A probable civil trial in New York for Prince Andrew: accused of sexual assault, the second son of Queen Elizabeth asks to defend himself before a jury for acts he allegedly committed in 2001 on an American still a minor.
In a substantiated document made public on Wednesday by his lawyers and the federal court in Manhattan, “Prince Andrew hereby demands a trial by jury on all the grounds invoked in the civil complaint” filed in August 2021 in New York by Virginia Giuffre, 38, who accuses the prince of sexually assaulting her three times in 2001.
In the entourage of Andrew in London, it is confirmed that “this simply means that the case will be settled in court”.
Many attempts
After multiple attempts in recent months to block and have Virginia Giuffre’s complaint dismissed, Prince Andrew, 61, who lives deprived of any official role and stripped of all his military titles, therefore seems to have resolved to be tried in civil court in New York in a trial that will inevitably have a huge impact on the British royal family.
As he has always “categorically” denied them, Prince Andrew disputes Mrs. Giuffre’s accusations point by point in the legal document from his lawyers. The latter, who now resides in Australia, was herself the victim of financier Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in prison in 2019, and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted in December in New York of sex trafficking of minors.
Lawsuit in sight
Prince Andrew is accused of sexual assault in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands, residences of the couple of sexual predators Epstein-Maxwell, when the victim was 17 years old.
The increasingly likely prospect of a civil trial in New York does not preclude the two parties from finding a financial compensation agreement. In the fall of 2021, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Manhattan court, who on January 12 rejected the last princely appeal, predicted that a civil trial would take place “between September and December 2022”.
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