Sex in the bathroom: What allegedly happened moments after infamous prince photo
Prince Andrew smiles, his arm wrapped around Virginia Giuffre’s tiny teenage waist as Ghislaine Maxwell beams in the background. Here is what is alleged to have happened in the moments after that now infamous photo was taken.
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She handed her “little yellow Kodak camera” to her boss and he took that photograph.
The one with Prince Andrew, Duke of York, smiling, his arm wrapped around her tiny teenage waist. The one with society gal, Ghislaine Maxwell, tanned and relaxed, beaming in the background. The one with her, Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, at the centre of it all.
And the Floridian teenage “sex slave” turned Australian mum has been smack-bang in the middle of one of the biggest sex-trafficking scandals to hit the globe ever since releasing that photograph 11 years ago.
Something beastly lurked behind those smiles, says Giuffre, now 38.
Moments after the photo was taken in March 2001, the then 17-year-old did what her boss and Maxwell expected of her, what she had been trained to do. She escorted the third child of Queen Elizabeth into a bathroom, took her clothes off, then his, and after foreplay in the bath, had sex with him.
Prince Andrew, 61, denies that, claims to have no memory of meeting her and has suggested the photograph was faked.
Last week, the Prince requested a jury trial in a civil claim brought by Giuffre, elevating the prospect of the world seeing the royal in a US court.
She alleges he “committed sexual assault and battery” against her and is seeking punitive damages for the “physical and psychological injuries” caused after three alleged liaisons with him.
It’s alleged he knew she was trafficked.
Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, is behind bars. On December 29 last year, the daughter of one-time media mogul, the late Robert Maxwell, was convicted in the US federal court on five sex trafficking-related counts. She is set to receive her sentence in June but has requested a retrial.
And the man behind the camera? That was Jeffrey Epstein, the former hedge fund manager and billionaire who, after already striking a controversial sentencing deal in 2008 after pleading guilty to procuring a child for prostitution, was arrested on July 6, 2019, on sex-trafficking charges.
A month later, the 66-year-old was found dead in his cell, the cause of death recorded as suicide. Many suspect he was murdered.
As the years of lies and manipulation caught up with Epstein and Maxwell in the US, as Prince Andrew limps along in the UK as a royal in disgrace, Virginia Giuffre has been living, for the most part, in Australia; first Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, then Cairns, and now Perth.
Her two years of being passed around by Epstein and Maxwell to their high-society friends like a trinket ended in late 2002, after a whirlwind romance in Thailand with Australian Robert Giuffre.
She followed him home and Australia, wrote Giuffre in an unpublished, semi-fictionalised memoir titled The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, became her haven. She put her jetsetting, drug and orgy-filled life behind her and started again.
For more than eight years, while living in Sydney and then the NSW hamlet of Glenning Valley, she hid her past from all but Robert.
She worked for about a year at recruitment firm ET Australia on the NSW Central Coast before becoming a mum to Christian in 2006, then another boy, then a daughter in 2010. Her old world was behind her.
But after Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008 and Giuffre being advised by the US Attorney’s Office that she’d been identified as a potential victim, she began legal action anonymously.
Then, after photographs of Epstein and Prince Andrew together in New York’s Central Park in 2010 emerged, Giuffre spoke out about Epstein.
Since March 2011, when Virginia Giuffre’s name and that photograph with Prince Andrew was printed, the one-time runaway has become the loudest voice among scores of women who have raised the lid on the murky, tawdry case of Epstein and the powerful and rich.
She’s been accused of being a willing participant in transactional sex, of only speaking out now for money. She’s admitted recruiting other girls into Epstein’s lair. She’s been called a liar, a fantasist.
Giuffre says she wants justice. For a troubled girl who fell into a trap and could not get out, and for every other girl or boy who finds themselves, vulnerable and adrift, in the arms of predators. Everyone, she says, should be treated equally under the law, no matter their wealth or status.
