Who is Virginia who accused prince Andrew?
Who is Virginia Giuffre, the American woman who accused Prince Albert of sexually abusing her when she was a minor?
The royal family has consistently denied her allegations of sexual abuse by Prince Albert at the time she was 17 years old. Virginia Giuffre claims Andrew beat and deliberately harassed her while Jeffrey Epstein cheated on her. All lawyers' efforts to dismiss the case failed. His legal team hoped the charges against the prince would be dropped under an agreement Virginia Giuffre signed with the late Epstein, pledging not to sue him or anyone associated with him for which he paid her half a million dollars. A trial is underway in New York, and it seems that Queen Elizabeth's son will still have to answer the accusations. But who is Virginia Giuffre?
She was born Virginia Roberts in 1983 in California. Her family later moved to Florida. At the age of seven, she said, she was sexually abused by a family friend, and ‘her childhood was quickly taken away’. "I was so mentally frightened at such an early age and I ran away from it," she told.
She spent her childhood in foster families, and until she was 14 she lived on the street where she says, she found nothing ‘except hunger, pain and more abuse’. In 2000, while trying to rearrange her life, she met Ghislaine Maxwell, a member of the elite, a favorite of high society in London and New York. While Giuffre worked at Donald Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Maxwell offered her the opportunity to train as a massage therapist.
When Giuffre arrived at Epstein's home in Palm Beach, she claims he was lying naked and that Maxwell had instructed her on how to massage him.
"They asked questions about who I was. They looked like dear people, so I trusted them, and I told them that I had a very difficult period in my life until then - that I ran away from home, was sexually and physically abused. That was the worst thing I could tell them because now they knew how vulnerable I was," Giuffre told the BBC. She explained that for what she expected to be a job interview, it soon turned into the beginning of her years of abuse.
Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty in December on five of the six counts, including the most serious charge of sex trafficking in minors. Although Giuffre was mentioned on many occasions in court, she was not one of four women who testified against Maxwell. In 2015, Giuffre filed a defamation lawsuit against Maxwell after accusing her of lying.
When she was 17, she claims Epstein brought her to London and introduced her to Prince Andrew. The now-famous photo he says was taken that night shows the prince with his arm around Giuffra's waist, while Maxwell smiles in the background.
After going to a nightclub, Giuffre says Maxwell told her that for Andrew he has to do what she does for Jeffrey. "It was a terrible time of my life. I was not tied to the sink, but these powerful people were like my chains, " she told the BBC.
In her lawsuit, Giuffre alleges that Prince Andrew sexually abused her three times. The first time it was at Maxwell's house in London that night, and later at Epstein's houses in Manhattan and Little St James in the Virgin Islands. Prince Andrew said in an interview with BBC Newsnight 2019 that he does not remember ever meeting Giuffre and, in response to her statement that they had sex in the US and the UK, that it didn’t happen.
By 2003, Epstein had lost interest in her. Giuffre persuaded a wealthy financier to pay for her training to become a true professional masseuse and helped her go to a course in Thailand. On the trip, she met the man she fell in love with and married him 10 days later. She moved to Australia with him and started a family. She now lives in a large house on the coast of Perth with him and they have three children. She founded a non-profit organization called 'Speak Out, Act, Reclaim '(SOAR), which aims to educate and raise awareness about victims of trafficking.
