As Queen Elizabeth II prepares for her Platinum Jubilee celebrations’ culmination in June, a hearing in New York on the 28th of the same month threatens to cast a dark cloud over the events.
Prince Andrew’s sex abuse accuser, Virginia Giuffre, has been invited to speak at the sentencing of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein accomplice and pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell.
While under the terms of an out-of-court settlement reached between the American-Australian woman Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts) and the royal in mid-February she is said to have agreed to keep quiet until after the jubilee, Maxwell’s sentencing “could be the first time we hear from Virginia since the settlement”, a source was cited by the Sun as saying, adding:
“It will bring the whole affair with Andrew back up again just as he hopes to move on.”
“Although there were just four women who testified against Maxwell at her trial she had many more victims. With Epstein dead, Maxwell’s sentencing is going to be their chance to have their say. There will be a line out the door if the judge allows them all to speak. Virginia is highly likely to want to make a statement,” the legal source was quoted as saying.
Prince Andrew’s legal team had settled out of court on Giuffre’s civil claim that the late billionaire Epstein and his “madam” and lover Maxwell had trafficked her out to have sex with the Duke of York on three occasions when she was 17 and a minor by US law. The royal, who has since stepped down from official duties and been stripped of his military roles and royal patronages, has strongly denied her claims and any wrongdoing.
Despite efforts of Prince Andrew’s legal team to have the case dismissed based on a settlement Giuffre reached with Epstein in 2009, US district judge Lewis Kaplan had ruled on 12 January that it could go forward.
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Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, was found guilty on 29 December of recruiting underage girls to be sexually abused by the late billionaire financier between 1994 and 2004 at his various properties. She is now facing sentencing on 28 June, with the prospect of spending up to sixty years in a US jail.
Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell sits as the guilty verdict in her sex abuse trial is read in a courtroom sketch in New York City, U.S., December 29, 2021
© REUTERS / Jane Rosenberg
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2019 on charges of organising the sex trafficking of underage girls. While awaiting trial, the tycoon, who had been denying all charges, was found dead in his New York federal jail cell in 2019, with his death being ruled a suicide. At the end of a 2019 case against Epstein, Giuffre had stated that “the reckoning must not end” and others must face justice.
Besides the royal, she claimed she was sexually trafficked out to others, such as former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former senator George Mitchell, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, French modelling scout Jean Luc Brunel and the billionaire Glenn Dubin. All of these men have vehemently denied her “fabricated” allegations. Giuffre had been conspicuously left out of the Maxwell case by prosecutors, despite being mentioned numerous times on nearly every day of the British socialite’s trial.
For example, her name came up in the testimony by Epstein housekeeper Juan Alessi, who recalled driving Maxwell when she first met the teenage Giuffre outside Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private members’ club. One suggested reason, cited by UK media outlets, is that prosecutors in the Maxwell case may have believed testimony from Giuffre might complicate the case with “extra actors, jurisdictions and other details.”