Carole Radziwill Wrote a Substack Essay After Being Questioned About Her Friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell on ‘Real Housewives of New York’
· Thought Catalog
Updated 1 minute ago, October 14, 2026
Carole Radziwill is pushing back. The former “Real Housewives of New York City” star and author has published a Substack essay defending herself against mounting questions about her past friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell — questions that intensified after her name and personal information surfaced in the Epstein files and after her castmates confronted her on camera.
The essay defends Radziwill over questions about her friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell and her appearance in the Epstein files. She says the files exposed her address, phone number and personal emails with Maxwell from 2004 and 2005. The 63-year-old denies knowing about Maxwell’s crimes and says she never met Jeffrey Epstein.
The essay follows the Oct. 13 episode of The Real Housewives of New York City, which showed her castmates questioning her about Maxwell during breakfast on Moskito Island. That conversation was filmed months before she wrote the essay.
Sai De Silva asked about their friendship and the messages released in the files. Radziwill said she’d never visited Epstein’s Little Saint James island and that Maxwell had never discussed him with her.
Radziwill described a connection through mutual girlfriends and New York social events. She rejected the suggestion that Maxwell had been a close friend, though she’d described a friendship lasting “five or six years” in a March 2026 interview.
In the essay, Radziwill says her contact with Maxwell included occasional dinners and social gatherings. She recalls Maxwell being in a serious relationship with a boyfriend named Ted, who lived in California. Radziwill says she spent much of the early 2000s near Portland, Oregon, working on her first book.
She also explains why Maxwell received credit for her author photograph: after a publisher-arranged shoot failed to yield a usable picture, Maxwell took one as a favor. Radziwill says she asked the publisher to credit her.
On the show, Radziwill recalled Maxwell contacting her while she was in London after her husband’s death. A mutual friend had told Maxwell she was there alone over the holidays. Maxwell offered to arrange dinner with friends, and Radziwill said she eventually received a call from Prince Andrew. She confirmed that she and Andrew had dinner and didn’t kiss.
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Radziwill said she and Maxwell eventually drifted apart. Looking back, she characterized Maxwell as someone drawn to money, power and recognizable surnames.
When De Silva brought up having a teenage daughter, Radziwill objected to how the questioning was framed. “I get that people would be curious about it, but there’s a fine line between curiosity and accusation,” she said in a confessional.
Radziwill also disclosed that a professor sexually assaulted her in college, saying he had friends who didn’t know he was assaulting students. “It does shake me to think that I knew someone, and would even call her a friend, who then, 20 years later, turned out to be a monster,” she said of Maxwell.
Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 and convicted on 5 felony counts. She received a 20-year prison sentence.
In her essay, Radziwill rejects claims that she knew about the abuse and describes the release of her personal information as government doxxing. “I don’t need to defend my reputation. No serious person believes I was, in any way, involved in a criminal sex-trafficking ring,” she writes.
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