US attorneys representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein have hailed Tuesday’s settlement between Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre as a “victory” for survivors, with one claiming the royal’s “arrogance” stood in the way of settling sooner.
Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against the Duke of York in New York last year, accusing the prince of sexually abusing her when she was 17. The move represents a remarkable turnaround for the duke, who has always denied having a sexual relationship with Giuffre and had vowed to clear his name in court.
In the settlement, the prince said he regretted his association with Epstein, who killed himself in prison in 2019 while facing trial for sex crimes.
“It’s another banner day for the survivors,” Robert Lewis, a New York-based lawyer for Sarah Ransome, who was abused at the age of 22 and settled a lawsuit with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2018, told the Guardian.
He said he felt the victims had “been heard, and were no longer silenced” after Maxwell, the disgraced British socialite, was convicted in December on charges of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sexual encounters with Epstein between 1994 and 2004, but he said Tuesday’s developments would further empower them.
“They understand the pain and suffering that other survivors have gone through and they’re happy to see other survivors get some vindication, whether it’s the money paid or even more importantly just an acknowledgement that their claims are legitimate, that they’ve been wronged and that the truth is out.”
Lisa Bloom, attorney for several of Epstein’s victims, said in a tweet that Giuffre had achieved “what no one else could: getting Prince Andrew to stop his nonsense and side with sexual abuse victims”.
“My clients and I see this as a monumental victory for Virginia and are just in awe of her courage,” Bloom told the Guardian. “She stood up … she did it not only for herself but for other victims. It’s really an inspiration.”
Bloom said cases such as these where “everyday people can stand up and get justice” provided hope to other victims. “Every time there’s a victory for somebody like this it goes a long way toward inspiring victims to stand up and stick with the fight,” she added.
Settlement money, which Bloom said surely amounted to millions of dollars, would go toward Guiffre’s charity and support victims who haven’t received news coverage and don’t have a celebrity name attached to their cases, she said.
However, Lewis said he was surprised the prince had not settled the case sooner. Asked if there had been “any element of arrogance” in the prince’s delay in settling, Lewis said: “That’s absolutely the case.”
“It’s true for Epstein, it’s true for Maxwell, it’s true for the Catholic church, it’s true for the prince … they think the law on some level applies only to everybody else.
“The settlement does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that he and his advisers and lawyers didn’t see this earlier and come to terms with it much earlier.”
The court document that revealed news of the settlement on Tuesday said: “Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms Giuffre’s character, and he accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks.”
However, Lewis said he believes the royal’s previous conduct, from his claim of not remembering meeting Giuffre to denouncing her allegations as “baseless” has been questionable.
“What I observed, and what the world observed, was that for the last however many years he’s been dodging the whole matter. He sat for that terrible [Newsnight] interview in 2019, that didn’t come off well at all. Then they fought jurisdiction in New York and lost, and moved to dismiss, and lost.
“So he was a couple of weeks from being deposed and having to answer questions under oath to lawyers, who had a lot more information about the situation than journalists did.
“Given that, and the further diminution in his public standing, which is obviously important to him, it was a good time for him to settle.”
Bloom said the settlement means the royal would not “malign [Giuffre] any more”.
“Folks need to understand how extraordinarily difficult and painful it is to litigate a sexual abuse case, and Virginia has shown more courage in one day than most of us show in an entire lifetime, by not only going after Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, but now Prince Andrew, and standing up to him,” Bloom saidin an interview with Talk Radio.
“Part of this settlement is acknowledging her pain and what she has gone through, and that he did not intend to malign her character. He’s not going to malign her any more.
“He states publicly that he regrets his association with Jeffrey Epstein, which frankly, he should have said a long time ago. These are good accomplishments. It would have been nice for all of us to see this trial … but at the end of the day Virginia gets to decide what’s best for her. She does not have to carry the weight of the world’s interest.”
