Friends of Prince Andrew have said the prince and his family are “completely unsurprised” that his sex accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, made a string of questionable claims about being in a high speed bus crash that had brought her to death’s door.
One friend of Andrew’s told The Daily Beast: “There is no sense of satisfaction on the duke’s part at Giuffre’s disgrace. If anything it has brought back the sadness the entire family feel that this woman, who he always maintained was a fantasist, was allowed to ruin his life. The whole family are completely unsurprised that her alarmist post turned out to be a fabrication.”
Giuffre now says that an Instagram post in which she claimed she only had four days to live after being involved in a horrific bus crash was inaccurate. The Jeffrey Epstein victim’s admission came after police in Western Australia, where she now lives, told The Daily Beast that the only bus crash they could find on their systems in the relevant dates was not serious and had resulted in no injuries.
Andrew paid Giuffre a reported $14 million in 2022 to settle a lawsuit she brought against him alleging sexual abuse but has always maintained he has no recollection of meeting her and never had sex with her, despite the wide circulation of a photograph showing him grinning, with his arm slung around her waist, when she was just 17.
Giuffre had claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17 and being sexually trafficked by Epstein. Andrew has always emphatically denied the allegations.
Andrew and his supporters, including jailed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, have claimed the photo is fake. Some have highlighted that Giuffre appears to be wearing exactly the same set of clothes in the photo with Andrew as she wore in a photo of her at a party to celebrate model Naomi Campbell’s birthday.
Sources close to Giuffre’s legal team admitted to The Daily Beast in 2022 that she had lost the photo, saying they didn’t even know if the original of the picture “still existed,” adding, “The picture is not in Virginia’s possession.”
The “copy” now in existence is a photo of the original photo taken by a freelance New Zealand photojournalist in 2011.
The photographer, Michael Thomas, previously told The Daily Beast he believed the photograph was genuine, saying, “At the end of the day, I just copied a photo.”
“Copying” a photograph by taking a photo of it is a standard news-gathering technique to obtain an image without requiring the owner to relinquish the original.
There has previously been some speculation among Andrew’s friends that he might try and reopen the settlement with Giuffre.
Royal writer Daphne Barak, who conducted a jailhouse interview with Maxwell, previously told Talk TV’s Jeremy Kyle Live: “I am very close to the people most close to [Andrew]… There is a feeling right now that he settled too quickly, he might have misunderstood that when he gave up the titles that they would not be given back to him. It’s a tough reality for him. If indeed he was forced to settle for something he didn’t do... is something that is being considered legally right now, that is something I can definitely confirm.”
However, that strategy now appears to have been abandoned, one source told The Daily Beast, saying, “Andrew won’t be trying to reopen the legal settlement. That horse has bolted. But in the longer term, anything that exposes Virginia Giuffre as a liar is a positive for his reputation. He has been quite adamant from day one that he never met her and certainly never had sex with her. Someone capable of lying about being four days from death is quite capable of lying about their interaction with him. Andrew knows he made mistakes—but sleeping with Virginia Giuffre was not one of them.”
One of Andrew’s most prominent public supporters in the Giuffre case, the royal writer and YouTuber Lady Colin Campbell, told The Daily Beast: “Virginia Giuffre has lied, lied, and lied again and repeatedly been caught in those lies, not least by Alan Dershowitz, who forced her to retract her wild claims about him. She is utterly unreliable and has accused figures from Bill Clinton to Ehud Barak of having had sex with her.
“It is a matter of public record that she worked for Jeffrey Epstein, procuring women for him, as an adult. It is remarkable that she has so frequently, until now, been presented as credible by so many publications and politicians who want to use her as a stick to beat Andrew with. I firmly believe Andrew was entirely innocent of the accusations made against him by Giuffre, as I have repeatedly said on my YouTube channel. If I am wrong, why has she not sued me? Indeed, I invite her to sue me, because then I will have a chance to cross examine her in a witness box.”
The driver of the bus involved in the accident with Giuffre in Western Australia has now come forward and said that he merely clipped a car, that it was not driven by Giuffre, and that he did not see Giuffre inside it.
It has also been revealed that Giuffre was due in court two weeks ago on allegations that she breached a restraining order.
Giuffre has referenced a difficulties seeing her two teenage children in some online posts, and is believed to have separated from their father and her husband of 22 years, Robert Giuffre, last year.