TROUBLED GIRL
She called herself Jenna and she was a runaway. It started when she was about 10, making a bolt from the Loxahatchee, Florida, home of her odd-jobbing cowboy father Sky Roberts and bank worker mother Lynn. She’d wander the streets and shores of Palm Beach.
Her parents tried a new tack, sending 11-year-old Giuffre to Salinas, California, to live with Sky’s sister, Carol Roberts Kess, a devout Mormon.
She ran away from there, too, and was returned home a year later. The escapes continued, and she started smoking marijuana. Her parents sent her to Growing Together, a drug rehabilitation centre that housed wayward kids in foster care at night.
It only deepened Giuffre’s distrust of her “messed up” parents.
What they didn’t know, what Giuffre didn’t tell them, was the reason behind her rebellion. Giuffre says she was sexually abused by a close family friend at a very young age.
“He touched me places I shouldn’t be touched,” she told lawyers in a Maxwell-related legal proceeding.
“He sexually abused me.”
She didn’t tell her parents until years later.
“It took me a long time to forgive my parents for sending me away. I didn’t feel like anybody understood me.”
Growing Together couldn’t hold her, either. Giuffre’s life spiralled way out of control when a 65-year-old man approached the young waif on the streets of Miami. He was Ron Eppinger, the owner of a modelling agency called Perfect 10. He offered to look after her.
In her memoir, Giuffre says he acted fatherly, took her shopping, then to his apartment overlooking the island of Key Biscayne.
It was stunning and filled with beautiful girls who welcomed her with girly excitement. It made her feel like part of a sorority, “like I actually belonged somewhere for once”.
Later that night, Eppinger handed her a couple of pills and sexually assaulted her. She was about 14.
She stayed. “If all these girls seem happy enough, why couldn’t I try to be, it was this or the streets for me,” she wrote.
The pills kept coming, including the “hillbilly heroin” OxyContin, and she became Eppinger’s plaything; he’d watch her and the girls in orgies before having sex with her.
Then he pimped her out to rich pedophiles. Giuffre tells of lying beside a “client” in bed when men in black military gear with guns and helmets burst through the door of the Miami apartment. It was the FBI.
Eppinger and his racket had been under surveillance; they arrested the client and took Giuffre for questioning.
It’s unclear if her account of the raid is fictionalised but it is fact that Giuffre was questioned by the FBI about Eppinger who escaped to Europe.
He was located, brought back and convicted of running a sex trafficking ring of mostly Eastern European women. He died in jail.
Giuffre’s father came to pick her up from the Broward County police station.
But he didn’t take her home. Her mother didn’t want her back.
Giuffre was returned to Growing Together, Sky telling her he needed time to convince Lynn to let her come home. She escaped again and phoned her dad.
“I said, ‘This is your final chance’. And they came and picked me up and they let me live there,” she told lawyers.
She didn’t stay long, moving in with the parents of a friend she met at Growing Together in 1999, when she was about 15.
While there, she grew close to her friend’s brother, James Michael Austrich, who was 18. He asked her to marry him, getting down on one knee on the beach on Valentine’s Day. Giuffre said yes but told lawyers she wasn’t serious.
The couple moved into an apartment in the Fort Lauderdale area, both finding jobs, before moving back to live in a trailer at her parents’ place.
Her brother, Sky, five years younger than Giuffre, was there but her older brother by five years, Daniel, from Lynn’s previous marriage, had left home.
In April 2000, Giuffre’s father got a job as a maintenance worker at Mar-a-Lago, the resort and spa for rich Floridians centred on a 126-room, opulent mansion owned by Donald Trump, the yet-to-be US president.
Roberts asked the spa manager if there was any work for his daughter. Giuffre, who had re-enrolled in school, started as a locker-room attendant that year and had dreams of becoming a masseuse.
On a break one day, Giuffre was sitting outside the spa in her uniform of white mini skirt and tight polo shirt, reading a book about massage.
