A victim of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, who claims she was forced to have sex with the royal under duress while still a minor, has sued Prince Andrew in New York. Lawyers for Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s highly known accusers, filed the lawsuit in US federal court in Manhattan recently.
The lawyers filed the lawsuit after many attempts to have Prince Andrew sign a “tolling” agreement that would suspend the statute of limitations for Giuffre’s claim came to nothing.
In a statement, Giuffre said: “I am holding Prince Andrew accountable for what he did to me.”
She added that she “did not come to the decision lightly”.
Prince Andrew, who happens to be the second son of Queen Elizabeth and ninth in line to the British throne, has initially said that he could not remember meeting Giuffre and debunked her public allegations. A picture included in the lawsuit reveals Prince Andrew with his arm around a young Giuffre’s waist.
Ghislaine Maxwell, who now awaits trial under the allegation of procuring underage women for Epstein, is shown off to the side. In 2019, the prince announced that he was stepping back from his official duties after a disastrous performance in a BBC interview where he struggled to tackle Giuffre’s claims or justify his relationship with Epstein.
Giuffre met Maxwell when she was 16. At that time, she was working as a spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. According to her claims, Epstein and Maxwell sexually abused her then and pressured her to have sex with other men.
According to the complaint, she was coerced to have sex with Prince Andrew on many occasions between 2000 and 2002 (when she was still below 18) at Maxwell’s London home, Epstein’s New York City mansion and his private Caribbean island, Little St James.
The suit states that “During each of the aforementioned incidents, Plaintiff was compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew, and feared death or physical injury.”
Epstein was found dead in a New York City prison cell in August 2019, while he was awaiting criminal trial for allegedly trafficking underage girls.
Buckingham Palace cited calls to Prince Andrew’s legal team, which declined to comment. The complaint includes a letter from July 2019 which was sent by David Boies, Giuffre’s lawyer, to the prince’s counsel. In the complaint, Boies stressed the need for a tolling agreement in a bid to preserve his client’s legal rights. Also, he noted that his failed efforts to meet Prince Andrew or his counsel “to discuss whether a negotiated resolution might be appropriate. We continue to be interested in such an approach”.
