'ANDY' VICTIM: HERE'S MY SIDE
How I ended up with predator prince
She’s the smiling girl in the pink camisole in that unforgettable Prince Andrew photo — the millionaires’ trinket who grew up to upend Buckingham Palace and become a compelling voice for all victims of sex trafficking.
But back in 2000 — two decades before her current public crusade helped cage wealthy Manhattan pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and split Andrew from his royal family — Virginia Giuffre was just a kid.
She was 16, and handing out towels at a Palm Beach resort called Mar-a-Lago, a job she got through her dad, a maintenance man there.
And in ways that would one day drop her into the center of a media and criminal-justice maelstrom, her childhood was about to end.
Giuffre tells her story in “Panorama: The Prince and the Epstein Scandal,” an in-depth BBC interview to air Monday.
It’s a story that begins in humble circumstances.
Born in California, where her mother, Lynn, worked as a banker in Sacramento, Giuffre moved with her parents to Palm Beach County, Fla., when she was 4 years old.
She didn’t do drugs and always stayed out of trouble, her dad has said.
Then one day, as she worked her spa job at Donald Trump’s resort, she met Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s gal pal and alleged sex-slave recruiter (above right, with Prince Andrew and Giuffre), the socialite daughter of late publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell.
Giuffre was sitting just outside the spa locker room, reading a book on massage therapy, a trade she was interested in pursuing.
Maxwell looked at the book — and at her — with great interest.
Would Giuffre, who then used the name Roberts, be interested in working as a traveling masseuse to a very wealthy man, Maxwell asked.
“If the guy likes you, then it will work out for you,” Giuffre recounted Maxwell telling her in a 2015 deposition. “You’ll travel. You’ll make good money.”
Epstein would want more than massages for that good money.
Maxwell immediately trained her on how to pleasure the pedophile financier, Giuffre has alleged.
Soon enough, Epstein was passing her around as a plaything to his well-heeled buddies — including, as she will continue to insist in Monday’s BBC interview, to Prince Andrew in 2001.
Giuffre finally escaped Epstein and Maxwell at age 19, when she was sent by him to Thailand to study massage and bring back “a Thai girl” for his underage harem.
Instead, she fell in love with Australian martial-arts expert Robert Giuffre. They married in Thailand in 2002 and moved to Australia soon after the wedding.
Giuffre called Epstein, and told him she wasn’t returning to America and was through with him.
But in 2007, Maxwell and Epstein tracked her down in Australia, demanding to know if she had revealed anything about Epstein to law enforcement.
“I was like, ‘How the hell did she just find me?’ ” Giuffre, now a mom of three, told the Miami Herald.
That now-notorious photo with Andrew came to light only after Giuffre was approached by a Daily Mail reporter in 2010, after reports surfaced that the FBI was planning to reopen its Epstein investigation. It was never meant to entrap a prince, as it now has.
“I asked Jeffrey to snap a picture of me with the prince,” Giuffre told The Mail, for the most innocent — even childlike — reason. “I wanted something,” she explained, “to show my mom.”