Salon boss who ‘saw Duke with sex accuser’
Working just miles from Epstein’s Palm Beach House of Sin, Mail finds key figure in case against Andrew
THIS is the American hair salon owner who could hold the key to Virginia Roberts’s hotly disputed sex claims against the Duke of York.
As a college student 20 years ago, Johanna Sjoberg was lured by Ghislaine Maxwell into Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘pyramid of sexual abuse’ and says that within days she met Prince Andrew at the tycoon’s Manhattan mansion.
Now 41, she alleges it was there that the Queen’s second son groped her in an incident during which a latex Spitting Image puppet of the duke was used to abuse Miss Roberts, then 17, with Maxwell in attendance.
According to legal documents, the alleged inappropriate conduct did not end there. Miss Roberts, now 37 and a mother of three who uses her married name Giuffre, claims that after the Spitting Image incident, she and Andrew slept together in a massage room at Epstein’s house dubbed ‘the dungeon’.
Andrew vehemently denies her assertions and says he cannot recall meeting Miss Roberts, despite a notorious picture of them together at Maxwell’s London home in March 2001.
Miss Sjoberg’s salon is a few miles from the site of Epstein’s now-demolished ‘House of Sin’ in Palm Beach. The hairdresser was photographed by the Mail in the Florida town this week.
What she could potentially say about the alleged encounter in Manhattan may have a vital bearing on the outcome of Miss Roberts’s rape lawsuit against the duke. She could help corroborate Miss Roberts’s story or give evidence that aids the prince’s case.
Next week Andrew’s legal team will try to get Miss Roberts’s legal action against him thrown out at a New York court. The showdown will come days after Maxwell, 60, was found guilty of sex trafficking children for her paedophile boyfriend Epstein to sexually abuse.
The verdicts were seen as a blow to Andrew’s hopes of stopping the action in its tracks and left him with more questions to answer. His team have been locked in discussions, with Maxwell’s fate thought to be high on the agenda.
Attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents a number of Epstein victims, said yesterday Andrew should be ‘quaking in his boots’ as his friend languishes in jail, unlikely ever to taste freedom again.
However, a source said the prince and his team were simply ‘focusing on his own hearing next week’.
Unlike many caught up in the Epstein saga, Miss Sjoberg –
who was not an alleged victim in Maxwell’s trial – has remained consistent in her account of what she says happened with the duke in 2001. It was in 2007 that she first told of the alleged encounter with Andrew at Esptein’s East 71st Street mansion.
Described as ‘church-going’ and an ‘all American brunette’ from Maine, she recalled that she returned to the grand home after some ‘sightseeing’ and ‘Prince Andrew was there and a couple of other girls my age’. ‘Andrew was very charming,’ she said. ‘She [Ghislaine] came down with a present for him – a latex puppet of him from Spitting Image.’ Miss Sjoberg added the duke had thought the puppet ‘funny because it was him’.
Then ‘I just remember someone suggesting a photo and they told us to get on the couch. And so Virginia and Andrew sat on the couch and they put the puppet on her lap.
‘And so I sat on Andrew’s lap, I believe of my own volition, and they took the puppet’s hands and put it on Virginia’s breast and so Andrew put his on mine.’
It was all done in ‘a joking manner’. ‘Everybody laughed,’ Miss Sjoberg said. ‘Ghislaine... had a very dirty sense of humour.’
According to her accounts, the prince, while being inappropriately tactile, had not caused offence. She thought him ‘charming’.
But what took the alleged encounter into a whole new sphere were the subsequent testimonies of Miss Roberts. Many times over the years, in interviews, an unpublished memoir and a deposition, she has corroborated Miss Sjoberg’s puppet story.
But Miss Roberts also went on to claim that afterwards she and Andrew retired to Epstein’s massage room ‘dungeon’, where they had sex. She claims they first slept together in London a month before
‘Ghislaine had a dirty sense of humour’
this, and after Manhattan, at Epstein’s private ‘paedo island’ in the US Virgin Islands.
The duke sidestepped questions about the alleged encounter with Miss Sjobjerg during his notorious BBC Newsnight interview two years ago, saying he may have visited the paedophile’s property but ‘definitely didn’t, definitely, definitely no, no, no activity’.
Miss Sjoberg said Maxwell recruited her to provide massages for Epstein in 2001 when she was at college in Palm Beach.
She added she was under the impression she was being hired as a personal assistant but soon realised her job was to provide ‘sexual massages’ to Epstein, who she has said told her he needed to have ‘three orgasms a day’.
Miss Sjoberg claims she was ‘punished’ when Epstein failed to orgasm as a result of one of her massages. Maxwell allegedly told her ‘she [Maxwell] would not be able to please him as much as he needed and that is why there were other girls around’.
She has told how Maxwell referred to herself as being like a ‘mother hen’ and her young female massage recruits were like her ‘children’.
On her salon’s website she talks proudly of visiting Vidal Sassoon in London and Toni and Guy in New York to educate herself on cutting and colouring techniques.