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Monday 2 December 2019 21:25
An interview with the woman who claims she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew as a teenager will air on BBC on Monday evening.
Virginia Giuffre will tell her story on UK television for the first time in a Panorama episode called The Prince And The Epstein Scandal. The American woman claims the Duke of York slept with her three times – twice while under age – after she was trafficked by convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Prince Andrew and Buckingham Palace have denied the claims.
In a trailer for the episode, she said: “He knows what happened. I know what happened. And there is only one of us telling the truth.”
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Mike Pezzulo, a local handyman who worked near the house, says he say lots of girls coming and going every day. Everyone on the street knew what was going on, he says. Prince Andrew visited too.
Ms Giuffre tells how she was asked to take her clothes off and she succumbed, and let them abuse her.
“They seemed like nice people so I trusted them and told them I was a runaway and had been sexually abused. It was the worst thing I could have told them because they knew how vulnerable I was. It was a gift for them.”
When she was 17, Ghislaine offered her the chance to work as a masseuse for Epstein, and went to his home for an interview, where he was lying naked on a table, Ms Giuffre says.
The couple were invited to Sandringham for a shooting weekend. Ghislaine introduced Virginia Roberts, a vulnerable girl, to Epstein.
“I was mentally scarred at a young age. I found nothing on the streets except hunger, pain and abuse,” she said.
In the 1990s he started dating Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell. They would feed off each other’s energy to abuse girls, says Sarah Maxwell, one of their victims.Ghislaine is one of Prince Andrew’s oldest friends and introduced Epstein to the rich and powerful including the Duke of York.
Epstein abused the schoolgirls at his home in Palm Beach after sending taxis to collect them.
Epstein arranged for underage girls to give him nude massages, one witness tells Panorama.
“The best way to describe Jeffrey Epstein was just creepy,” Spencer Kuvin, a lawyer for the victims, says.
Now a married mother of three, she told reporter Darragh Macintyre: “I implore the citizens of the UK to stand beside me, to help me fight this fight … this is a story of abuse.”
Ms Giuffre says she has given the famous photo of herself with the prince to the FBI.
Five women want to call the prince as a witness, according to Panorama.
Ms Giuffre’s interview was recorded before the Duke of York gave his interview to Newsnight but she later said she stood by her comments.
Last month Prince Andrew said he did not recall meeting Ms Giuffre, and that he had a medical condition that meant he did not sweat after suffering an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands war when he was shot at.
“This guy was sweating all over me, like his sweat was like it was raining basically everywhere,” she says.
Ms Giuffre has claimed in court papers in Florida that she was trafficked to have sex with friends of Jeffrey Epstein, including Prince Andrew.
Epstein was found dead in prison after being arrested for sex trafficking. Since his death, the deceased financier’s ties to prominent figures in American media and politics — including presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — have fuelled rampant conspiracies that he was silenced. But a medical examiner concluded that he killed himself.
Last month, Prince Andrew stepped back from public duties after a Newsnight interview he gave about his ties to the billionaire paedophile. The prince said he regretted his association with Epstein and “deeply sympathised” with his victims.
He had been widely criticised for not expressing sympathy in that interview for Epstein’s victims.
The Duke of York and Buckingham Palace have repeatedly denied Ms Giuffre’s claims.
Virginia Giuffre describes what she says was an encounter with Prince Andrew that led her to later allege she was forced to sleep with him while she was underage.
Ms Giuffre – formerly Roberts – is expected to go into further detail about her relationship with the Duke of York.
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