Prince Andrew’s bid to throw out the sex abuse lawsuit against him, citing a 2009 settlement Jeffrey Epstein reached with the same accuser, appeared to be met with skepticism in a hearing Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who is presiding over the federal lawsuit brought in New York, said that there are multiple ways to interpret the 2009 agreement but that the language suggested that only Epstein and accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre could say exactly what the language was intended to mean.
“But we don’t have Mr. Epstein here to say what his view was,” Kaplan said of the deceased financier, who died in federal custody in 2019 after he was arrested on sex charges. The death was ruled a suicide.
