Jeffrey epstein

Prince Andrew has been well and truly cut adrift. By his only family. From birth, he was styled His Royal Highness. He will go to his grave unencumbered by it. The removal of the style HRH, at the age of 61, will hurt a son of the Queen who doesn’t wear his royal status lightly. He remains a prince and a duke, but the Falklands veteran has no military titles. The uniform of an admiral he’d asked a tailor to run up will now remain in a wardrobe. Unworn in public. His patronages are gone too. Henceforth, he’s Prince Andrew, Duke of York: the non-royal, royal This is what a sacking looks like when you’re ninth in line to the British throne.

The Duke of York is heading to a New York courthouse. US District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled today that Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew may proceed as a matter of law. Ms. Giuffre’s victory means the judge finds her claims legally cognizable. As the case moves into civil discovery, Ms. Giuffre must prove all the relevant facts she alleges to be true. Prince Andrew has denied all Ms. Giuffre’s claims. In a 2021 lawsuit filed in New York’s federal courts, Giuffre sued Andrew for committing battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell stands convicted of numerous human trafficking crimes, but many of their alleged co-conspirators remain at large. Victims on both sides of the Atlantic claim they were preyed upon by the high and mighty but the predators remain unindicted and, as yet, unaccountable. Among the most high-profile of these alleged abusers is Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and ninth in line to the British throne. The Duke, the third child of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, faces a civil lawsuit by Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), whom Epstein recruited as a sex slave when she was still a minor. Roberts claims that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to Andrew in March 2001. She then met and danced with Andrew at a London club.

After five days of deliberation spanning the Christmas holiday, a federal jury in the Southern District of New York today found Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell guilty of five of six counts of human trafficking for her actions over ten years in multiple US states.

Away from the shenanigans of Westminster, the details of Ghislaine Maxwell’s ongoing trial have been filling our national newspapers this week. Images have been released of the British socialite cavorting with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at Balmoral, the Queen’s home in Scotland, with Maxwell facing allegations that she facilitated and participated in the sexual exploitation of girls for her longtime companion. In such circumstances, Steerpike was intrigued to hear that Ian Maxwell, Ghislaine’s brother, was appearing on The Spectator's Americano podcast to discuss the ongoing trial.

The high-profile trial of Ghislaine Maxwell started with a bang this week, as her defense lawyers portrayed her as a persecuted woman, a modern-day Eve blamed for Jeffrey Epstein’s sins. In opening statements, Maxwell’s attorneys attacked the credibility of the alleged victims, their lawyers, and government lawyers. One of the victims, whose testimony is crucial to the government’s case, testified that Maxwell had lured her into Epstein’s web of vice. The government countered this narrative with testimony from some of the employees closest to Epstein in an effort to show that Maxwell was an integral part of his trafficking ring. The jury heard from Epstein’s pilot, Larry Visoski, who described Maxwell as the manager of Epstein’s properties.

One of the highest-profile human trafficking cases ever charged in the United States is underway in federal court in New York. Ghislaine Maxwell, an Oxford graduate and the youngest child of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, stands accused of six counts of human trafficking and two counts of perjury. Her alleged co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein died in his jail cell after committing suicide in 2019 following his arrest by the FBI. Human trafficking is a $150 billion illegal global enterprise, second only to drug trafficking. Though the law has long outlawed sexual slavery, the George W. Bush administration began a vigorous attack on the systemic roots of human trafficking, newly empowered by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

Seventeen months is clearly long enough, as far as Prince Andrew is concerned, to spend in the royal wilderness. While mourning the passing of his father, he’s made tentative steps to reclaim his position as one of the public faces of the House of Windsor. His private status, close to his mother, has never been under threat. His first act, on this path to redemption, was an audacious one. He gave a television interview. Emily Maitlis was nowhere in sight and it passed off without incident. Indeed, it generated positive headlines with his account of how the Queen had described the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh as 'having left a huge void in her life'. Andrew also told reporters Prince Philip was a 'remarkable man' and he 'loved him as a father'.