Virginia Giuffre vs. Prince Andrew
“[Giuffre] feared death or physical injury to herself…for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth, and authority.”
All throughout Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial, letters and motions were hitting another docket in the Southern District of New York.
In August 2021, Virginia Giuffre’s law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP filed a complaint against Prince Andrew of York. It alleged that the prince had sexually abused Giuffre on separate occasions when she was a child under the age of 18.
The complaint describes how on one occasion, at Maxwell’s London home, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew allegedly forced Giuffre to have sexual intercourse with Prince Andrew “against her will.”
On another occasion, at Epstein’s New York Home, the complaint alleges, Giuffre and one other victim were forced by Maxwell to sit on Andrew’s lap while the prince touched her. “During his visit to New York,” the complaint continues, “Prince Andrew forced [Giuffre] to engage in sex acts against her will.”
The complaint further alleges that Prince Andrew sexually abused Giuffre on Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
According to Prince Andrew, says the complaint, he met Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell, now a convicted child sex trafficker, in 1999. Publicly available flight logs show that the prince flew with Epstein often on his private jet starting in 1999. Entries show him flying with Epstein and Maxwell to Little Saint James, as well as to West Palm Beach in Florida, and Teterboro in New Jersey, where Epstein would land when he spent time at his Manhattan townhouse.
Each time the abuse occurred, Giuffre claims that she was “compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew, and feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth, and authority.”
Furthermore, Prince Andrew knew Giuffre’s age; according to the complaint he had been told it by Maxwell and Epstein, and he knew “that she was a sex-trafficking victim being forced to engage in sexual acts with him.”
The complaint finishes with listing the formal causes of Giuffre’s action.
The first is for battery, specifically sexual offenses as defined in New York Penal Law Article 130, with crimes including sexual misconduct, rape in the third degree, rape in the first degree, forcible touching, sexual abuse in the third degree, and sexual abuse in the first degree.
The second cause of action listed is for the intentional infliction of emotional distress.
“Prince Andrew’s actions,” the complaint says, “constitute extreme and outrageous conduct that shocks the conscience. Prince Andrew’s sexual abuse of a child who he knew was a sex-trafficking victim, and when he was approximately 40 years old, goes beyond all possible bounds of decency and is intolerable in a civilized community.”
NY Child Victims Act
The timing of the complaint comes in the context of the 2019 New York Child Victims Act.
That act was signed into law on February 14th, 2019, and provided a one year extension, beginning 6 months after the act came into force, for survivors to file claims seeking money damages.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order extending the window for claims until August 14th, 2021. Giuffre filed her complaint 5 days before this extension expired.
According to Giuffre’s complaint, she was forced to file this claim because Prince Andrew and his lawyers were non-responsive.
Attached to the pleading was a letter sent from Giuffre’s lawyers to Prince Andrew’s representatives, Clare Montgomery, Gary Bloxsome, and Stephenson Ferguson. It proposed a “tolling agreement,” which would extend the statue of limitations from July 21, 2021, to January 31, 2022. No admission of liability would be inferred by the agreement. This, said Giuffre’s lawyers, received no response.
Giuffre-Epstein Settlement
On January 3rd, 2022, a settlement between Giuffre and Epstein was ordered to be unsealed. It included language, argued the defense, that excluded the prince from any possible action by Giuffre. She signed the agreement on the 17th of November, 2009. Epstein signed a week later, on November 25th, 2009.
In exchange for $500,000 from Epstein, Giuffre agreed to dismiss a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida styled Jane Doe No. 102 vs Jeffrey Epstein. That sum, said the agreement, was received “from or on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein and his agent(s), attorney(s), predecessor(s), successor(s), heir(s), administrator(s), assign(s) and/or employee(s).” Anyone among those groups is referred to as “Second Parties.”
The document acknowledged the receipt of the money, and promised to “remise, release, acquit, satisfy, and forever discharge” the Second Parties and “any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant” from any action, federal or state, or otherwise, brought by Giuffre. The time-frame covered by the document was agreed to be “from the beginning of the world to the day of this release.”
Oral Arguments on a Motion to Dismiss
This morning, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan heard arguments from David Boies for the plaintiff, and Andrew Brettler for the defense. They were debating a motion to dismiss the case outright.
Brettler’s argument to dismiss took two avenues. The first was claiming that the 2009 agreement completely excluded Prince Andrew from any possible action by Giuffre. The second was that the extension to the extension in the New York Child Victims Act passed by an executive order by Governor Cuomo was unconstitutional. As a result, Giuffre’s pleading was filed after the deadline to make a claim. Brettler also argued that Giuffre’s claims were unspecific and vague.
“Ms. Giuffre needs to lock herself into a story now,” he said. “She needs to allege when Prince Andrew abused her…even a year.”
Further, argued Brettler, “Ms. Giuffre doesn’t allege what happened to her…she doesn’t explain what this abuse was…she was over the age of consent in New York.”
She needs to explain this “before Prince Andrew needs to answer these very serious allegations,” the prince’s lawyer said.
“With all due respect,” said Judge Kaplan, “that’s not a dog that’s going to hunt.”
It just isn’t how the law works, he said. He had to accept the truth of the pleading, and dismissed the idea that the acts being alleged by Giuffre were non-specific.
He pointed to a section in the complaint which specifically alleged “involuntary sexual intercourse.”
“There isn’t any doubt about what that means,” Kaplan said coolly, “at least since somebody else was in the White House.”
Brettler argued that Prince Andrew was one of the ‘potential defendants’ in the case Giuffre settled with Epstein. That meant, per the terms of the settlement, that Prince Andrew was protected from the action being brought against him now.
“A potential defendant is someone who could have been named in the lawsuit but wasn’t,” Brettler explained.
Boies conceded that the term ‘potential defendants’ is “a term that can have more than one reasonable interpretation.”
However, he said that his interpretation of the term has two conditions.
First, that it be someone subject to the jurisdiction of Florida, and second that the individual have committed acts under question in the proceeding.
Boies said this makes Prince Andrew eligible now because he wasn’t subject to the jurisdiction then. Furthermore, the acts Andrew committed, sexual assault and battery, aren’t trafficking related.
“There’s no allegation that Prince Andrew was the person transporting,” Boies argued. Instead, “he was somebody to whom the girls were trafficked.”
Brettler’s constitutional argument hinged on the idea that Cuomo’s extension of the extension was unconstitutional.
“It was completely arbitrary,” he said, and “done by executive order, not the legislature passing a law.”
Additionally, the extension signed by Cuomo was because of the pandemic situation, but this didn’t apply to Giuffre, Brettler said. She was healthy in Australia during the initial extension time period passed by the New York State legislature.
Furthermore, “she is represented by very sophisticated attorneys,” and had no trouble accessing the courthouse to file. Therefore, her deciding to file right before Cuomo’s extension by executive order was not timely.
Judge Kaplan asked if Brettler was making a general or specific argument. For instance, if there was a plaintiff who was sick and had poor representation, would their claim be timely?
It might not be, Brettler said, but the question was abstract, because he’s not even sure any claims after the initial deadline the legislature set are constitutional.
“The case should be thrown out,” Prince Andrew’s defense concluded, “for lack of jurisdiction…because of the duplicative claims…and because this is a time barred action.”
Boies rejected the constitutional argument, saying that the defense was trying anything that would stick.
“I think their motion makes clear that they’re attacking the legislative decision,” Boies said. Now, they were simply trying to make an argument about the governor.
"You will have a decision pretty soon but I will not define that further," concluded Judge Kaplan.