Scotland Yard under fire over Prince Andrew
Urged to explain why allegations weren’t probed
LONDON • Scotland Yard was under pressure Sunday night to explain why it failed to carry out a full investigation into allegations that a teenager had been trafficked to the U.K. to have sex with Prince Andrew.
Four years ago, the Yard received a complaint alleging that in 2001, Virginia Roberts, 17, was flown to London by pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and coerced into having sex with Andrew, the Duke of York.
It was claimed the incident took place at the Kensington townhouse of Ghislaine Maxwell, a close friend of the Duke. A photograph appeared to show him with his arm around the girl while Maxwell looked on in the background.
After assessing the complaint, police decided the matter did not warrant a full investigation.
The Duke vigorously denies having sex with Roberts and insists he knew nothing of Epstein’s activities. But victims’ rights campaigners have questioned why the matter was not pursued, especially given that in 2015 London’s Metropolitan Police Service adhered to national policy stipulating that “victims must be believed,” introduced in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Such was the Yard’s determination to pursue the policy to the letter that it spent 18 months and millions of dollars looking into complaints by fantasist Carl Beech, who told police he had been raped and abused by a string of VIPS in the Seventies and Eighties.
Harry Fletcher, a victims’ rights campaigner, said the Yard needed to be transparent about the 2015 complaint. “There appears to be some worrying double standards here in terms of how Scotland Yard approached two complaints of historic sexual abuse,” he said.
“In one case, a complaint from a vulnerable young woman has been dismissed without further investigation, while at around the same time the Met was going all out to investigate a pack of lies from a fantasist.”
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the Duke held a meeting with Maxwell in Buckingham Palace in the summer, a fortnight after Epstein was placed under investigation by U.S. authorities on fresh sex-trafficking allegations.
In the Duke’s now-infamous Newsnight interview, he admitted seeing Maxwell in the summer but insisted they had not discussed Epstein. Sources have now revealed the meeting took place in the Duke’s private quarters at Buckingham Palace.