Halibut Cove.
It appears Rogoff and Maxwell had become close a year earlier in Reykjavik, Iceland during the Arctic Assembly, a conference concerning Arctic Circle nations, attended by people like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Rogoff, who were featured speakers:
Soon, the Clinton Global Initiative made “commitment to action” to the TerraMar Project. Little evidence exists that it amounted to much, and Maxwell was not any sort of expert in the Arctic; she just had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars from public funds. Maxwell was an invited speaker in 2014 at the Council on Foreign Relations, again accepted as an expert on the ocean and the Arctic. Her TerraMar Project was little more than a scam, however.