“Prince Andrew’s not the prince from the fairy-tale stories you read,” says Virginia Roberts Giuffre in the third installment of Lifetime’s docuseries Surviving Jeffrey Epstein, which airs Monday.
In Giuffre’s telling, Andrew is a different kind of prince—one allegedly willing to have sex with a 17-year-old girl after joking that she is just a few years younger than his own daughters. And one allegedly willing to accept criminal sex with underage women proffered by Jeffrey Epstein, even if the act put him—and, by extension, the integrity of the British royal family—in an incredibly vulnerable position. (Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing regarding any accusations and has not been charged with any crimes.)
Giuffre claims that Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew on three occasions—once in London, at Ghislaine Maxwell’s home; once in New York; and once on Epstein’s private island. (Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied these claims.) And in the docuseries Giuffre claims that Epstein’s decision to send her to the prince was all part of a perverted master plan.
There was a period in the early aughts when Giuffre says that Epstein “started literally trafficking me. There were times that he would send me on a commercial flight to go meet the people…saying, ‘I want you to take care of them and report back to me what they liked, what you did for them.’” Giuffre volunteers that Prince Andrew was one of these targets.
Accuser Lisa Phillips also claims that Giuffre was not the only woman whom Epstein dispatched to Prince Andrew.
“Most of the girls didn’t speak about what happened with Prince Andrew, but I had one very good friend who confided in me about her experience with him,” says Phillips in the series. “She told me that Jeffrey kind of instructed her to go into a room and have sex with Prince Andrew. She told me, ‘Jeffrey isn’t really who he says he is.’”
Phillips says that she later asked Epstein point-blank about his relationship with Prince Andrew.
“He didn’t want to talk about it a lot,” Phillips says, recalling that Epstein was discreet about his royal friend—though he did offer one clue about the nature of their relationship: “He just mentioned that he needs to have something on people.”
The docuseries then cuts to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Barbara Ziv, who explains, “Once [Epstein] gets someone to accept to have sex with an underage kid, it gives him some power over the individual when the individual accepts…[Epstein] thought of these girls as commodities. He gave them out like he’d give out a good bottle of wine or a trip on his boat or a flight to somewhere…They were nothing more than objects to him.”
And according to Epstein lore, Epstein was careful to collect evidence of his friends’ behind-closed-door escapades.
“The stories I kept on hearing were that in every guest bedroom in Jeffrey Epstein’s house, there were hidden cameras,” says journalist Christopher Mason, who was a longtime friend of Maxwell’s. “And that part of Jeffrey’s ability to manipulate was that he had this video of powerful men having sex with underage girls. And these recordings were held in a safe that Jeffrey was using as a power tool to manipulate wealthy guys to make them do whatever he wanted.”
Prince Andrew is locked in a seeming stalemate with U.S. federal prosecutors over his participation in the investigation into Epstein and Maxwell. This past June lawyers for Prince Andrew accused American investigators of misleading the public and violating their own confidentiality rules. Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, responded by accusing the prince of “falsely portray[ing] himself to the public as eager and willing to cooperate” while repeatedly declining interview requests.