Ship Shape: Who is Scott Borgerson and What Does Ghislaine Maxwell See in Him?
ONE OF THE DETAILS that emerged from this week’s Ghislaine Maxwell bail hearing is that Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime paramour and pimp was married - and not to her partner in crime. Kirby Sommers, the survivor and author who follows the Epstein story closely, suggested that the mystery spouse might be a man named Scott Borgerson
Married or not, the
two did have some kind of relationship - a romantic one, if the tabloids can be
trusted. The Daily
Mail reported that
“Borgerson, 43, the CEO of a tech company, left his wife, Rebecca, for the
57-year-old five years ago, a source close to the family said,” and that
“Maxwell had been living with Borgerson at his $3m oceanfront mansion in
Manchester-by-the-Sea for the past three years.” Manchester-by-the-Sea is in
Massachusetts, north of Boston - less than two hours away from Tuckedaway, the New
Hampshire redoubt where Maxwell was busted by the FBI.
The Daily Mail presents a less-than-flattering portrait of Scott Borgerson: he left his wife and kids to be with Ghislaine, but before he left, there was a history of (alleged) heavy drinking and (alleged) domestic abuse. According to the divorce papers, he once threatened his wife: “Don’t make me beat you in front of the kids.” So Ghislaine’s knight in shining armor is not exactly Tom Hanks. But then, this is not the romance of the century. There are compelling reasons why Borgerson would be attracted to Maxwell, and vice versa—and none of them have anything to do with love.
The high seas, Rachel
Slade tells me, are “the Wild West.” She would know—she is the author of a book
about the shipping trade, Into
the Raging Sea. The laws that govern international waters are
antiquated and arcane. Ships are routinely registered in small, corruptible
countries like Liberia and Panama, the better to avoid oversight and regulation
from more fastidious governments. When ships are lost at sea—which happens much
more than you think - it can be difficult even to determine who ultimately owns
the vessel, as ships are purchased by shell companies owned by shell companies,
and so on to oblivion. It’s anarchy - or, more poetically, “the
outlaw sea,” as the author William Langewiesche puts it.
Even something as simple as locating the 50,000 ships crisscrossing the ocean at any given time can be dicey. While ships are equipped with rudimentary GPS systems, called AIS, disabling them is a piece of cake, and when they fall off the radar, there is no alert mechanism, and no entity monitoring the vanishing. There is no great urgency to change this. The shipping industry is notoriously slow to adapt to new technologies. And perhaps, on some level, companies prefer the oceans to be vast and unknowable.... read more:
