Prince Andrew’s team tried to hire “internet trolls to hassle” his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, while he hid behind the “well-guarded gates” of Balmoral Castle to avoid being served court papers, according to allegations in her posthumous memoir.
Giuffre wrote of the 2022 confidential settlement of her sexual abuse civil claim against the royal, widely rumoured to be $12m (£9m), that her lawyers “were going to ask for the moon” and her team had agreed it “had to be more than mere money”.
“After casting doubt on my credibility for so long – Prince Andrew’s team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me – the Duke of York owed me a meaningful apology as well,” she wrote.
“We would never get a confession, of course. That’s what settlements are designed to avoid. But we were trying for the next best thing: a general acknowledgment of what I’d been through.”
Giuffre agreed to a one-year gag clause so as not to “tarnish” the late queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022.
Virginia Giuffre with a photograph of herself at roughly the age when she says she was abused. Photograph: Emily Michot/TNS/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
Giuffre died by suicide in April aged 41. Her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published on Tuesday, comes amid growing pressure for Andrew to be officially stripped of his titles.
Before its publication, the prince announced he would no longer use his Duke of York or Knight of the Order of the Garter titles, which are extant but inactive.
As King Charles visited Manchester on Monday to show his support to the Jewish community and those affected by the terrorist attack at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue on 2 October, pressure was growing on the royal family to go further by backing a move to formally strip Andrew of his dukedom through parliamentary legislation.
Downing Street would not be drawn on the matter, with the prime minister’s official spokesperson saying the question of legislation was “a matter for the palace in the first instance” and ministers “support the judgment of the king” regarding Andrew’s titles.
He added: “The prime minister’s thoughts are very much with the victims and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein who suffered and continue to suffer.”
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan police was “actively” looking into claims Andrew passed Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to his police protection officer in an attempt to dig up dirt for a smear campaign, after reports in the Mail on Sunday.
A Buckingham Palace source said the new allegations were of “very serious and grave concern” and should be “examined in the appropriate way”.
They said action was needed because of “what lies at the heart of this, the broader allegations and the issues highlighted”.
The Mail on Sunday reported that Andrew had embarked on an effort to smear Giuffre in 2011. The prince’s alleged attempt, on which the officer is not said to have acted, came hours before the newspaper first published the photograph of Andrew with Giuffre.
In her book, Giuffre repeats her allegations, published in an exclusive extract by the Guardian, that she was forced to have sex with the prince on three occasions, including when she was 17 and also during an orgy after being trafficked by the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew vehemently denies the allegations.
Giuffre also claims her legal case against Andrew was strengthened by the royal’s own words in his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis when he insisted he had no memory of meeting Giuffre, failed to apologise for his friendship with Epstein and failed to articulate any compassion for Epstein’s victims.
The immediate fallout saw him forced to withdraw from public life “for the foreseeable future”.
Giuffre wrote: “As devastating as this interview was for Prince Andrew, for my legal team it was like an injection of jet fuel.
“Its contents would not only help us build an ironclad case against the prince but also open the door to potentially subpoenaing his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.”
The book reads: “Did he really take Beatrice out for pizza on March 10, 2001, as he claimed? If we deposed the princesses, his family members could potentially poke holes in his alibi.
“Would his medical records really show that he had a temporary case of anhidrosis (a lack of perspiration), which typically isn’t a response to adrenaline? We weren’t quite ready to sue yet, but this interview gave us a lot more to work with than we’d had before.”
Once she went ahead with her lawsuit, she said, the prince tried to hide at Balmoral. “Initially, the prince made it difficult for my lawyers to serve him with papers, fleeing to Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral Castle in Scotland and hiding behind its well-guarded gates.”
In her memoir, Giuffre accuses Andrew of hiding from court action behind the walls of Balmoral Castle. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
A settlement was reached in 2022, thrashed out over “two days of mediation talks”. Giuffre read it through tears, she said.
In it Andrew accepted she had suffered “both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks”. He also commended her and other survivors “in standing up for themselves and others” and said he’d “never intended to malign [her] character”.
She wrote: “I agreed to a one-year gag order, which seemed important to the prince because it ensured that his mother’s Platinum Jubilee would not be tarnished any more than it already had been.”
Giuffre said she gained “more out of” Andrew than money because she had “an acknowledgment that I and many other women had been victimised and a tacit pledge to never deny it again”.
She said she looked forward to using the “Crown’s money to do some good” and said she began developing her Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (Soar) foundation to combat human trafficking.
In her final chapter, Giuffre said: “I don’t regret it, but the constant telling and retelling has been extremely painful and exhausting.
“With this book, I seek to free myself from my past. From now on, anyone who wants to know about what happened can sit down with Nobody’s Girl and start reading.”
Giuffre wrote in an email to her co-writer Amy Wallace, after a car accident shortly before she died, that it was her “heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time”, and that it was still to be released in the event of her death.
“The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders,” she said in the email.
Speaking to Channel 4 News on Monday night, Amanda Roberts, the sister-in-law of Giuffre, said the Met should “100%” reopen its investigation into Andrew.
“What else does it have to take? I think the cost of proof is too high for these survivors and we’ve seen that over and over again. It doesn’t matter who is being implicated, there is no separate law for those in power,” she said.
In response, the Met said that, on being made aware of the human trafficking allegation in 2001, it was “clear that any investigation would be largely focused on activities and relationships outside the UK”. It was concluded the Met was not the “appropriate authority” to investigate and a full criminal investigation would not go ahead, a decision reviewed and confirmed in 2019.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
