Lawyers in bid to make Andrew ‘come clean’
LAWYERS for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims are considering bringing a lawsuit to pressure Britain’s Prince Andrew to give evidence in the long-running ‘sex slave’ scandal.
David Boies, chairman of a highprofile New York law firm, claims ‘there is too much evidence’ connecting Andrew to the paedophile financier ‘for the allegations to simply go away’.
He said the prince was ‘continuing to delay and obfuscate’ over repeated claims he had sex with one of Epstein’s teenage victims.
Mr Boies urged Andrew to agree to an informal interview, as it would be the best way for him to ‘advance his interests’ if he ‘really has nothing to hide’.
The lawyer said he has asked to interview the prince and is willing to travel to London to make the process more comfortable for him.
But if this does not happen, Mr Boies said he would consider bringing a lawsuit to pressure him and other Epstein associates to give evidence under oath.
Should Andrew ever set foot in the US again, he could be ambushed with a subpoena. This would oblige him to give evidence on oath – or face the threat of jail.
Mr Boies represents a number of women who say they were abused by Epstein when they were teenagers.
One of those is Virginia Roberts, who claims she had sex with Andrew on three occasions when she was 17 years old. She is now a 36-year-old married mother-of-three called Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Ms Roberts is one of 16 women who told a Manhattan court on Tuesday of their alleged abuse at the hands of Epstein and his friends.
The prince has strenuously denied having ‘any form of sexual contact or relationship’ with Ms Roberts and has attempted to downplay his friendship with Epstein, who died by suicide in jail earlier this month at the age of 66.
However, he has failed to answer continued questions about his behaviour, particularly his frequent visits to Epstein’s many homes across the US.
‘If he would sit down and let everything come out, and just come clean, this is the time to do it,’ Mr Boies told Sky News.
‘It’s very hard to take the position that you were close and friendly [with Epstein] and you were treating the mansion as your home away from home, yet you were totally unaware of what was going on.’
Mr Boies said there ‘has to be an explanation’ as to why Andrew attended so many of Epstein’s parties and why he was photographed grinning broadly with his arm around the bare midriff of Ms Roberts in 2001.
Friends of the prince have insisted his lawyers have ‘serious doubts’ about the veracity of the picture – and say that he is at the centre of a ‘witch-hunt’. But lawyer Sigrid McCawley, who also represents Ms Roberts, said the FBI has ‘never questioned the authenticity’ of the photo.
‘The photograph of Prince Andrew grabbing 17-year-old Virginia Roberts’s waist in Ghislaine Maxwell’s townhouse is real,’ she said. ‘The FBI has never questioned its authenticity. Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs also place Virginia in London at the time the photograph was taken. Prince Andrew’s denials with the help of misinformed friends and unnamed sources who have no real knowledge of the facts are getting louder.
‘But those atmospherics do not change the evidence and the facts.’
Buckingham Palace aides told the Mail this week that the prince would be willing to help authorities if approached.
One courtier said: ‘Members of the royal family would always cooperate with the police in an appropriate way.’ However, this does not mean that he would be willing to be interviewed by lawyers for Epstein’s victims.
Last week it emerged that London’s Metropolitan Police had decided not to investigate claims first made in 2015 that the prince had sex with Ms Roberts.
But the FBI is investigating both the claims against Epstein and the circumstances around his death.
‘Has to be an explanation’