Prince Andrew’s sex accuser said Tuesday that she did not mean to publicly post a statement claiming that she had four days to live after being hit by a school bus.
Virginia Roberts’ tragic story, which she shared in a Sunday Instagram post showing her heavily bruised in a hospital bed, had begun to attract skepticism after media outlets reported seeming inconsistencies.
But the latest statement, issued by Roberts’ family to multiple news outlets, maintains that she “remains in serious condition while receiving medical care.”
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Roberts, who now goes by her maiden name after a recent split from her husband, is a Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking victim who won a $14 million settlement from Prince Andrew in 2022. She said Sunday that a bus crashing into her car at over 60 miles per hour had left her with fatal kidney failure and that all she wanted to do was see her children before she died.
Western Australia police told the Daily Beast that, while they could not “confirm an incident based on a person’s name,” they had “located one crash involving a bus that occurred in the last week.”
They said they had “received a report of a minor crash which occurred between a bus and a car in Neergabby on 24 March just after 3pm.”
However, they added: “The collision was reported by the bus driver the following day. The car sustained approximately $2000 worth of damage. There were no reported injuries as a result of the crash.”
Roberts’ latest statement says that police were called at the time of the crash but were unavailable to come to the scene.
“The school bus driver had a bus full of distraught children and left the scene to get them back, saying he would file a police report, which he did later,” the statement says. “Virginia was banged up and bruised and returned home. Virginia’s condition worsened and she was admitted to the hospital.”
The statement claimed that Roberts, when she posted the photo and tragic story to her public Instagram, had thought that she was sharing it on a private Facebook page. The post remains up.
“Virginia thanks everyone for the outpouring of love and support,” her family said. “She is overwhelmed with gratitude. Today she remains in serious condition while receiving medical care.”
CNN reported earlier on Tuesday that a “source with knowledge of the situation” said Roberts “is a current inpatient at a hospital in Perth, but is not in a life-threatening condition.”
CNN further muddied the waters by adding that she “does have the bruising shown in the social picture, according to the source, but has not at this stage told the hospital what caused those injuries.”
Roberts’ representative Dini von Mueffling told CNN: “Virginia has been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital.”
Roberts was sex trafficked by Epstein and accused Prince Andrew of raping her as a teenager. Prince Andrew has always said he has no recollection of meeting her.
Although he has not out and out called the notorious photograph of him with a teenage Roberts a fake, he has long sought to cast doubt on its authenticity.
He told BBC Newsnight: “From the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph… Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored, but I don’t recollect that photograph ever being taken.”
In 2022, the Daily Beast revealed that Roberts had “lost” the photograph.
Prince Andrew’s former girlfriend Lady Victoria Hervey is among those who claim the picture of Andrew with his arm around a teenage Roberts’ bare waist is a composite. She has used social media posts to highlight that Roberts appears to be wearing exactly the same set of clothes in the photo with Andrew as she wore in a photo at a party to celebrate Naomi Campbell’s birthday.
Hervey posted a gloating message on social media Monday night saying, simply, “Karma.” She has since posted a number of messages casting doubt on Roberts’ claims to be dying. She wrote in one: “How does one write a massive paragraph like this on deaths door. I don’t believe it. Karma for all the lies.”
Roberts has made multiple claims that have turned out not to be true. She most famously accused Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, of having sex with her six times, but withdrew the claims and apologized after Dershowitz threatened legal action.
She also alleged that she was forced to have sex with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was one of Epstein’s business partners and visited his New York City mansion.
Barak has denied the allegations.
