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By: Ellen Cans
The United Kingdom’s Prince Andrew is said to be dreading the upcoming unsealing of court documents in New York, which will have his name listed alongside 170 people with ties to Jeffrey Epstein. As reported by the NY Post, The Duke of York is “totally tormented” over the anticipated January release of a trove of court documents, connected with the defamation lawsuit of Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, which she brought in 2015 against Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted pedophile’s madam. “Andrew’s name is in there,” a source told the Daily Mail. “He is beside himself with this latest development and everyone close to him is concerned for his mental wellbeing.”
Last year, the humbled British royal was stripped of his HRH [“His Royal Highness”] distinction, and several of his patronages by his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth, due to his revealed ties with the late sex offender. “He is facing his second Christmas without his mother and now the New Year is going to start with his name being dragged through the mud all over again,” the sources told the Mail in the story published Sunday.
Last week, Manhattan federal Judge Loretta Preska had ordered the unsealing of the documents which name scores of people with links to Epstein, the late financier who commited suicide in his jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Under the ruling, dozens of individuals, whose names were previously protected, being referred to as “Jane Does” or “John Does” in various court filings linked to Giuffre’s case, will be named publicly when the materials are “unsealed in full” this January. The judge gave those persons, who also include Epstein’s former employees as well as victims, 14 days to appeal the decision, per the court order. Per the Daily Mail, “other names set to be made public in the new documents include Wall Street bankers, business leaders and big-name politicians and academics.”
Some of the individuals who are set to be named in the unsealed papers have previously spoken out in media interviews about their working relationships with the convicted pedophile, or how they were abused by him, the ruling says. The lawsuit, which was settled in 2017 for an undisclosed amount, had focused on Giuffre’s claim that Maxwell defamed her by saying that she was lying about being sex-trafficked by Epstein as a teenager.
Prince Andrew, 63, was captured in a now-infamous photo with his arm around a then-17-year-old Giuffre as Ms. Maxwell smiled in the background. Maxwell was convicted in late 2021 of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004. In June 2022, she was sentenced in a New York court to twenty years’ imprisonment. In July 2022, Maxwell was transferred from Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, to a low security federal prison for female inmates at FCI Tallahassee in Florida.
“Every time Andrew hopes to put his association with Epstein in the past, it flares up again,” a source told the Daily Mail on Sunday. “It doesn’t matter that he has never been charged, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing, his name keeps getting dragged through the mud by association. This is going to hang over him all Christmas.”
