Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, will now face a civil case in the US after his plea to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre against him for allegedly sexually abusing her when she was a minor, was rejected by a New York court, on Wednesday.
Giuffre, one of the accusers of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, sued Prince Andrew in 2021 on the grounds that he had forced her to have sexual intercourse with him. She sued Andrew under the Child Victims Act, a New York state law that allows child sexual abuse victims to “pursue claims against their abusers, even if the abuse occurred decades earlier.”
Andrew not only denied Giuffre’s claims, but also called her grounds “legally insufficient,” and relied on a 2009 agreement between Giuffre and Epstein that settled a different lawsuit.
Earlier this month, a New York court revealed the settlement that showed that Epstein had paid Giuffre $500,000, to drop the case of sexual abuse and sex trafficking against him, without any admission of liability or fault. While Andrew is of the view that the settlement also guarantees him immunity from any liability, the documents don’t explicitly mention his name, according to the court order acquired by BBC. Neither does Giuffre’s complaint mention the settlement. In fact, Giuffre’s attorney had issued a statement, after the settlement was made public, and said that it was “irrelevant” to her claim against Andrew.
Judge Lewis A Kaplan of the US Disctrict Court of New York said that Prince Andrew’s immunity under the settlement in question, was ambiguous and therefore, dismissal of Giuffre’s lawsuit on the same grounds was not justified.
He noted, “In a similar vein and for similar reasons, it is not open to the court now to decide, as a matter of fact, just what the parties to the release in the 2009 settlement agreement signed by Ms Giuffre and Jeffrey Epstein actually meant.”
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In July 2019, Epstein was charged with sex trafficking and exploiting several girls and women. Andrew is said to have been linked to Epstein, who had died by suicide in prison in 2019, while awaiting trial.
As per the complaint, Giuffre was a victim of Epstein’s sex-trafficking and abuse from 2000 to 2002, from when she was 16. Epstein kept her as a “sex slave” and forced her to have sex with Andrew at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of late media baron Robert Maxwell, she said in her complaint. Ghislaine, who is also named in Giuffre’s suit, was recently convicted by a New York court for trafficking and sexually abusing underage girls.