When Ghislaine Maxwell was imprisoned, she referred to the Duke of York as a “close friend.”
The 60-year-old disgraced socialite spoke out in a prison interview about helping the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein with his international sex-trafficking network, bringing up Prince Andrew, 62.
Speaking to The Sun from her cell in Florida’s low-security FCI Tallahassee prison, she said about the royal: “I feel so bad for him. I keep up with his progress.
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Maxwell said, “I recognise that our connection could not survive my conviction. Andrew’s defence team apparently stated that they were not close friends. Such is the cost of the association for him. He is a great friend to me. I’m concerned for him.
In two interviews, Maxwell expressed her opinions, one in Florida and the other in June at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York, where she was detained while she was on trial.
The iconic photo of her with Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s sex trafficking victims, with whom the queen is rumoured to have had intercourse, and which was allegedly taken at her home in Belgravia, London, was likewise described by her as “not real.”
Virginia, then 17 years old, is pictured with Andrew’s arm around her in the photograph, which is reported to have been taken in March 2001.
Virginia claimed that she was compelled to have sex with Andrew, but Andrew vehemently refutes this claim.
Regarding the photo of her, Virginia, and Andrew, Maxwell remarked, “The photo is not real. An original one was never created. I’m not even going to bring up Virginia.
She insisted that the photograph has more than 50 “issues,” which caused her to believe it was a fake.
On a special episode of Newsnight in 2019, Andrew told Emily Maitlis that she couldn’t “establish whether or not that photograph is faked or not because it is a photograph of a photograph because it is a photograph of a photograph.”
Nobody can definitively say whether or not the photo was altered, but I don’t remember that photo ever being taken, he continued.
Andrew agreed to a cash settlement with Virginia, who brought a legal case against him in the US and claimed he sexually abused her three times in 2001 when she was 17 after being trafficked by Epstein – who was found dead in his New York jail cell aged 66 in 2019 after an apparent suicide.
The duke has continuously denied any misconduct, saying in his Newsnight appearance that Virginia lied about specifics in her claim, such as his capacity for sweating.
The settlement was supposed to cost £12 million, but according to sources, his legal team was able to negotiate a bargain for between £3 and $5 million.
Prince Andrew, according to Ghislaine Maxwell, “I feel so horrible for him.”
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