Ghislaine Maxwell’s family have released a bizarre photograph of two people in a bath at her former London home with photographs of Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre stuck to their heads in an extraordinary attempt to discredit Giuffre.
Giuffre claims that she and Prince Andrew engaged in sexual activity in the bath. Maxwell’s side says the photos show this is impossible.
In fact, the somewhat insane photograph will do little to discredit Giuffre, not least because there is clearly plenty of room in the bath for two people. Plus, in a 2011 interview, she only claimed that Andrew played with her feet in the bath. She said she and Andrew got into the bath where “he started licking my toes, between my toes, the arches of my feet.”
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She said they then went into another room where they had sex.
In 2019, she told BBC’s Panorama: “There was a bath and it started there and then led into the bedroom.”
Ghislaine’s brother, Ian Maxwell said, in comments reported by the Daily Telegraph late Friday, that the images “show conclusively that the bath is too small for any sort of sex frolicking. There is no ‘Victorian bath’, as Giuffre has claimed, which is proved both by the attached plan of the bathroom and the photos themselves.”
Maxwell’s side’s claims about Giuffre describing a Victorian-style bath seem to come from Giuffre’s unpublished memoir, entitled The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, which formed part of court records released after a law suit against Maxwell was settled in 2017.
In that book she wrote: “It was a beige marble tiled floor with a porcelain Victorian-style bathtub in the middle of the room,” however Giuffre’s lawyers have previously said parts of the memoir were fictionalized and the judge presiding over Andrew’s trial last year refused to accept the memoir as evidence in the case. It was certainly not written as legal testimony.
Andrew paid Giuffre an estimated $14 million to settle her claim that he had raped her three times but did not admit liability.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-girlfriend who was jailed for child sex trafficking in 2021, gave a jailhouse interview this week in which she said that she believed Prince Andrew never met Giuffre and that the famous photo of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre’s bare midriff, taken when she was 17, is a “fake.”
Andrew is now reported to be considering reopening the case after Giuffre dropped a case against Alan Dershowitz, and said she “may have made a mistake” in claiming she had sex with him.
Andrew reportedly sees this as an “extraordinary” development that throws his settlement with her into question.
However, he has been publicly and vociferously protesting his innocence of ever even meeting Giuffre for years. In a September 2021 email to this reporter, for example, Dershowitz told The Daily Beast: “[Giuffre] dropped the claim that she had sex with me. I never met her or even heard of her until her lawyers pressured her to falsely accuse me.”
The Telegraph says that the new picture was taken by Ghislaine Maxwell’s family to discredit Giuffre in the summer of 2021.
Maxwell’s brother, Ian, said: “The whole of Virginia Giuffre’s case pivots upon a photograph taken more than 20 years ago at my sister’s former house in Kinnerton Street, in Belgravia.
“It proves nothing. Prince Andrew and my sister think it’s a fake, but I take the view that it’s irrelevant. It just shows that Prince Andrew had his arms around a girl who wanted a photograph, as she has said herself, ‘to show to her mother’.”
Maxwell said: “Ghislaine was in custody, and shortly after the picture was taken, the mews house was sold,” he said.
“[Giuffre’s] story relating to having had sex in the bath dates back many years, and the obvious time to put it to her that the bath is too small and makes sex impossible was at the trial. But Virginia Giuffre was never called to give evidence, and the photo never came to light.
“But her admission that her claim of having sex with Alan Dershowitz may be mistaken and therefore untrue, and given Prince Andrew is considering appealing the settlement, it seemed in the context of that the correct moment to release the images.”
Maxwell said masks were used to conceal the identities of friends who acted as stand-ins.
He added: “Prince Andrew has been completely cancelled on the basis of the allegations…The truth really does need to come out. If this photo is helpful in achieving that, then that is what this is all about.”
If this is the “good news” that Prince Andrew has been gloating to friends will rehabilitate him, he is likely be disappointed, not least because many people might consider that Ian Maxwell has lived a very sheltered life if he truly believes it is impossible to have sex in a small bath, let alone lick a toe.
