A woman seen with the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, in a video purportedly shot at the New York house of the now-deceased US financier Jeffrey Epstein in December 2010 is alleged to be Katherine Keating, daughter of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The paper cited her friends as saying that the woman in the footage, which was first released by the Daily Mail last week and showed Prince Andrew waving her goodbye, strikingly resembled Keating, with the similarities going "right down to the beauty spot on her left cheek".
Keating has yet to comment on the speculation.
The video separately showed Epstein, who was just released from prison after serving a 13-month term for soliciting a minor for prostitution, leaving his mansion with a young blonde, who accompanied him to his car.
There's no suggestion that Keating, who had just moved to New York at the time to be closer to her then-boyfriend, prominent hotelier Andre Balazs, was aware of or involved in any of Epstein's supposed criminal activities. Balazs' name, meanwhile, is said to have appeared in the disgraced financier's "black book" that surfaced in court proceedings.
Incidentally, a few years ago, Keating who now works as Maverick's chief sustainability and strategy officer, presented a series of "One on One" interviews, published by The Huffington Post, with one of them featuring Ghislaine Maxwell, a British media heiress, who has been accused of being the "Madame" for Epstein's alleged sex trafficking circuit.
Video Released Days After Epstein's Apparent Suicide
The footage, presumably filmed on 6 December 2010, was released just days after Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Lower Manhattan, New York, where he was detained pending trial next year on child sex trafficking allegations after being arrested on 6 July.
"When the Prince came to the door I was stunned. He said a few words to the girl, who was very pretty, and then she walked off down the street in the direction of Central Park. If I hadn't known it was Prince Andrew, I would have thought he owned the place", an unnamed source told the Daily Mail last week as the video was released.
An earlier photo making the rounds on the Internet showed the Duke of York hugging Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed in a 2015 lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged "Madame", that Andrew had groped her when she was a minor at Epstein's New York estate, and that she was used as a "sex slave" to please different famous and powerful men.
A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said in a Monday statement that Prince Andrew "has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein's alleged crimes. His Royal Highness deplores the exploitation of any human being and the suggestion he would condone, participate in or encourage any such behaviour is abhorrent".