AFP, published on Wednesday, January 12, 2022 at 11:05 p.m.
Britain’s Prince Andrew, embarrassed for years by his ties to sulphurous financier Jeffrey Epstein, failed to dismiss a civil complaint in New York from an American who accuses him of sexual assault in 2001, when she was 17 year.
In this case, embarrassing for Buckingham Palace, the second son of Queen Elizabeth, who vigorously denies the charges, therefore still risks a civil trial. He can still appeal the decision of New York judge Lewis Kaplan, who rejected his appeal.
If all appeals are refused and if no agreement between the parties is reached, this trial could be held “between September and December” 2022, said the same judge in the fall of 2021.
Virginia Giuffre, a 38-year-old American now living in Australia, has publicly pointed out Andrew for years. But last summer she decided to take the matter to court and filed a lawsuit in New York accusing her of being one of the powerful friends Jeffrey Epstein allegedly handed her over to. he sexually abuses her.
Virginia Giuffre accuses the prince of sexually assaulting her three times in 2001, when she was 17, in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands.
She “is obviously happy” that the prince’s request “has been rejected” and that evidence can now “be collected” to support his complaint, reacted his lawyer, David Boies.
– “Ambiguous” agreement –
The prince’s camp has been doing everything for six months to convince American justice to abandon this procedure. This time, to obtain the dismissal of the complaint, his lawyers had brandished a 2009 agreement, by which Virginia Giuffre undertook not to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein, as well as “other potential defendants”, against a compensation of 500,000 dollars from the American multi-millionaire.
But in a 46-page decision made public on Wednesday, Judge Kaplan said the agreement “is far from a model of clarity and precision in its drafting”, calling it “ambiguous”. As a result, he judges that the prince’s request must be “denied in all respects”.
Virginia Giuffre’s lawyers argued that the prince was in no way “covered” by the 2009 transaction, applicable according to them only in Florida – Epstein had one of his residences in Palm Beach – and of which he had no “not even aware” at the time.
The prince, 61, has been embarrassed for years by his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty in December of sex trafficking in Manhattan federal court and now faces dozens years in prison.
If the case continues, the prince could be brought to be questioned by the lawyers of the plaintiff. “It’s in a more informal setting than a court but it can be very long, take many, many hours, and it can be aggressive,” former prosecutor Bennett Gershman told AFP.
– Playboy turned pariah –
Within the British royal family, the one who was a playboy and a brave soldier, and who today appears as an outcast, “categorically” denies having attacked Virginia Giuffre.
In an interview deemed calamitous on the BBC in November 2019, the prince claimed not to even remember the young girl.
Widely distributed, photos attest to the closeness between Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre. A snap from 2000 shows the American financier, British socialite and prince out hunting in the east of England. In another, Andrew and Virginia Giuffre hug each other, all smiles, with Ghislaine Maxwell in the background.
Judge Kaplan had rejected on December 31 another request for nullity filed by the prince, on the grounds that Virginia Giuffre could not file a complaint in the United States because she resides in Australia.
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