Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew’s accuser, is determined to ‘get the truth out’

Her baby face appears in a photo that has gone around the world. Long blond hair, rosy cheeks, she smiles at the flash reflected in the window in the background. The man’s hand resting on her waist is that of Prince Andrew.

He who, during a disastrous BBC interview in the fall of 2019, hammered “not remembering having met this young woman” who accuses him of rape. Now 38, Virginia Roberts now bears the name Giuffre. And made his trauma the fight of a lifetime.

The American welcomed, in a series of tweets this Friday, January 14, that a New York judge validated her complaint filed in August. “I am pleased with Judge Kaplan’s decision which allowed my litigation against Prince Andrew to move forward. I am pleased to have the chance to continue to tell the truth and I am deeply grateful to my extraordinary team of lawyers “, she wrote. “Their determination has allowed me to seek justice from those who have hurt me and so many others. My goal has always been to show that the rich and powerful are not above the law and must be held to account”, she continues. And make sure she “do not walk this path alone, but alongside other survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking”.

Born in August 1983 in California, Virginia Giuffre grew up in Florida. A complicated childhood during which she was tossed from foster family to foster family. At 14, she is on the street. And find there only “hunger, pain and violence”. Two years later, she goes up the slope and lands a small job that will seal her destiny. While working in the locker room at the Mar-a-Lago spa, owned by Donald Trump, she was approached by Ghislaine Maxwell. The British socialite offers her to become a masseuse for her boyfriend, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

“They seemed like nice people so I trusted them. I told them that I had been through a very difficult time in my life. I had been a runaway, had been sexually abused and physically… It was the worst thing I could have said to them because they knew from then on how vulnerable I was”, she recalled in 2019 in the program “Panorama” of the BBC. The one in which Princess Diana testified in 1995. Virginia Giuffre recounts the sex trafficking to which she was subjected by the Maxwell-Epstein couple, who “passed her like a fruit platter” from friends to friends.

“I was not chained to a sink but these powerful people were my chains”, she slips. For the first time, she also opens up about her meeting with Prince Andrew. She was 17 in 2001 when Epstein and Maxwell brought her with them to London. She talks about an evening in a very select nightclub in the capital in which they entered like VIPs “because they were with a prince”. It was that evening that the famous photo was taken, on which Ghislaine Maxwell also appears.

“She told me I had to do to Andrew what I was doing to Jeffrey”, says Virginia Giuffre who ended the evening with the queen’s son. “It didn’t last very long…the procedure. It was disgusting. He wasn’t mean. He got up, said thank you and left”, she says, very moved. She claims to have been forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times between 2001 and 2002. So in London, New York and Little St James, Epstein’s private island in the Virgin Islands.

The following year, she was sent to Thailand to take massage lessons and bring a young woman back to the United States for Epstein. But there, she falls in love. It’s the click. “I escaped. I called Jeffrey, told him I wasn’t coming back. He wished me a good life and hung up. And it was over”, she tells the Miami Herald. Now settled in Australia, she is married to the man she met on Thai soil. The couple have three children.

If she has found a smile, some wounds will remain open. “I will never heal. Some pieces in me can never be put back together”, believes the one who created an association to help victims of trafficking. Delighted by Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction for sex crimes last month, she says that “it is not finished”. Deprived by his mother of his royal title and his military honors, Prince Andrew would consider a financial agreement to escape the trial at the end of the year. But his accuser is determined to go to the end of the procedure to have him convicted.