Prince Andrew’s accuser has made new claims about the abuse she suffered, in a memoir which is being released after her death.
In it, Virginia Giuffre writes that the prince, the younger brother of King Charles, considered it was “his birthright” to have sex with her.
Her memoir adds to the air of gloom at Buckingham Palace, which has tried to distance itself from Prince Andrew, but royal sources acknowledge that every new claim against him heaps further pressure on the institution of monarchy.
Giuffre was one of the many victims of the sexual abuse operation run by the late Jeffrey Epstein and his friend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now in a US jail.
She ended her life by suicide in April, but before she died, she wrote a book detailing what she claimed happened with the Duke of York in 2001.
The posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, is being serialised in the Guardian newspaper.
In that year, she consistently alleged that three sexual encounters took place in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands.
As she has previously claimed in court, Ms Giuffre repeats in her book her own account of what she suffered in the London home of the British socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell.
She claimed she took a bath with Prince Andrew, who she describes in her memoir as “still relatively fit, with short-cropped brown hair and youthful eyes”, in comparison to the “stout, white-haired and jowly” figure of today.
She wrote about the infamous photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist and Ms Maxwell standing next to them.
Virginia Giuffre claims it was taken on her own “Kodak FunSaver” camera, and she asked Epstein to take it.
Prince Andrew said in his Newsnight interview in 2019 that he does not ever remember being at the house nor having the photo taken.
He has also suggested that the photograph could have been manipulated in some way.
In her book, Ms Giuffre described how she went out with Prince Andrew, Epstein and Maxwell to a restaurant and nightclub where Andrew “sweated profusely”.
Many people will remember how the prince later claimed he had a condition which meant he was not able to sweat.
Her book gives an account of how they took a bath, “but didn’t stay there long because the prince was eager to get to the bed”.
There, Ms Giuffre claims he paid a lot of attention to her feet and was then “in a rush to have intercourse”.
“Afterwards, he said thank you in his clipped British accent”, and she claims the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.
There is a paragraph in this part of Virginia Giuffre’s book which has attracted a lot of attention, and we have not heard her claim before.
She wrote: “In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about how he behaved. He was friendly enough, but still entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.”
The next encounter with the prince, claims Giuffre, happened in the same year, about a month later, at Epstein’s townhouse in New York.
The third, she alleges, was on “a 72-acre island Epstein owned in the US Virgin Islands”.
There, she wrote, “it was not just the two of us this time; it was an orgy” in which “Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls and I had sex together.”
It makes for very uncomfortable reading from a woman who continues to make claims against the King’s brother from beyond the grave.
A senior royal source said on Thursday with a heavy dose of sarcasm that Prince Andrew “is the gift that keeps on giving,” and of course, as they were acknowledging, the issue is “giving” for all the wrong reasons.
Prince Andrew continues to live at Royal Lodge on the Windsor Estate with his former wife, Fergie, the Duchess of York.
They have both been the subject of newspaper stories in recent weeks, in which it’s alleged they sent private emails to Jeffrey Epstein after the time they claimed in public they had ceased all contact with him.
It’s brought yet more reputational damage to the York family.
Despite stopping the flow of money Andrew was getting from his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, and ending his public-funded security, King Charles has been unable to remove his brother from Royal Lodge.
Andrew says he has a cast-iron lease with the Crown Estate and is, evidently, still able to make the rental payments.
He has always strenuously denied the allegations made against him by Virginia Giuffre and says he has no recollection of ever having met her.
The Duke of York came to an out-of-court agreement with Ms Giuffre in 2022 for an undisclosed sum thought to have been many millions of pounds.
He did so without any admission of liability on his part, and to this date, he has never been convicted of anything in a court of law in either the USA or the UK.
Virginia Giuffre’s book will be published on 21 October.
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