Previous praise for
Prince Andrew: Epstein and the Palace
by Nigel Cawthorne
A strong book.
washington post
An irresistible story.
NEWSWEEK
Royal watcher tells all.
NEW YORK POST
Explosive expos.
GLOBE
Controversial.
Omid Scobie
[A] psychological portrait.
DAILY MAIL
Excruciating details.
SUNDAY TIMES
Raises deep questions.
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK
As forensic in detail as salacious in delivery.
TLS
A must-read.
JEWISH CHRONICLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
One of the most explosive investigations to be seen in print in many years.
ON MAGAZINE
What makes this biography so powerful is the painstaking detail the book goes into. An investigative look behind the key players, allegations, and counter-allegations a different departure from the royal family to the others in this round-up.
THE I NEWSPAPER
Goes behind the headlines, documentaries, and mini-series to expose the painstaking detail.
INDEPENDENT
Also by Nigel Cawthorne
Prince Andrew: Epstein and the Palace
Ghislaine Maxwell
This edition first published in Australia only by Gibson Square
rights@gibsonsquare.com
www.gibsonsquare.com
The moral right of Nigel Cawthorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher. The publishers urge copyright holders to come forward. Photos courtesy Getty Images, NY Attorneys office. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright 2022 by Nigel Cawthorne. Not for sale in the UK.
INTRODUCTION
Virginia Giuffres first-ever interview with the press was published on Sunday 27 February 2011 under her maiden name Roberts. Ever since, her name has been inextricably linked to the news connected with the scandals surrounding secretive billionaire playboy Jeffrey Epstein who died in custody in 2019. But, although practically everyone has heard of her name, we know very little about her. Who really is the person who took on her powerful employer and his army of lawyers and vanquished them? This is the first book to try and tell the story of who she was before she met Epstein and became a media sensation.
Hers is a modern David and Goliath tale, casting a young girl rather than a young shepherd. Goliath in this struggle was Jeffrey Epstein (but not only him). He was powerful and friends with Nobel Prize winning scientists, world leaders such as Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Crown Prince MBS, de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, film stars such as Kevin Spacey, and other luminaries who jetted around the world in his fleet of aircraft. Virginia was simply a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who travelled alongside as one of the staff.
Yet that interview made her almost as famous as Epsteins friends. Blond and blue-eyed, in 2011, Virginia sketched a harrowing picture of the depravity that went on in private behind the gilded faade of Epsteins public high-society life. Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls, she revealed about her work as a fifteen-year-old masseuse at Epsteins Florida home in Palm Beach. After two years of training in 2000, Epstein asked her to come to Little St James his Caribbean island to make a friend of his feel how you make me feel. From then on, she was employed to do the same with other associates of Epsteins, including men in their 60s, either on Epsteins island or at his ranch in New Mexico.
These were shocking allegations, even if Epstein had already pleaded guilty to two underage sex offences. In March 2005, the mother of a 14-year-old girl had gone to the police in Palm Beach and accused Epstein of sexually assaulting her young daughter. Almost a decade and a half later, it would be revealed that an FBI investigation had uncovered 100s of girls with a similar story. But this remained a secret for a long time. How many victims there had been was not known in 2015, as Epstein had been allowed to strike a plea bargain under Florida law with a jail time of 13 months. In return for pleading guilty to two underage felonies he avoided federal prosecution based on hundreds of allegations by girls similar to Virginia.
In 2015, Virginia dared to go public about Epstein as the first of his victims with her interview. It was her challenge to his attempts to burnish his tattered reputation by being seen to give money to good causes while carrying on as before in private. Over the years, Epstein had been able to use his seemingly bottomless wealth to fend off the swirl of lawsuits by his victims through paying out vast sums in return for their silence. After Epstein died in 2019, his estate was to pay out another $121 million to some 150 victims. After his conviction, Epstein was using his money to buy his way back into the world elite.
Virginia, too, had been bound by a non-disclosure agreement in a civil case that she had brought against her former employer. And also by an agreement in another suit she had brought in 2015 against Epsteins former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, herself a millionaire many times over. But her lawyers had found a way for her to go public despite the wall of legal clauses the lawyers of her onetime bosses had erected around her. The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell in December 2021 for underage sex trafficking added instant credibility to what she had first said in 2011. Virginia herself did not testify in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, but the evidence on which Maxwell was convicted amply corroborated her statements and showed that Epstein and Maxwell had acted in concert to abuse a raft of underage girls from as early as 1994.
One thing became clear since 2011. Virginia was not afraid to fight her corner. On 2 December 2019 two weeks after Prince Andrews disastrous BBC interview on British Newsnight programme to explain why he stayed friends with Epstein subsequent to Epsteins guilty pleas to underage-sex offences she appeared on British TV for the first time. This was during an hour-long episode of the BBCs Panorama programme called The Prince and the Epstein Scandal. Two weeks earlier, Andrew had told Newsnight that he did not recall ever meeting Virginia. But Virginia insisted that, not only did he meet her, the prince had sex with her on three occasions something he vehemently denied. He knows what happened, I know what happened and theres only one of us telling the truth, she said, however.
On 9 August 2021, she went further and filed a civil suit against the prince in New York, claiming that, not only did he have sex with her, but it was non-consensual. Indeed she maintained that billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his one-time partner Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked her for $15,000 although she did not claim the prince knew about the payment. What the jury would have made of the evidence presented by both sides, we will never know. The case was settled out of court on 7 March 2022 and the prince making a donation to Virginias charity in support of victim rights as a pledge to demonstrate his regret for his association with [Jeffrey] Epstein.