Her reading was interrupted by an elegant-looking woman with a British accent who started chatting about massage. It was Ghislaine Maxwell.
She told Giuffre she knew a rich man who was looking for a masseuse to tour the world with him. Giuffre told Maxwell she wasn’t trained but Maxwell said the man could organise that, suggesting Giuffre come to his place that afternoon for a trial. Maxwell gave her a number to call.
Excited, the 16-year-old Giuffre ran to find her father at the tennis courts. Could she go?
He agreed, and Giuffre phoned Maxwell, who gave her the address: 358 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach.
The pink mansion of Jeffrey Epstein.
IN THE WEB
Watching Giuffre now, in interviews and on the steps of New York’s Federal Court, an almost matronly figure calmly and determinedly calling on Prince Andrew to come clean, it’s hard to see the rudderless girl she was.
But that afternoon in 2000, she knocked on the door of Epstein’s mansion, followed Maxwell through the luxurious home, up a staircase and into another life.
Epstein was on a green massage table, lying face down, completely naked. The trap was set.
They chatted as Maxwell showed Giuffre how to massage Epstein, the power duo wanting to know about the girl they called Jenna.
She babbled, telling them of her troubled life. It wasn’t long before Maxwell – Epstein’s occasional lover, employee and sexual “fixer” with a knack for sniffing out susceptible girls – removed Giuffre’s top.
The trio had sex. Giuffre, under Florida’s age of consent, was paid $200 and asked to return the next day.
Why did she?
Giuffre gives an insight into her mindset in the memoir.
“Not given the belief in myself from an early age I suppose is what affected my sense of control,” she wrote.
“The men I had encountered in my short experience…convincing me there was no running away from the sick world I lived in, not yet understanding it all came down to the choices I had made.”
There were promises of money, a life of luxury, of travel. Epstein had one of New York’s biggest residences in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a private island in the Caribbean, a ranch at Santa Fe. He had a private jet. He could be charming. And he promised to get her accredited as a masseuse.
Once in the web, her lawyers argue, the power imbalance between a vulnerable girl and an influential man in his late 40s kept her in “invisible chains”.
Giuffre says the duo would let her know how powerful they were, what high-level friends they had, including former US president Bill Clinton and a future one, Trump. She took their regular reminders as threats.
Over ensuing months, Giuffre encountered many young girls at the Florida mansion and his other properties, some of whom she was expected to have sex with as Epstein watched.
His sexual appetite was insatiable and Maxwell groomed Giuffre to do as she did: approach young girls and lure them back for Epstein.
And Giuffre did. Some of them were her friends.
Giuffre was then “lent out” to other high-powered people. One of them, she alleges, was Prince Andrew.
The first occasion, when the photograph was taken, is alleged to have been in mid-March 2001 at Maxwell’s townhouse in Belgravia, London. Giuffre, Epstein and Maxwell flew there in Epstein’s private jet, via Paris, Spain and Tangiers. Epstein organised Giuffre’s passport.
The next time was in April at Epstein’s New York mansion, where she alleges Prince Andrew used a puppet of himself from the satirical TV show Spitting Image to grope Giuffre’s breasts, while fondling another girl.
That girl, Johanna Sjoberg, has given a similar account. Giuffre claims she and Prince Andrew later went to Epstein’s massage room for sex.
The last encounter was allegedly after flying on what was dubbed the “Lolita Express” to Epstein’s Caribbean island of Little St James which he called Little St Jeff’s.
Others called it “Pedophile Island” and “Island of Sin”, a place widely known to hold orgies for rich men with under-age girls.
Amid the excess and sparkling parties – Giuffre went to supermodel Naomi Campbell’s birthday party in St Tropez, France – came drug use. Not for Epstein: he was anti-drugs, a non-drinker and healthy eater.
But Giuffre grew reliant on the prescription drug Xanax.
