Prince Andrew bets on casting his accuser Virginia Roberts-Giuffre as a sex trafficker
Prince Andrew will reportedly take evidence from a teenage sex abuse victim to prove his accuser conspired with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Prince Andrew aims to obtain sworn testimony from a victim of paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in a high-risk plan to cast his accuser, Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, as a player in the couple’s child sex-trafficking ring.
Lawyers for the Duke of York are seeking evidence from Carolyn Andriano, who says she was recruited by Roberts-Giuffre at the age of 14 and trained to give sexual massages to Epstein.
The proposal to question Andriano under oath may backfire, however, because she recently corroborated claims that Roberts-Giuffre had sex with Prince Andrew at Maxwell’s London home when she was 17.
“It’s potentially a double-edged sword,” said a source familiar with the duke’s strategy, according to The Times, London.
Prince Andrew’s lawyers are seeking other women who may have been recruited by Roberts-Giuffre while they were under age.
“We are interested in speaking with and interviewing anyone and everyone who has information relevant to these allegations,” the source said.
It comes as Prince Andrew, 61, agreed to be questioned by Giuffre’s lawyers in London on 10 March.
However, Roberts-Giuffre, who lives in Australia, has yet to agree to a date when she can be interviewed under oath by the duke’s defence team.
Roberts-Giuffre, now 38, is seeking a multimillion-dollar settlement from Prince Andrew after accusing him of teenage rape and sexual assault in a civil lawsuit filed in New York.
She claims that he abused her three times in 2001 at Maxwell’s house in central London, and at Epstein’s mansion in New York and on his private island estate in the Caribbean.
Prince Andrew has vehemently denied the allegations.
If the case ends up going to trial, the duke’s lawyers will pin their defence argument on Roberts-Giuffre’s involvement in a “criminal enterprise”, which would make her ineligible for damages.
In court papers filed at the end of last month, the lawyers said: “Giuffre’s alleged causes of action are barred in whole or in part by her own wrongful conduct and the doctrine of unclean hands.”
A deposition from Andriano, 35, will be pivotal in the case. Andriano was one of four accusers who helped to convict Maxwell on five charges linked to child sex trafficking at a trial in New York in December.
The disgraced socialite faces up to 65 years in prison, but has demanded a retrial following claims a juror failed to declare in advance that he had been abused.
Andriano, who has suffered a history of substance addiction and mental health problems, testified under her first name, “Carolyn”, revealing that she first met Maxwell and Epstein at their Palm Beach villa in 2001 after Giuffre, then her friend, asked if she would like to “go and make some money”.
Andriano elaborated on her relationship with Roberts-Giuffre in an interview with the Daily Mail:
“I did my own make-up, but Virginia gave me clothes. She gave me these really tight skimpy shorts with a spaghetti-strap top with all my cleavage hanging out. She just said ‘Whatever you do, don’t say your age.’ And I didn’t even ask why. I went along with it.”
Andriano said she and Roberts-Giuffre gave Epstein a nude massage and Roberts-Giuffre had sex with him. Andriano said she was given dollars 300 for her time and over the next four years, she said she returned to the villa about a hundred times and was repeatedly abused by Epstein.
“I don’t think Virginia deserves anything less than what Maxwell is getting because she trafficked me into a world of spiralling downward slopes and it has taken my husband, John, 12 long years to get me to love myself again,” Andriano told the Mail.
In the same interview she claimed that Roberts-Giuffre texted her from London in March 2001 to tell her that she had been invited to dinner with Prince Andrew, Maxwell and Epstein.
A few days later, on her return to Florida, Andriano says Roberts-Giuffre showed her a copy of the photograph of Prince Andrew with his arm around Roberts-Giuffre and Maxwell in the background.
“I asked her if she’d been to the palace,” Andriano told the Mail. “And she said ‘I got to sleep with him’. I said ‘What? You’re f***ing with me’, and she said, ‘No, I got to sleep with him’. She didn’t seem upset about it. She thought it was pretty cool.”
If the case goes to trial and Andriano repeats this story under oath, it could seriously undermine Prince Andrew’s claim that he never met Roberts-Giuffre.
However, Roberts-Giuffre’s lawyer, David Boies, previously stated: “Virginia has said for years that her role in facilitating other young women’s involvement is something that she has always regretted. But that fact doesn’t have anything to do with the truth of her allegations [against Prince Andrew].”
A spokeswoman for the duke declined to comment.
— With The Times, London
Originally published as Prince Andrew bets on casting his accuser Virginia Roberts-Giuffre as a sex trafficker
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