Prince Andrew’s out-of-court settlement with Giuffre in 2022 included no admission of guilt. Photo / UK Press via Getty Images
Prince Andrew insisted Virginia Giuffre sign a gag order so that he would not embarrass Elizabeth II during her Platinum Jubilee.
Details of the legal battle and eventual agreement are revealed in Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, which will be published next week.
The book’s claims will heap further embarrassment on the Prince who was forced to relinquish his Dukedom on Friday to avoid inflicting further damage on the Royal family.
It describes how Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview provided ammunition for her civil suit.
The Prince reached an out-of-court settlement with Giuffre on February 15, 2022.
Giuffre claimed she was sexually abused or raped by Prince Andrew on three separate occasions when she was 17. She sued him for unspecified damages.
The Prince denied all the allegations and the settlement included no admission of guilt, but Giuffre said his acknowledgment of the abuse suffered by Epstein’s victims brought tears to her eyes.
“I agreed to a one-year gag order, which seemed important to the Prince because it ensured that his mother’s Platinum Jubilee would not be tarnished any more than it already had been,” she wrote.
The Prince was reportedly intent on clearing his name, even as headlines about the case threatened to overshadow his mother’s big year.
The settlement meant Giuffre was silenced, barred from discussing the abuse she suffered at the hands of Epstein, throughout the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022.
Giuffre finished writing Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice in October last year. She took her own life six months later.
Her book describes how she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to work for Epstein at the age of 16.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year jail sentence for procuring underage girls for Epstein.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with running a sex trafficking network involving dozens of underage girls at his homes in New York and Palm Beach, Florida.
He died by suicide before he could face trial.
The book sets out Giuffre’s allegations that she was trafficked to a string of rich and powerful men.
She describes her astonishment that Prince Andrew was photographed in public with the financier in 2010, after he served a sentence for sex crimes, including procuring a child for prostitution.
And it details her legal battle with the Prince after suing him for unspecified damages in 2021.
Her case, she said, built on some of the claims he made in his 2019 Newsnight interview when he said he did not remember ever meeting Giuffre.
The interview was a public relations disaster for the member of the Royal family.
The Prince said he was with one of his daughters at the Woking branch of Pizza Express on the night Giuffre claimed to have first been trafficked to him, and that he could not have been seen dancing sweatily with her at a nightclub because he had temporarily lost the ability to perspire because of an “overdose of adrenaline” during his service during the Falklands War.
“As devastating as this interview was for Prince Andrew, for my legal team it was like an injection of jet fuel,” Giuffre wrote.
“Its contents would not only help us build an ironclad case against the Prince but also open the door to potentially subpoenaing his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
“The world didn’t know it, but settlement discussions with Prince Andrew’s team were suddenly moving quickly,” she wrote.
“After he’d stonewalled us for months, the scheduling of his deposition, which was to take place on March 10, seemed to motivate him.”
In January of that year, Buckingham Palace announced it had stripped Prince Andrew of all military titles and patronages.
A month later the settlement was announced. It reportedly included a $12m payout with a $2m donation to her charity.
“But I’d gotten more out of him than that: An acknowledgement that I and many other women had been victimised and a tacit pledge to never deny it again,” she wrote.
Her memoir details each of her three alleged encounters with the Prince and her shock at seeing a photograph of him years later strolling through Central Park together with Epstein.
“I was of course revolted to see two of my abusers together, out for a stroll,” writes Giuffre, who finished the book six months before she took her own life in Australia, aged 41.
“But mostly I was amazed that a member of the Royal family would be stupid enough to appear in public with Epstein.”
She said it was one thing for the rich and powerful to associate with Epstein before he admitted sex crimes in 2008.
“But by 2011, everyone knew that Epstein – though he’d gotten off with a light sentence – was a convicted sex offender,” she wrote.
“Seeing this new photo of Prince Andrew at Epstein’s side made ‘Randy Andy’ seem even more arrogant to me.”
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice is published by Alfred A. Knopf.