Prince Andrew has amassed a £10million ($12million) war chest for an alleged attempt to sever his agreement with Jeffrey Epstein’s victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed she was forced to have sex with Andrew to have when she was 17 years old.
British newspaper The Sun says Andrew is partly funding the renewed effort with the inheritance of his mother, the Queen, who died in September.
A royal source said Sun: “Pressurized to settle the case to avoid overshadowing the platinum anniversary, Andrew has paid a heavy price personally and professionally.
“The king is glad he’s investigating. As head of state, he can’t publicly support him, but Andrew is still his brother and he wants what’s best for him.”
Andrew is said to have finally struck a deal to sell his Swiss chalet for £10million last year and the Sun says the Queen left him “several millions”.
He is spurred on by a prison interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, in which she said she thought the photo of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre, with Maxwell grinning in the background, was fake, a claim Andrew has long maintained.
Maxwell told documentary filmmaker Daphne Barak, “I don’t remember meeting them. And I don’t think the picture is real. It is a fake. I don’t believe for a second that it’s real, in fact I’m sure it’s not. There has never been an original, there is no photo.”
Andrew, 62, is also said to be asking permission from his brother the King to re-use his HRH title in a bid to rehabilitate his image.
Andrew was effectively fired from among the working royals by his mother in one of her final acts as queen. However, he reportedly feels he was “pressured” to back down and come to terms with Giuffre by those who didn’t want the case to overshadow last year’s platinum anniversary celebrations.
The terms of the settlement have remained secret, but it has been widely reported that he paid around $14 million to settle with Giuffre but has not admitted guilt.
Andrew has always privately claimed that the photo is fake, and while he has not been so explicit in public statements, he strongly hinted so to Emily Maitlis in a disastrous BBC Newsnight interview.
He said: “From the investigations that we have done, you cannot prove whether this photo is fake or not, because it is a photo of a photo of a photo… No one can prove whether this photo has been manipulated or not, but I don’t remember this photo ever being taken.”
Sources close to Giuffre’s legal team admitted to The Daily Beast last year that Giuffre lost the photo, saying they don’t even know if the original of the picture “still exists,” adding, “The picture isn’t in Virginia’s possession. ”
The photo was lost after apparently being stuffed into one of several storage boxes and shipped from Colorado to Sydney between 2011 and 2016 when Giuffre relocated to Australia.
However, finding the original was not considered critical by Giuffre’s legal team, as the provenance of the copies made of it has been unequivocally established. The court case was aimed at allowing a reproduction of the widely circulated copy of the photo, first published by the Mail on Sunday.
This “copy” was a photo of the original photo taken in 2011 by a freelance New Zealand photojournalist.
Photographer Michael Thomas told The Daily Beast he believed the photo was real, saying: “At the end of the day I just copied one photo.”
“Copying” a photograph by taking a photo of it is a standard news-gathering technique to obtain an image without the owner having to release the original.
The legal source added to The Daily Beast at the time that they didn’t think failure to provide an original of the photo would affect the admissibility of the photo in evidence, saying it wasn’t “productive” for Andrew to do so contesting the image’s authenticity, adding: “It would destroy her credibility. Even Andrew didn’t say it was fake in that BBC interview.”
The source added, “The photo doesn’t show them having sex. But it shows that they were together. It shows that they met. The more he argues about this photo, the more he underscores the fact that the real question of credibility for him now is whether he’s ever met her. This is a losing battle for him.”
Online detectives have highlighted that in the photo with Andrew, Giuffre appears to be wearing the exact same clothes she wore in a photo of her at a party celebrating Naomi Campbell’s birthday.