Jeffrey Epstein’s accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre has chastised Britain’s Prince Andrew after US investigators said the royal is not responding to requests for cooperation.
Sigrid McCawley, a US lawyer representing Giuffre and several other alleged victims of the late financier, said in a statement to multiple news outlets: “Prince Andrew’s continued refusal to cooperate with authorities, after freely acknowledging that he would be prepared to answer inquiries, raises even more questions.”
She added that Prince Andrew “should take most seriously the deeply held belief in this country [the United States] that no one is above the law”.
And US lawyer Lisa Bloom, who is representing five of Epstein's accusers, told Sky News Prince that Andrew's lack of cooperation with the FBI is “a slap in the face” for the victims.
The comments came after US attorney Geoffrey Berman said that New York prosecutors and the FBI had reached out to Prince Andrew’s lawyers as part of their investigation into Jeffrey Epstein but there was “zero cooperation” from the royal. Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the matter.
Virginia Giuffre claims she was used by Jeffrey Epstein, a well-connected New York money manager, as a sex slave from 1999 to 2002. In a sworn deposition and in TV interviews, she also described her experience of being forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times beginning when she was 17.
Andrew, 60, categorically denied the accusations and maintained that he had never met Giuffre – despite the fact that there is a widely-publicised photo of Giuffre, Prince Andrew, and Epstein’s alleged “madame” Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Duke of York suggested in a BBC Newsnight interview in October that the photo, in which he is seen wrapping his arm around his accuser, was a fake. He also argued that he couldn’t have had sex with Roberts on the night she claimed because he was at a pizza restaurant with a daughter that day in 2001.
The interview generated a lot of negative reactions in Britain, with media and commentators widely criticising it as a PR fail. And a number of businesses, universities and charities were quick to cut their ties with Andrew. The prince stepped down from royal duties just days after the interview came out.
At the time, he said he was “willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations if required”.