“It was a drug that would blind my eyes to everything I should’ve been running from,” she wrote.
If she was not needed by Epstein, Giuffre had her own digs; first a flat with Austrich and then a Royal Palm Beach apartment, paid for by Epstein.
That side of her life was chaotic, too.
In early 2001, she dumped Austrich for Tony Figueroa, an old boyfriend and drug user on probation for drug possession.
Things got ugly when Austrich arrived at the flat he’d shared with Giuffre to collect some belongings and check on their pets – a dog, six cats, ferrets, rabbits, a gerbil and mice. Figueroa punched Austrich in the face.
Giuffre did break away from Epstein at one stage. She got work at the Road House Grill, as well as other short-term jobs.
But when she was accused of stealing tips – she claims it was Figueroa – and the police became involved, she called Epstein for help.
“Knowing that Jeffrey has got the Palm Beach Police Department in his pocket, I went to Jeffrey Epstein and I told him what had happened,” she said in a court deposition.
“And Jeffrey said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Let me take care of it for you.”
And like that, she was back in the Epstein lair.
KNIGHT ON A WHITE HORSE
She spied the handsome stranger shadowboxing with a friend and “couldn’t take my eyes off him”.
Ten days later, she was wearing a white halterneck dress and flowers in her hair as she married Robert Giuffre, an Australian of Sicilian descent, in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
They’d met at a Muay Thai tournament in the mountainous city in September 2002; he was there to compete and she was doing a Thai massage course. The eight-week course was a 19th birthday gift from Epstein to Giuffre, with flights and accommodation included.
She had another job: to meet with a girl whose name Epstein gave her and check if she suited his tastes.
Giuffre dreaded her return, she says, because Epstein and Maxwell had put a chilling proposition to her before she left.
Epstein wanted Giuffre to have his baby, which she could care for – but the child would be legally his.
Robert Giuffre offered her an escape and from Thailand, she phoned Epstein. She’d fallen in love, she told him. She was not coming back. He said, “Have a good life”, and hung up.
Giuffre says that was the last contact she had with Epstein until 2008, when he was facing his first child sex charges.
Miami police had begun investigations in 2005 after the parents of a 14-year-old Floridian girl made a complaint that Epstein had sexually abused her.
The investigation, pushed along by a dogged local reporter, led to dozens more girls being identified.
Giuffre received phone calls from Epstein and Maxwell, asking what she knew about the case. Court documents say Giuffre was “terrified by (Epstein’s) demonstrated ability to track her down on her changed cell phone number halfway across the world”.
She told him she’d stay quiet, which she did, until contacted as a potential victim by the US Attorney’s office and advised of her rights.
All of that was ahead of her when, in October 2002 at a Buddhist temple, Giuffre married her “knight on a white horse”.
Robert Giuffre vowed to love her unconditionally, shelter her from the cruelty in the world “and to be like the bear, because the bear never forgets”.
He appears true to his word.
Take a scroll through his Twitter account and he is combative with those who doubt Guiffre – “you a now voted as a f--cking idiot leave my wife alone u gutless turd” – keen to take “a bolt gun” to “sikos” who prey on children and ready to display his love.
On July 4, 2020, he wrote: “To my beautiful and power wife words can’t express the joy that what u have accomplished, strength and power and love I send to you, change the world darling.”
That was when the family was living in Cairns, a five-year sojourn north starting in December 2015.
They bought a four-bedroom home at the gated Ulysses Blue estate at Trinity Park in June 2017 for $550,000. Giuffre was obviously taken with the stunning Ulysses butterfly: it’s her profile photograph on Twitter.
After adding a pool and spa, the Giuffre’s sold the home last month for $905,000, having moved to Perth in late 2020.
Cairns locals say Giuffre was “lovely” and would enjoy a trip to the Smithfield Tavern for a beer and to play the pokies. An animal lover, she adopted a black cockatoo, named Daisy, that caused a flap after escaping in 2018. There’s a French bulldog, named Juno, and a husky, called Chief.
