Prince Andrew delayed and shortened a family holiday to visit Jeffrey Epstein’s private island for a party attended by a teenager who later claimed to have been forced to have sex with the Royal, according to reports.
The Duke of York was originally scheduled to go to the Bahamas in the week following Easter Sunday in 2001 for a break with his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, then 12 and 11.
But the Daily Mail reports that he “tore up long-standing official travel arrangements involving Buckingham Palace, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Metropolitan Police” in order “to follow” convicted sex offender Epstein to Little St James, about 1,000 miles to the southeast of the Bahamas.
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Attended by his senior Personal Protection Officer (PPO), the Royal spend 48 hours on the island at what sources have described as a “weekend-long party”, the paper adds.
Flight logs are said to show that Virginia Roberts, then Virginia Giuffre, was also present. Roberts claims that she was trafficked by Epstein to have sex with the late financier’s friends, including Andrew.
She has alleged that the third time she and the Duke had sex was during an orgy on Little St James that year.
The Mail reports that Andrew had also stayed at Epstein’s New York mansion immediately before jetting off for the Easter trip - despite explicitly telling Emily Maitlis that he had not during his infamous Newsnight interview in November last year.
Little Saint James is at the centre of many of the allegations against Epstein and his alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell is currently being detained at the Metropolitan detention centre in Brooklyn on charges that she helped procure girls as young as 14 for Epstein to sexually abuse, and of perjury.
The Guardian reports that she has “lodged a $28.5m (£21.4m) bail bid that includes waiving her extradition rights and employing armed guards to protect her after receiving death threats”.
