Prince Andrew, now headed for a jury trial over rape allegations, still intends to argue that the photo of him with a teenage Virginia Giuffre in convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home is a fake, The Daily Beast understands.
“It’s impossible to determine whether that photo has been edited or otherwise altered based on the digital copy that has been plastered all over the web,” a confidant of Andrew’s, who gave an insight into the prince’s thinking, has exclusively told The Daily Beast.
The defiant attitude mirrors the message transmitted by friends and acquaintances of Prince Andrew who say that the queen’s disgraced second son is just as insistent in private as he was in his Newsnight interview that he has never met Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accuses him of raping her three times when she was 17.
ADVERTISEMENT
Giuffre is seeking unspecified damages from the recently defenestrated royal, and this week the prospect of a courtroom showdown moved closer after Andrew asked for a jury trial.
“He just always says, ‘I don’t remember ever meeting her, I have no recollection of her whatsoever,’” one source, who knows the prince personally, has previously told The Daily Beast.
Andrew’s defiant stance is, of course, contradicted by the apparently damning photograph of the prince with his arm around the waist of a teenage Virginia Giuffre, which has been reproduced in millions of news feeds since it first emerged in 2011.
Andrew’s only solution to this otherwise intractable problem has been to suggest the picture is a fake—at one stage his friends briefed the U.K. papers that the picture couldn’t be of him because he has “chubby fingers” and the Andrew in the picture has slender ones.
Now The Daily Beast can exclusively reveal that Prince Andrew will continue to maintain his reservations about the authenticity of the notorious photograph as he heads towards a jury trial. He will maintain that it is irrelevant until the original is produced, The Daily Beast understands.
Andrew’s refusal to admit the photo is genuine is what is behind a line in his official response to Giuffre’s complaint filed this week.
Paragraph 38 in Giuffre’s suit says: “The below photograph depicts Prince Andrew, plaintiff, and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home prior to Prince Andrew sexually abusing plaintiff.”
Andrew’s response in full reads: “Prince Andrew lacks sufficient information to admit or deny the allegations contained in paragraph 38 of the complaint.”
Lawyer Rachel L. Fiset, co-founder and managing partner of Zweiback, Fiset & Coleman, told The Daily Beast the response, in essence, meant that Andrew would “seek an expert’s opinion on whether or not it is real….The photograph may be the single best piece of evidence that Giuffre has going forward in this case. It corroborates Giuffre’s story and appears to place Andrew with another prominent member of the alleged Epstein conspiracy (Maxwell) at the location of the alleged abuse. This case would likely not have garnered the amount of media attention it has without the photograph because the photograph, at the least, makes her story credible.”
Andrew’s refusal to accept the photo is genuine in the court documents broadly mirrors the position he took in his disastrous Newsnight interview, when he said: “From the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph…Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don’t recollect that photograph ever being taken.”
Virginia Giuffre has repeatedly insisted that the photo is genuine. In an interview with British TV show Panorama she said: “It’s a real photo. I’ve given it to the FBI for their investigation and it’s an authentic photo. There’s a date on the back of it from when it was printed.”
The photographer who first “copied” the image—photographers often refer to taking a photo of a photo as “copying” it and it is a standard news gathering technique to get a reproduction of an original image the owner does not want to part with—is a New Zealand photojournalist named Michael Thomas.
He has described stumbling across the image in a bundle of photographs handed to him by Giuffre.
He told the same Panorama documentary; “It wasn’t like she pulled the photo of Prince Andrew out, it was just in amongst the rest of them. They were just typical teenage snaps. There’s no way that photo is fake.”
The Daily Beast also understands that Andrew has not ruled out settling with Virginia Giuffre, despite formally requesting a jury trial this week, sources in his camp have exclusively told The Daily Beast.
While insisting that the prince has the stomach to see the court case through to a civil trial if necessary, the source said that they did not wish to “foreclose” on the prospect of a negotiated settlement.
A source told The Daily Beast: “Andrew has adamantly denied the allegations and continues to do so. These allegations are extremely serious. Anyone who was similarly accused would want to, and be entitled to, fight to clear their name. It’s human nature. But that is not to foreclose on the possibility of a resolution.”
The source noted that there were a “million reasons” why the vast majority of civil cases are settled before they reach trial, citing the expense, intrusion and “level of stress” that a full trial typically involves.
The Daily Beast understands that Andrew’s filing this week, applying for a jury trial, does not represent an alteration to the prince’s strategy, and another source familiar with Andrew’s thinking indicated that the application for a jury trial was a necessary next step in the process of continuing to litigate the case.
Both sources noted that Andrew is still unlikely to appear in person in judge Lewis A. Kaplan’s courtroom, with one saying that as Giuffre’s action is a civil trial, there is nothing “compelling” Andrew to make a physical appearance. It is likely that his evidence will be presented to the jury in the form of videotaped depositions.
However there was some satisfaction in Andrew’s camp that the filing for a jury trial seemed to be banishing the narrative that Andrew is hiding behind his mother’s skirts, with the source saying: “He has never been hiding from these allegations. That is a false narrative. He has been aggressive and he is mounting an aggressive defense as regards these claims.”
Challenging the authenticity of the notorious photograph is undoubtedly part of that aggressive strategy.
Andrew’s side are likely, therefore, to be encouraged by the fact that a source in Virginia Giuffre’s camp has exclusively told The Daily Beast that they did not know whether Giuffre still has the original of the photo, or whether the original photograph even still existed.
The source added: “But she doesn’t have to have the original. It will probably be sufficient for Virginia to identify it for the photo to be admitted as evidence. And even if it is not admitted, he will have a hard time denying that he ever met her. He can’t avoid the sworn testimony of other people who saw them together.”
Jill Steinberg, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr, told The Daily Beast: “It is not ideal if the original photo is no longer available, but it isn’t fatal. There are experts who can look at photos and address whether there are indications of tampering—of course the quality of the image that is available now may impact whether an expert can reasonably come to those conclusions.
“But perhaps most importantly, her burden is not to show that the photo is real. The photo is one of many pieces of evidence that I imagine she’ll offer to show that there was sexual contact between she and Andrew. I think the overall presentation, of which the image is one piece of the story, will be the most important driver of the outcome of the litigation if it goes to trial.”
