Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of Industry.
We knew going into the Season 4 finale of Industry that the HBO finance drama had already been renewed for a fifth and final season, guaranteeing us a presumed eight additional episodes of Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) fighting, flailing, making up, and making moves. But in the meantime, we’re certainly going to be wondering where Yasmin’s story will go now that she appears to have fully transformed into a Ghislaine Maxwell-type enabler of uber-wealthy and powerful men.
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Following the collapse of both her marriage to old-money aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harrington) and partnership with fraudulent fintech company Tender, Yasmin is left to pick up the pieces of her life and decide what’s next. In the finale, the method to her upper-echelon bootstrap-yanking is revealed to be procuring young women to fraternize (and more) with a rotating roster of nefarious dinner-party guests—oh, and seemingly also recording these illicit interactions. Despite Harper’s protestations over Yasmin rubbing elbows with Nazis and exploiting underage girls, Yasmin insists this new path is her calling.
“‘The world’s showing you what it is.’ You said that to me,” she tells Harper. “So, you metabolize hard feelings. You become someone. I feel important here. Do you see that? I’m necessary. I feel new. I feel less pain. That’s it.”
The scene is stomach-churning for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it directly calls to mind the ongoing case surrounding disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, his primary conspirator Maxwell, and the documenting of both their own alleged crimes and those of their numerous associates in the Epstein Files. In 2021, Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other related charges, with prosecutors establishing that she leveraged her status as a British socialite to facilitate the recruitment and grooming of young girls for sexual abuse. If what we witnessed in the Season 4 finale is any indication, Yasmin may very well be headed for a similar reckoning.
This isn’t the first time parallels have been drawn between Yasmin and Maxwell. Industry has been leaning into their comparable life trajectories since the start of Season 3, particularly with regard to the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Yasmin’s father, publishing magnate Charles Hanani (Adam Levy). Just as Charles died after falling overboard from a luxury yacht named after his daughter, the Lady Yasmin, Maxwell’s father, media tycoon Robert Maxwell, died after falling off his own yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. And while there was no evidence Ghislaine secretly witnessed her father’s drowning as Yasmin did in the show, Robert’s death did fuel speculation and conspiracy theories surrounding the true nature of his demise.
The similarities don’t end there. Yasmin’s descent into a personal and financial spiral in the wake of Charles’ sudden death—and the ensuing scandal surrounding his exposure as a scammer who embezzled millions from his own company—also mirrors talking points from Maxwell’s life. In Industry, these events have resulted in Yasmin increasingly displaying manipulative and predatory behavior as she has sought to secure her own position. In the real world, it was shortly after Robert’s death and the subsequent collapse of the Maxwell family’s reputation and fortune that Ghislaine met Epstein.
The Season 4 finale depicts Yasmin as still caught in her physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive father’s thrall. Unable to shake his hold on her, she spends the morning after her confrontation with Harper repeatedly listening to a voicemail from Charles in which he invites her on the yacht voyage during which he would ultimately meet his end. Similarly, ahead of Maxwell’s 2022 sentencing, her defense team argued the severe physical and emotional abuse she was subjected to by her father growing up traumatized her in ways that made her vulnerable to Epstein.
When asked by Vulture what she thought of Yasmin being compared to Maxwell in her Season 4 dealings with the Epstein-like figure of Tender founder and CFO Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), Abela confirmed her character was at least “loosely inspired” by Maxwell. “The fact that Yasmin’s father was a publishing tycoon and died on a boat called the Lady Yasmin, all of these things are [part of it],” she said. “We’re looking at a young woman who has never been able to get a foothold on the feeling of safety, or power, or feeling useful or necessary or belonging or loved. And then she suddenly has this intense proximity to power. What does it look like? Does it corrupt? Does she fall into it? That is the comp.”
At the same time, Abela maintained she has endeavored to preserve a certain amount of distance between Yasmin and Maxwell. “Things were unfolding with the files even as we were filming,” she said. “But especially now, the whole topic is horrifying and disgusting and very real [so] I’m very glad I didn’t draw too close a parallel.”
Perhaps a hint about what’s to come for Yasmin in Season 5 lies in the 20-year prison sentence Maxwell is currently serving for her crimes, though her fall from grace did not come until decades later. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s hard to believe the Season 4 finale didn’t mark a point of no return for the newly self-styled Miss Hanani.
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