Prince Andrew's team allegedly tried to hire internet trolls to hassle Virginia Giuffre, her memoir claims. Photo / Getty Images
Prince Andrew’s team tried to hire “internet trolls to hassle” Virginia Giuffre, her posthumous memoir has claimed.
In her book Nobody’s Girl, which is published on October 21, Giuffre also reveals details about negotiations during civil litigation before the prince’s scheduled deposition. Giuffre was suing the prince for alleged sexual assault.
The behind-the-scenes discussions led to a settlement deal, after her lawyer had read Andrew’s agreed statement to her at 2.30am “through tears, both hers and mine”.
Andrew has consistently denied claims he raped Giuffre on three separate occasions after she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier, but agreed to the settlement in early 2022.
He agreed to the deal after facing pressure from Buckingham Palace to draw a line under the scandal as legal proceedings threatened to overshadow Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
In her memoir, Giuffre writes: “Initially, the Prince made it difficult for my lawyers to serve him with papers, fleeing to Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral Castle in Scotland and hiding behind its well-guarded gates.
“After casting doubt on my credibility for so long – Prince Andrew’s team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me – the Duke of York owed me a meaningful apology as well.
“We would never get a confession, of course. That’s what settlements are designed to avoid. But we were trying for the next best thing: a general acknowledgement of what I’d been through. After my lawyers hashed out the basic details on Zoom, I then participated in two days of mediation talks.”
She added: “Finally, at 2.30am Florida time, the Prince’s lawyers agreed to the statement we’d been pushing for. Siggy [McCawley] called me immediately and read it to me through tears, both hers and mine.”
McCawley later told Giuffre that the phone call would be one of the highlights of her career.
On Sunday, the Metropolitan Police said it was “actively” looking into claims that Andrew had passed Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number on to his bodyguard in an attempt to launch a smear campaign when she first went public with her claims in February 2011.
Leaked emails sent by the prince to a Buckingham Palace aide reveal that he had sent her confidential information to his taxpayer-funded police protection officer before forwarding confirmation of his actions to Epstein.
On Saturday, Andrew announced he had relinquished his remaining titles and honours. The King is said to have pressured his younger brother into accepting the sanction by warning that he would otherwise remove the titles himself.
The Buckingham Palace website was updated on Monday to remove Andrew’s Duke of York title.
Palace aides were keen to avoid wasting parliamentary time but Sir Keir Starmer is facing pressure to pass a law to strip the prince of his dukedom.
Giuffre, who took her life in April, alleged that the prince had raped or abused her on three separate occasions in 2001, when she was 17 years old.
In her memoir, she also recounted how the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, left her feeling scared amid unproven claims the royal family had been involved.
She wrote that the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death at the time had an impact on her because she was “surrounded by people who wielded vastly more clout than I ever would”.
She alleged that she had sex with Andrew four years after the princess died, to keep “powerful” people happy while she was in the UK.
“I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince, I said, but I felt I had to,” she wrote, saying she believed there was no way to free herself from Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s grip.
She said Tony Figueroa, then her boyfriend, was “scared that I was alone in a foreign country with people so powerful; he said he understood why I felt powerless”.
“Less than four years earlier, Lady Diana had died in a car accident, prompting some conjecture [never proven] that the royal family had somehow been involved.
“Tony and I had no way of knowing if this was true, but we were sure that I was surrounded by people who wielded vastly more clout than I ever would.”
Giuffre added: “Tony and I agreed that, especially while I was abroad, I needed to keep Epstein and Maxwell happy.”
Mohamed al-Fayed, the former Harrods boss, had claimed Prince Philip “masterminded” the car crash that killed Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, his son, but an inquest found that Henri Paul, their chauffeur, was drunk and had been driving too fast.
Andrew’s office did not immediately respond to the claims.
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