Report: Underage Girl Was Paid $15,000 to Have Sex with Prince Andrew
The Daily Mail has interviewed one of the litigants in a Florida lawsuit against the prosecutors of investment banker and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who she says provided her to Prince Andrew, Duke of York, as a sex slave. The woman, Virginia Roberts, 30, was underage at the time.
The Mail reportedly spoke to Roberts about her experience working for Epstein a year ago, but the paper was not able to publish the account until now. Roberts says she was introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell. (In 1991, Robert Maxwell was found dead in the sea after going missing from his yacht, 3 billion pounds in debt.)
Ghislaine Maxwell, Roberts alleges, worked as Epstein's madame. "She said she worked for a very wealthy gentleman called Jeffrey Epstein who was looking for a traveling masseuse and I'd get training and be paid large amounts of money," Roberts told the Mail.
"Jeffrey said he wanted to be my mentor," says Miss Roberts. "I felt that he and Ghislaine really cared for me. We'd do family things, like watch Sex And The City and eat popcorn.
"But it was a sick family. I was a paedophile's top girl, being trained up for a British Prince. He trained me to do whatever a man wanted. I was worried, but I would do anything to keep Jeffrey happy and keep my place as his No 1 girl."
The New York Post reported in 2011 that Epstein and Prince Andrew celebrated the registered sex offender's release from jail with a party at his $50 million East 71st Street mansion. Epstein plead guilty in 2008 to a single charge of soliciting prostitution. He served 13 months in jail.
Roberts alleges that she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times, the first during a visit to London. "Andrew was making eye contact with me at every chance and concentrating on my plunging V-neck top," she told the Mail. "He didn't ask me anything about myself. I just sat there with a smile frozen on my lips. Ghislaine had whispered, 'The Prince seems really interested in you.'"
Roberts claims that Epstein paid her about $15,000 for sleeping with the Prince, the Mail reports. Also: "There is no suggestion that the Prince knew that Epstein paid her."
The second time she was coerced into having sex with the prince was at Epstein's Manhattan apartment, Roberts claims; the third alleged time was on Epstein's Caribbean island, where a group of Russian models were flown in for an orgy.
Buckingham Palace has "emphatically denied" the accusations, the Associated Press reports. Prince Andrew, meanwhile, has had to cut his ski vacation short to tell his mother (Queen Elizabeth II) that he did not have sex with underage girls, the Mail reports.
"I'm not going to be bullied back into silence," she said in a statement provided to The Guardian by her lawyers. "I am going to name every guy who deserves to be named when I go to court," she told the Mail.
[Photo credit: AP Images]