Prince Andrew among names in first 1200 pages of tranche of docs to be made public
Politicians, celebrities and royalty had been waiting for this moment with bated breath, dreading what might be disclosed. After months of legal wrangling, a Manhattan court released 1200 pages of documents yesterday detailing lurid claims of the alleged abuse carried out by Jeffrey Epstein against teenage girls.
The document release came hours before Epstein’s death by suspected suicide in a Manhattan jail.
The files relate to the case of Giuffre v Maxwell, in which Virginia Giuffre, who claims to have been the US businessman’s teenage “sex slave”, sued Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and the billionaire’s former girlfriend, for defamation.
Testimony includes claims that Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, had sex with Giuffre when she was 17 and groped Johanna Sjoberg, then 21.
Giuffre also alleges she was made to have sex with the billionaire’s other famous friends such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
There is also evidence from David Rodgers, one of Epstein’s pilots, who described how he had flown Epstein with guests including Bill Clinton and Naomi Campbell. Donald Trump appeared on flight logs from 1997.
The release is only the start. Court officials confirmed the 2000 documents judges had ordered to be unsealed would be done so in chunks.
A judge in another related hearing will now also consider whether to release a further 10,000 pages from other documents.
The documents released state it is “an undisputed fact that multiple witnesses deposed in this case” have testified that Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell, “operated as convicted paedophile Epstein’s procurer of under age girls”. The defamation case, filed in 2015, was settled out of court by Maxwell in 2017.
The release comes after a legal battle led by the Miami Herald. Maxwell
had opposed it on the grounds that it would spark a “furious feeding frenzy”.
Giuffre alleges Maxwell “had sex with under age girls virtually every day” and she and Epstein’s “whole lives revolved around sex”.
Maxwell is alleged to have recruited Guiffre and Sjoberg, who says she was approached on her college campus.
In her testimony, she alleged she was groped by the Duke of York while staying at Epstein’s New York mansion in 2001.
Giuffre claims she slept with the Duke later that night on a massage table for her “usual hourly rate, which at that time was $200”.
The documents allege Giuffre, then 17, was also “trafficked to Prince Andrew”, flying to the UK with Epstein before meeting him at Maxwell’s London town house.
They state Maxwell has never offered a “legal reasonable explanation” about the visit, documented in a photo of the trio at the property in which the Duke has his arm around Giuffre’s bare midriff.
Buckingham Palace, which has long denied the claims, said yesterday: “This relates to proceedings in the US, to which the Duke of York is not a party. Any suggestion of impropriety with minors is categorically untrue.”