Prince Andrew’s jury trial throws Queen under the bus
Prince Andrew’s latest move spells “disaster” for the royal family with one of his “demands” adding to the trainwreck.
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The Buckingham Palace gift shop, or more accurately the Royal Collection Trust, sold out of 70 pairs of $229 limited edition Platinum Jubilee champagne saucers within hours of them going on sale recently.
In a dire week, in a dismal month after a cataclysmic year, the fact that etched glasses being sold to commemorate the Queen’s 70th year on the throne are flying off the shelves is the only skerrick of good news going for Her Majesty going right now.
On Thursday, things got, for approximately the 176th time, worse for her when it came to legal finagling of her errant son and disgraced former British trade ambassador Prince Andrew when it emerged he has demanded that his civil sex abuse case will be decided by a jury.
In a 12-page document officially pushing back against the claims made by Virginia Giuffre, nee Roberts, that the Duke of York had sexually assaulted her on three occasions, Andrew denied “any and all wrongdoing”.
However, there is one line that has potential disaster written all over it. The document concludes with: “Prince Andrew hereby demands a trial by jury on all causes of action asserted in the complaint.”
Lawyers in the UK have practically been queuing up to cast doubt on this approach.
“This is going to be crippling if he really is dead set on running this to a trial,” media lawyer Mark Stephens has told the Daily Mail. “The only thing he could have done to stop this getting worse is to have pulled the case and stopped it in some way.”
Even the use of those two words “hereby demands” is a hackle-raising misfire, whether pro-forma legal language or not, coming from Andrew’s side, and which will only further alienate an already hostile public. (The phase calls to mind the image of a Little Lord Fauntleroy petulantly stomping his foot.)
Nick Goldstone, head of dispute resolution at London lawyers Ince Gordon Dadds has told The Guardian: “There has to be a way out of this for Andrew that will avoid a jury trial because a jury trial is a complete disaster.”
Oh dear …
The fact is though that Team Andrew seems to be gambling that Ms Giuffre will have a harder time winning her case if it is decided by a clutch of ordinary people rather than a judge.
While technically a jury will be instructed by the judge as to the rules of law, unlike someone with decades of experience on the bench and the cool mind of a seasoned jurist, seeking a jury trial introduces emotion, feeling and public perception into the mix.
The Duke of York is reviled in the UK and is one of the most unsympathetic public figures in the world. It is an unimpeachable fact he palled around for years and years with Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted paedophile and a recently convicted sex offender. Hardly charm offensive stuff.
All of this has the making of an even bigger disaster for the royal family than the Andrew trainwreck already is.
According to the Daily Mail, Andrew’s latest legal gambit has put him at loggerheads with the palace, with sources having said that the royal family is “desperate” for him to try to settle the case and that “Andrew is on [a] collision course with the Palace over this.”
The question I want an answer to is, especially if the Queen is indeed picking up Andrew’s legal bills as has been reported, why The Firm is not taking over and steering how this case plays out.
Sure, the driving motivation behind Andrew’s recent defenestration by the Queen was that it would try and cauterise the royal family’s reputational bleeding, supposedly casting Andrew out of the official royal fold and thereby theoretically protecting the crown, like lopping off a diseased limb to try to prevent the infection spreading.
But, anyone who thinks that is going to fly in the real world has been at the Jubilee champagne saucers too early in the day.
No matter how many times the phrase “private citizen” gets slapped all over an official media release or is bandied about by the palace, Andrew is still the Queen’s son and his case has and will continue to have very dire repercussions for the reputation of the house of Windsor.
Given what is at stake for a 1000-year-old institution, why does it feel like Andrew’s bruised ego is still being allowed to call the shots?
In a breakdown of the various defences offered by Andrew’s lawyers posted on Twitter, high-profile Los Angeles lawyer Lisa Bloom argued that two of them constituted “a clear signal that Prince Andrew intends an all-out attack on Virginia”.
This comes after the Duke of York angered many in recent weeks by his lawyers revealing they want to see Ms Giuffre’s psychologist’s notes and her medical records and by suggesting she might be suffering from “false memories”.
The judge in the case also recently struck down Andrew’s request for a newspaper story calling Ms Giuffre a “money-hungry sex kitten” to be included in the case.
This victim-blaming and these overly antagonistic tactics just seem like patently disastrous ideas.
So … Why aren’t the pinstriped hordes who are employed by Her Majesty up to their ears in briefings and strategy sessions with Andrew’s high priced lawyers in LA and London defies logic. Why in god’s name, or even his supposed representative on Earth, the Queen’s name, aren’t they taking over?
Keeping this legal mess at arm’s length or failing to become keenly involved in the handling of this legal quagmire is idiotically short sighted because the strategy of trying to sell Andrew as no longer being royal is simply not going to wash.
Whatever happens in Andrew’s case will directly reflect on the royal family and the monarchy, no matter how many times the palace puts out statements which basically translate to curt missives saying “it’s got nothing to do with us guv’nor”. The palace and the monarch are intimately involved in this case no matter how frequently they throw their hands up and protest that Andrew is no longer technically “royal”.
While Andrew has continually denied Ms Giuffre’s claims, he has irrevocably proven thanks to his historically, epically disastrous Newsnight interview that he is hardly someone naturally adept at winning over audiences or broadly appealing to the masses.
This is a man who, the world recently learned, slept with dozens of teddy bears and would “shout and scream and become verbally abusive,” if they were not placed exactly as he liked on his bed every day.
Who left former Buckingham Palace maid Charlotte Briggs in tears with his “demanding and entitled” rants, including once yelling at her, “Can’t you f***ing do anything right?” after she left a minor gap in his curtains. (Briggs also labelled Andrew “a horrible, nasty man” in an interview with the Daily Mail this week.)
Nearly every story and report that has come out of London over the last decade about him has painted him as a horribly spoiled, self-important, puffed-up egomaniac.
And yet his lawyers want him to be judged by a group of his not-quite-peers. (Bet none of the people who end up on the jury spend much time trying to gla-hand Central Asian despots or Libyan gun runners.)
To make clear: Andrew has never been charged with a crime nor has there ever been any suggestion he might. He has, since day one, consistently denied the claims made against him. He of course has every right to defend himself.
It’s not what he’s doing, it’s how he’s going about defending himself and the fact that it looks like the Queen has yet to truly put her dainty foot down and demand that The Firm gets to run the show.
When it comes to the court of public opinion, no one’s favourite Duke has found himself in the dock time and time again and most likely will again and again before this chapter is closed.
So why is he still allowed to make terrible calls like this jury one? Why is he still being allowed to jeopardise the monarchy like this?
In the coming week, on February 6, the Queen will privately mourn the day in 1952 she found out her beloved father Bertie, aka King George VI, had suddenly passed away and she had just ascended to the throne. At a moment when she should be reflecting on the successes of her historically long reign, she is instead facing what might be the most perilous chapter yet when it comes to the health of the monarchy.
There’s no rest for the wicked or so the saying goes. Nor would there ever seem to be any if you are the Queen too.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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