New York - Is the court action behind the renewed scandal over Prince Andrew’s association with the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein a witch-hunt, or an attempt to hold the super-rich accountable?
Epstein, 61, is the secretive Wall Street titan who served a short 13-month jail sentence for procuring under-age girls for sex acts at his Palm Beach mansion, and remains on the national register of sex offenders for the rest of his life.
Prince Andrew lost his globetrotting role as a business “ambassador” for Britain in 2011 after he was photographed with Epstein walking in Central Park following the financier’s release from jail, and after a photograph emerged of the prince with his arm around the bare midrift of one of the teenagers at the heart of the scandal.
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It is the involvement in a new court action of that young “erotic masseuse” which has fanned the embers of an old scandal back to life. Virginia Roberts is now 31 but she was below the age of consent in Florida - which is 18 - when she first straddled Epstein to his command as he masturbated on the massage table,
She is “Jane Doe #3” in a legal move made in a Palm Beach court last week. Lawyers representing alleged victims of Epstein want to add her and another woman as plaintiffs to a civil case they launched years ago in which they challenge the “plea bargain” that put Epstein in jail as a “sweetheart deal” which was a violation of those victims’ rights. The legal point is that the prosecutors should have consulted the victims before agreeing the deal.
The lawyers are Brad Edwards and Paul Cassell. Edwards represented some of the more than 40 teenagers who testified to the prosecutors when Epstein’s life began to unravel in 2005 after the mother of a 14-year-old went to the police; Cassell is a former judge who was appalled by the leniency shown Epstein.
Politico broke the story last week with excerpts from the legal papers expanding the case to include allegations from Roberts that she had been “trafficked” by Epstein for the use of his powerful friends. Roberts names Prince Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the fallen tycoon Robert Maxwell, and the French model scout Jean Luc Brunel.
The court papers filed on Roberts’s behalf allege: “Jane Doe #3 was forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations: in London (at Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment), in New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands (in an orgy with numerous other under-aged girls).”
The allegation continues: “Epstein… trafficked Jane Doe #3 for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to describe the events that she had with these men so that he could potentially blackmail them.
“One such powerful individual that Epstein forced then-minor Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with was former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a close friend of Epstein’s and well-known criminal defence attorney. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions while she was a minor, not only in Florida but also on private planes, in New York, New Mexico, and the US Virgin Islands.”
Buckingham Palace issued denials while the ink was barely dry on the headlines: “It is emphatically denied that HRH The Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts. The allegations made are false and without any foundation.”
And by yesterday, British newspapers were adding that “lawyers acting for the Duke of York have privately accused Mrs Roberts of embarking on a ‘speculative fishing expedition’ in an attempt to ensnare him in the under-age sex scandal.”
Dershowitz was once among America’s most famous lawyers, a household name after his portrayal in the Hollywood movie Reversal of Fortune as he gets an attempted murder conviction quashed in the celebrity case of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons.
He told Politico that Roberts’s allegations were “totally, unequivocally and completely false”.
In an apparently genuine rage, he continued: “I'm planning to file disbarment charges against the two lawyers who signed this petition without even checking the manifests of airplanes or travel itineraries, et cetera. I'm also challenging the young woman and the lawyers to level those charges against me outside of the courtroom, so that I can sue them for defamation... Finally, I’m challenging the woman to file criminal charges against me because the filing of false criminal charges is a crime."
Who to believe?
Dershowitz is playing the classic defence lawyer’s card of rubbishing the character of the witness: “My only feeling is if she’s lied about me – which I know to an absolute certainty she has – she should not be believed about anyone else. So I think it must be presumed all her allegations against Prince Andrew were false as well.”
Roberts has spoken publicly once before, in a 2011 interview with the Daily Mail when it published that photograph of Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist.
In the interview, she described the four years she spent as Epstein’s ‘masseuse’, travelling with him by private jet to his various homes in Palm Beach, New York, Paris, New Mexico, the Caribbean and London. She offered a lurid description. She detailed being “set up” with Prince Andrew, in the mansion in New York (sitting on his knee in a leather armchair) and at Maxwell’s home in London. They had tea and biscuits, and went dancing. But there was no talk of sex – which is not consistent with the latest allegations.
And yet both sides have credibility issues. There is no denying that when Epstein made his “sweetheart” deal with the prosecutors, the police and prosecutors had lined up as victims and witnesses at least 40 girls and young women.
Were they all lying? Were they all getting their stories from the same book, since all of them told of much the same behaviour? Epstein paid off many of them in civil settlements, which surely is not the mark of an innocent man.
The court action in Palm Beach has been going on for six years. Whatever the details of the roles allegedly played by Prince Andrew, Dershowitz, Maxwell and others - there is certainly probable cause to quash a manifestly unjust plea-bargain and listen to the stories of the women who claim to have been used and abused by Epstein.
As Roberts said in statement though her lawyers yesterday: “I’m not going to be bullied back into silence”.
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Charles Laurence is a US correspondent for The Week.co.uk. He is a former New York bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. He divides his time between Manhattan and Woodstock, upstate New York.
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