Epstein victim’s $500G settlement unsealed in lawsuit against prince
A Jeffrey Epstein victim’s $500,000 settlement deal in 2009 with the notorious sex offender, which Prince Andrew says shields him from lawsuits, was unsealed Monday by a Manhattan federal judge.
The agreement between Epstein and Virginia Giuffre was revealed through ongoing litigation between her and the British royal.
Giuffre says Epstein lent her three times to Andrew for sex when she was 17 and he was 41.
Lawyers for Queen Elizabeth’s son argue the broad terms of the deal protect him from Giuffre’s lawsuit.
The 11-page agreement “forever discharge[s]” Epstein and “other potential defendants” from “the beginning of the world to the day of this release.”
The deal resolved a federal lawsuit Giuffre filed in Florida against Epstein. Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies said the deal is “irrelevant” to her sexual assault lawsuit against the Duke of York.
“The release does not mention Prince Andrew. He did not even know about it. He could not have
been a ‘potential defendant’ in the settled case against Jeffrey Epstein both because he was not subject to jurisdiction in Florida and because the Florida case involved federal claims to which he was not a part,” Boies said in a statement.
A hearing in Giuffre’s lawsuit against Andrew is scheduled for Tuesday.
Andrew met Epstein through his friend Ghislaine Maxwell in the early 2000s, according to court filings. His name came up multiple
times at Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial, which ended last Wednesday with her found guilty of facilitating Epstein’s serial abuse of minors.
Epstein’s former private pilot Larry Visoski testified at the trial about flying the prince numerous times as a passenger on Epstein’s private planes.
The deceased financier’s longtime house manager Juan Alessi told jurors he was driving Maxwell to the spa at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club in 2000 when she first spotted 16-year-old Giuffre walking the grounds. Maxwell then allegedly recruited Giuffre into Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme.
According to Giuffre’s lawsuit, Epstein and Maxwell forced her to sleep with Andrew at Maxwell’s London townhouse, Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion, and on Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean when she was 17.
Andrew has strenuously denied the allegations. In his latest bid to quash Giuffre’s lawsuit, his lawyer Andrew Brettler claimed that her Australian residency bars her from suing in a New York court.
Giuffre said that Colorado is her home, where she is registered to vote and will return once her father-in-law in Australia no longer needs round-the-clock care.
In her latest filing, Giuffre demanded the prince prove he cannot sweat, which the royal claimed as a bizarre alibi during a 2019 interview with the BBC.
Epstein was arrested for trafficking underage girls for sex in July 2019. He hanged himself in his cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center a month later.