Prince should be in jail: Accuser
A woman who alleges that she had sex with the Duke of York when she was aged 17 on the orders of the late financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has given an extended interview to Australian television in which she calls for him to be jailed.
Prince Andrew has strenuously and repeatedly denied the claims of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 35, who lives in Cairns, north Australia.
In an interview to be broadcast on Sunday by the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes programme, Giuffre is filmed returning to Epstein’s former New York mansion, where she claims that the financier first took her almost 20 years ago. She has alleged that she was trafficked by Epstein while underage to have sex with his powerful friends.
In 2008 Epstein agreed to a plea deal in Florida in which he admitted soliciting prostitution but avoided sex-trafficking charges. He was found dead in August while being held in a New York prison on charges of sex trafficking of minors. ‘‘I was trafficked to other billionaires, I was trafficked to other politicians. It was the elite of the world,’’ Giuffre told her interviewer. ‘‘They should be named. What they’ve done is horrific.’’ She added: ‘‘Prince Andrew should go to jail. I mean, is he ever going to? Probably not.’’
The programme’s preview shows Giuffre producing a 2001 photo of herself with the duke when she was a teenager, which has been dismissed as a fake by his associates. ‘‘This is a real photo. That is Andrew,’’ Giuffre said.
She has previously claimed in court documents that Epstein told her to have sex with the prince multiple times.
Excerpts of the interview were published in Australia as questions emerged in the United States over an interview Giuffre had given to the American broadcaster ABC in 2015.
In off-air comments to a colleague, the ABC News presenter Amy Robach complained that her interview with Giuffre had been dropped after ‘‘the Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways’’.
A recording of Robach’s conversation was leaked to the rightwing activist James O’Keefe. She was apparently speaking in August days after National Public Radio (NPR) reported that ABC
News and Vanity Fair had failed to reveal interviews with women who accused Epstein of sexual abuse.
Giuffre said she had given an interview to ABC News in 2015 while Epstein ‘‘was walking around a free man’’, hoping to see ‘‘a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him.’’
In a studio at ABC Robach complained that her bosses became fearful of losing possible interviews with the Duke of Cambridge after threats from Buckingham Palace. A Palace spokesman declined to comment yesterday, saying it was a matter for ABC.
A network executive told NPR that a development in a court case in April 2015 had made it more difficult to broadcast the interview. A judge ruled that Giuffre’s allegations about Prince Andrew should be struck from the record.