Giuffre’s had some dramas with her health in recent years. On June 12, 2020, she tweeted that she was in hospital with bacterial meningitis.
“Went to the rainforest for the weekend with the fam and came back with something from the jungle,” she said. She needed a spinal tap.
Two months later, Giuffre was in Brisbane’s Sunnybank Hospital, having surgery on her spine. It’s unclear what the issue was but in a video on Instagram, a groggy Giuffre with a bruise on her neck said she had been in intensive care for five days.
“I’m too tough for something like this to take me down and I got a bionic spine out of it,” she says.
And since moving into a $1.9m home at Perth’s Ocean Reef she was back in hospital with “another bout of pneumonia”. Robert’s job is unclear but someone with his name has recently started in Perth as a technical manager at telecommunications equipment supplier Voicedata Services.
Giuffre says becoming a mother fuelled her resolve to stand up and fight against sex trafficking.
She is protective of her kids, keeping them out of the spotlight, although she did post a photograph in 2020 with her eldest son, Christian, a budding hip hop artist, with the words: “The reason life ever made sense to me & more!! Love you CG!!”
A son and daughter were photographed in Colorado with the Giuffres on a trip to McDonald’s in 2015, when legal proceedings led to it becoming public that she alleged she was sex trafficked to Prince Andrew by Epstein.
The family had returned to the US in October 2013, first to Titusville, Florida, and then to the Rocky Mountain town of Penrose, Colorado in 2014, before heading back to Australia in October 2015.
Her mother, Lynn and stepfather, Stan Miller, lived in Colorado and the Giuffre family rented a home there.
Her aunt said Giuffre fled Florida in fear of her life and that of her family after her allegations became public.
Giuffre told lawyers during a deposition that she had only told her parents that her life with Epstein was not that of a travelling masseuse after having children. “I get along with my parents now,” she said.
Giuffre’s long-term residency in Australia apart from that two-year period was one of the legal points Prince Andrew’s lawyers used to try to get her civil case against him dismissed, arguing she was not a US citizen. That failed, as did others, and now the world waits to see the final chapter.
COURT TIME
Prince Andrew is selling his $32m chalet in the Swiss Alps to pay for the legal defence of the civil suit taken out by Giuffre. Or, an out-of-court settlement, which remains a possibility.
His lawyers last year famously argued Giuffre was seeking “another payday at his expense” by peddling false stories about him. Many believe that to be true.
When Giuffre tweeted last month that she was pleased the case would go ahead, there were those who questioned her motives.
“Money gone, wants more,” said one respondent. “Why wait this long. Didn’t look that naïve at 17.” It’s not an uncommon retort to her social media posts.
Giuffre has received pay-outs. In 2009, she banked $US500,000 ($700,000) from Epstein, whose estate revealed last year it had paid more than $US121m to about 135 victims.
She received $US140,000 for the photograph with Prince Andrew in 2011, plus $US20,000 for the stories and $US4487 for photo syndication.
And in 2017, there was an undisclosed pay-out from Ghislaine Maxwell in settlement of a defamation case.
For all those who doubt Giuffre and what drives her, she has thousands of supporters who regard her as a hero, a beacon for those who have been sex trafficked.
In November last year, she launched SOAR – Speak Out, Act, Reclaim – a rebadging of her earlier advocacy group Victims Refuse Silence. Its charter is to raise awareness of the dark world of sex trafficking and to tackle policies and procedures that prevent survivors speaking out.
It took Giuffre a long time to find her voice. If not for the parents of that 14-year-old girl in Florida and the ensuing investigations into the ugly secrets of a filthy-rich sex predator living in plain sight, Giuffre might still be just another mum living in Australia. Prince Andrew might still have his titles and dignity.
But Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the girl they called Jenna, is here, a survivor, on the world stage, and there is no going back.
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