Seen in full for first time, picture that haunts Duke

OF ALL Prince Andrew’s calamitous errors of judgment, few are as damaging as his decision to pose for a photograph with his arm around Virginia Roberts, the fingers of his left hand skimming the 17-year-old’s bare waist.

Taken at the Belgravia home of Andrew’s friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the photograph has become his millstone. In it, he grins at a camera said to be in the hands of his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein.

The picture has been reproduced countless times around the world since it was first published by The Mail on Sunday in February 2011 – but until today it has never been shown in its entirety.

The Prince has tried – rather desperately, critics say – to suggest it was somehow faked. First unnamed friends cast doubt upon it and then, during his disastrous TV interview,

Andrew himself said he didn’t

‘believe that photograph was taken in the way that has been suggested’.

He also expressed the hope that the original might one day surface, as though this might exonerate him.

In fact, the full, uncropped picture – a copy of the photograph shown to The Mail on Sunday by

Miss Roberts – does nothing to advance the Duke’s cause.

Seldom do pictures appear in newspapers without being cropped for compositional reasons, and so it was with this image. The complete picture reveals further detail of the interior of Ms Maxwell’s house, in particular what appears to be a large post-Impressionist painting hanging on the wall, its bottom corner obscured by a flash of white, possibly one of Epstein’s fingers partially covering the lens.

Leaving technical issues aside, the circumstances surrounding how it was obtained all point to the picture being genuine.

At the time Miss Roberts gave it to The Mail on Sunday, she was living a quiet life with her family on Australia’s Central Coast.

She wasn’t trying to seek any limelight. She had no wish to be found but was traced by this newspaper’s then New York correspondent, Sharon Churcher, who was investigating reports that the FBI was planning to reopen an investigation into the sexual exploitation of teenagers by Epstein. He had previously admitted to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14.

At first Miss Roberts was reluctant to talk, not least because she harboured fears that Epstein, who sexually groomed her from the age of 15 before ‘lending’ her to rich, powerful friends, might try to kill her. After finally agreeing, she served The Mail on Sunday team coffee on the patio adjoining her modest three-bedroom bungalow and produced the picture of Andrew from a white envelope containing a collection of photos chronicling her teenage years and travels with Epstein to New Mexico and Paris.

She explained that the picture with Andrew was taken at Ms Maxwell’s home after a visit to Tramp nightclub – a claim the prince disputes. ‘All of us went upstairs and I asked Jeffrey to snap a picture of me with the Prince. I wanted something to show my mom,’ she said.

Until this meeting, she had simply not considered the picture’s significance. Some commentators have pointed out that when she gave it to this newspaper, she made no claim of having been sexually trafficked to him – but instead waited another four years.

This is not the case. She told Churcher at the meeting that she had sex with Andrew three times while a teenager, but for legal reasons the MoS could not publish her claims, which the prince denies.

In his TV interview, Andrew hinted that the hand around her waist may not be his. ‘From the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph,’ he said.

Miss Roberts gave the original to the FBI which, incidentally, has never questioned its veracity.

‘I wanted something to show my mom’