The court decision on Virginia Giuffre’s claim for compensation for rape and sexual abuse is a dead letter in court, which will not prevent Queen Elizabeth II’s preferred son from remaining an outcast
A New York judge will announce this week his decision on Virginia Giuffre’s demand that Prince Andrew compensate him for three acts of rape and sexual abuse, allegedly committed when he was 17 years old. If the magistrate decides to start the trial, the case will be heard in September. If it discards it, the plaintiff may appeal. But in any case, the Duke of York will remain an outcast.
The third child of Queen Elizabeth II announced in 2019, following the discovery of her long relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein and Giuffre’s public denunciations of the prince, that she was abandoning her public role as a member of the royal family and that she was “willing to assist any law enforcement agency in their investigations. ” He is still an invisible prince, but he has not kept his word.
In September, he and his attorneys staged a pantomime, complicating service of the lawsuit by Giuffre’s attorneys. Now they are asking the judge to rule it out, because it would be incompatible with an agreement signed in 2009 by Epstein and Giuffre that avoided a court proceeding in Florida in exchange for money. The magnate thus avoided another trial and a new conviction for child sex trafficking.
Judge Lewis Kaplan denied, in Tuesday’s hearing, the validity of the argument of the prince’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler, known for his defense of Hollywood stars accused of sex crimes, that Giuffre’s claim is invalid by having inaccuracies about the places and dates, about her age and the specific acts to which Andrés would have been subjected.
«Potentials», the legal code
When Brettler claimed that the 2009 agreement protecting Epstein from new Giuffre lawsuits also shields the British prince, because in his letter he extends that protection to “other potential defendants,” the magistrate interrupted him on the grounds that “neither you nor I can give meaning to the word ‘potentials’ ». From these interventions it was deduced that the judge does not feel sympathy for Andrés’ strategy.
Baptized with the name of his father’s grandfather, Andrew was born in February 1960. The Duke of Edinburgh was satisfied with his two children, but the queen convinced him to have two more after a period of apparent crisis for the couple, according to the media. . Carlos and Ana were 12 and 10 years old. The age difference would distance him during his childhood and youth from his older brothers.
Growing up in the royal family at that time meant that, at the age of two, Lisa Sheridan published a photo book, ‘A Day with Prince Andrew’, where she portrayed ‘a childlike figure in successive fantastic positions, her charming little profile of grace and security ». “Faced with such a multitude of simple poses, it can be concluded that the mind that exercises such tight control is equally harmonious,” wrote the photographer.
His mother’s favorite, according to the media frequently, followed the guideline dictated by Philip of Edinburgh for his sons, in the Spartan boarding school in Scotland where he too had been educated. As a teenager, he noted his popularity with the girls of a college in Canada where he passed a course. Then the naval academy, where the young man of action trained to become a helicopter pilot.
Like his father, Andrés knew war combat, in his case in the Malvinas Islands, a campaign in which he participated aboard an aircraft carrier. Before and after the conflict, he had a love affair with an American actress and photographer, Koo Stark, finally discarded as a future wife after the publication of stills from a film in which she appeared in a state of medium nudity.
Blindness and amnesia
Andrés eventually married Sarah Ferguson, the daughter of a military man known to the royal family as a polo team coach. While the fairy tale of his brother Charles’s marriage to Diana was shattered in plain sight, his to ‘Fergie’ was a lively love affair that injected “fresh air” into the ritual rigidity of the royal family, according to the chronicles of time.
In the ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992, the dream of the sweet and virginal Diana turned into a nightmare for the monarchy; and that of her friend, Sarah, was trampled on as a result of what courtly chroniclers call her “vulgar conduct.” The divorced Andres enjoyed his regained singleness. He earned the nickname ‘Lustful Andy’ and also ‘Air Miles Andy’.
With no occupation to satisfy him after the end of his naval career, the Government appointed him British Special Representative for Trade and Investment. Their missions around the planet perhaps generated economic benefits, but they brought truly regrettable episodes. In Kyrgyzstan, he criticized the government body that investigates the payment of bribes to officials or politicians from other countries, for example.
It was in those days that he became friends with Epstein. Twenty years later, he would claim in an interview with the BBC that he never saw young girls in their homes. On the allegations of rape by Virginia Giuffre, he said: “I don’t remember anything. When the first allegations were published, I said to myself: it’s strange, I don’t remember this. And since then I have thought and thought and thought, over and over, over and over, … And no, nothing, it just didn’t happen.
.
#Prince #Andrew #life #sentence