Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz has claimed Prince Andrew made a “terrible mistake” by paying millions of pounds to settle a sex abuse lawsuit brought against him.
The Duke of York paid a reported £12 million to sex trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre, bringing to an end a civil US lawsuit in which she claimed she had been told to have sex with the Royal as a 17-year-old girl. Andrew has always denied the claim.
Mr Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law professor who legally represented disgraced financier Epstein, suggested Prince Andrew’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, may have been behind the payout.
“I think he made a terrible mistake. I suspect he was pressured by his mother to make that mistake”, he told Times Radio.
“If he had fought that case, I believe he would have won, I believe the case would have been dismissed on a variety of grounds, but he didn’t want to sit through a deposition, or people around him didn’t want to sit through a deposition, so he settled the case.
“Often you settle cases, not because you’re guilty of what you’re charged, but because you don’t want to admit other things that you’ve done.”
Mr Dershowitz represented Epstein when the financier admitted, in 2008, to procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting prostitution.
Epstein spent just three months behind bars on a private wing of the jail, after striking a plea deal which was concealed from Epstein’s victims. Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges.
The lawyer was a regular passenger on Epstein’s private jet, and in the newly released court papers he is named 137 times, including a claim that Epstein “required” an underage girl to “have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions while she was a minor, not only in Florida but also on private planes, in New York, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
Mr Dershowitz denies any wrongdoing and had publicly called for the court papers – from a settled lawsuit between Ghislaine Maxwell and Ms Giuffre - to be released in full.
“I had an innocent relationship with a man who I didn’t know, nobody suspected, had done anything wrong,” he told a YouTube livestream this week.
His radio comments come after it was claimed secret sex tapes had been made by Epstein of Prince Andrew, tycoon Sir Richard Branson and former US President Bill Clinton on trips to his private Caribbean island.
Sarah Ransome, who claims she was Epstein’s “sex slave”, says she viewed tapes of the men having sex with her friend and also suggested Donald Trump had sex with “many girls”.
Sir Richard called the sex tape allegation “baseless and unfounded” and pointed to a 2019 magazine article in which Mr Ransome had said she “invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behaviour”.
Mr Clinton and Mr Trump have also denied any wrongdoing.
