Prince Andrew’s criticisms of Virginia Giuffre may backfire, lawyers say
Prince Andrew’s attacks on Virginia Giuffre’s character in an attempt to get her sexual assault lawsuit against him thrown out may fail and risk doing further damage to his reputation, British lawyers have said.
Having initially attempted to prevent service of the suit, which alleges that he sexually abused Giuffre when she was 17, the prince’s lawyers went on the offensive over the weekend in an attempt to get her “baseless” claim dismissed. Their filings accuse Giuffre of seeking a “payday” at Andrew’s expense and contain references from friends and in newspaper articles to her being a “money hungry sex kitten” and recruiting girls for the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in custody in 2019, awaiting trial.
At the same time they argue that a 2009 settlement agreement between Giuffre and Epstein, formerly a friend of Andrew, absolves the prince from responsibility, a notion rejected by Giuffre’s lawyer.
Mark Stephens, a partner at Howard
Kennedy and UK media law expert, said it would take a brave judge to dismiss the case and suggested Prince Andrew had potentially opened himself up to further embarrassment.
“He’s obviously got fed up with the criticism that he’s taken so he has instructed lawyers to engage,” said Stephens. “The problem of course, is that he’s now embarked on a route towards a case. He’s saying it should be struck out because she’s unreliable but also that he’s covered by the plea deal from Epstein in any event, which seemed to be sort of contradictory.
“The problem you’ve got is he clearly as a human being wants to explain himself, he wants to make clear that he’s not responsible but his only way of doing that is in the court hearing. And if he does that, he has to get into what he actually did with her, how did the photograph [with Giuffre] come to be taken etc [allies of Andrew have claimed the photo was faked and he says he has “no recollection” of meeting her] and she will undoubtedly give graphic and detailed evidence about what she says were their liaisons”.
Andrew, 61, has “absolutely and categorically” denied having sex with Giuffre but the allegations have already done huge damage to his reputation. The Queen’s second son stepped back from royal duties in 2019 in the aftermath of a disastrous interview with Emily Maitlis for BBC’s Newsnight in which he was perceived as unsympathetic towards Epstein’s victims.
His lawyers’ latest strategy risks exacerbating that perception, according to a senior partner at a leading London law firm, who described the allegations in the filings as a “smokescreen”.
The solicitor, who did not want to be named, said: “This looks like putting
up a smokescreen to tarnish her [Giuffre’s] reputation but it has no legal relevance whatsoever. Whether or not she was complicit in assisting Epstein with his child abuse is neither here nor there when you consider the allegations against Prince Andrew, which are that he raped and molested her. However he tarnishes her character, it makes absolutely no difference to that issue.”
He said an English judge would ignore it and while there was more chance of US jurors being swayed by it, there was no guarantee.
“A jury might think, ‘This is an American citizen, and who’s this prince trying to blacken the character of one of our own?’, so it’s a high-risk strategy even with a jury, I would have thought,” he said.
In her lawsuit, Giuffre alleged the prince “stonewalled”, rejecting a request to explore alternative dispute resolution. The attempts to challenge service and jurisdiction further raised uncertainty about his level of engagement with the case but Richard Spafford, partner at Reed Smith, said it was “fairly standard” to try to stop the lawsuit in its tracks and only when those tactics failed, address the actual merits of the case.
“I can only assume that it’s been decided within his advisory team that, notwithstanding the fact that his application will attract publicity, that it’s nonetheless the appropriate step to take,” said Spafford. “On the basis of that there must be a view that these arguments raise the possibility that the case will be dismissed by the judge, or, alternatively, that the plaintiff may be more likely to conclude that it’s appropriate to settle it.”
Thomas Garner, partner at Fladgate, said the attacks on Giuffre showed the gloves were off even if it might do “irreparable” damage to the prince’s reputation. “If there was any doubt as to how he would handle the claim, this application makes it clear that if [the judge] doesn’t dismiss the claim then Prince Andrew intends to go on the attack,” he said.