The defense assures that the agreement between the accuser and Jeffrey Epstein also “protects” Prince Andrew.
Lawyers for British Prince Andrew on Tuesday (January 4th) urged an American judge to dismiss a civil complaint for “sexual assault» that an American filed in New York for facts dating back to 2001, when she was a minor. The prince’s defenders rely on a 2009 restitution and exoneration agreement between this American woman, Virginia Giuffre, and the sexual predator who died in 2019 Jeffrey Epstein, to argue that this settlement “protected“also others”potential defendantsin the entourage of Jeffrey Epstein, including his friend Prince Andrew.
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Virginia Giuffregave up her rights to sue them when she signed the 2009 deal and took money from Jeffrey Epstein“, pleaded the lawyer, Andrew Brettler, during a teleconference hearing in Manhattan federal court. According to the prince’s lawyer, Virginia Giuffreintended (to exempt) a broad category of individuals, including royalty and businessmen“. Defenders of Virginia Giuffre believe, on the contrary, that Andrew was not “coveredby the 2009 agreement, which attorney David Boies repeated before Judge Lewis Kaplan on Tuesday.
Complaint deemed “unfounded”
In her civil complaint filed in August in New York, Virginia Giuffre, 38 today, claims that Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II, “sexually assaultedthree times in 2001 — when she was 17 and called Virginia Roberts — in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands: this is where Andrew’s friends lived, the couple formed by Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced last week.
Jeffrey Epstein, an international jet-setter, committed suicide in Manhattan prison in August 2019, at the age of 66, before his trial for sex crimes. His companion and accomplice for three decades, Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, was found guilty last week in New York of sex trafficking teenage girls for his benefit and faces decades of imprisonment. Virginia Giuffre, who was not a plaintiff in the Maxwell trial, welcomed the judgment and said she hoped others “report“, possible allusion to Andrew.
The prince’s lawyers have been doing everything for six months to block Virginia Giuffre’s complaint and therefore repeated before Judge Kaplan on Tuesday that she is legally “unfounded“. The prince, 61, who is not criminally charged, denies “categoricallyto have assaulted Virginia Roberts at the time and claims not to even remember this young girl.
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