Things have really changed in the 11 months since Prince Andrew gave a disastrous interview to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The prince stepped back from public life and royal duties, the entire world was plunged into strange new conditions by a viral pandemic, and Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested and charged with six federal counts, including enticement of minors, sex trafficking, and perjury. (She has denied all the allegations and pleaded not guilty to the charges in July.) Despite all that, the public’s knowledge of the situations Andrew discussed—namely Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s allegations of sexual abuse, which Andrew has denied on multiple occasions—hasn’t progressed too much over that time, despite interventions by a U.S. attorney earlier this year.
On Thursday, a redacted version of a 2016 deposition Maxwell gave to Giuffre’s lawyers was made public after a protracted legal fight. Though Andrew’s name was one of the many blacked out by prosecutors, journalists at Slate and other outlets cracked the code using the index to match certain redactions to Andrew’s name. Because most of the details about Andrew from the deposition have been reported before, there isn’t too much new information to be gleaned for the people who have been following the prince’s scandal closely.
If anything, over the course of her 418-page testimony, Maxwell seems to be just as confused about how Andrew wound up embroiled in this as the rest of us. As a friend of hers told the Mail on Sunday earlier this year, she claims that she didn’t introduce Andrew to Epstein in the first place. When asked how long she has known Andrew, she said she also didn’t know how they met. “It’s so long, it’s a really long time ago,” she said. “I just don’t recall.”
In his BBC interview last year, Andrew was much more specific on both of these accounts. “I met [him] through his girlfriend back in 1999,” he said, “and I’d known her since she was at university in the U.K.” If anything, Andrew used the Maxwell connection to explain away his ties to Epstein. “Remember that it was his girlfriend that was the key element in this. He was the, as it were, plus-one to some extent in that aspect.”
In his interview, Andrew discussed at length a photo that shows him standing next to Giuffre and Maxwell. Andrew suggested that it was impossible to tell whether the photo was doctored, adding that he didn’t remember ever being in the part of Maxwell’s townhouse where the photo was taken and had never seen Epstein holding a camera. “I don’t remember going upstairs in the house,” he said, “because that photograph was taken upstairs.”
In her 2016 testimony, however, Maxwell admits that she sees Andrew and Giuffre in a photo taken at her townhouse, though her explanation for why Giuffre’s story can’t be true is a bit more baroque. To Giuffre’s claim that Maxwell bought her clothing that day, Maxwell responds that she couldn’t have because “the outfit doesn’t work at all.” She claims that Giuffre couldn’t have been assaulted in her bathroom, because “the tub is too small for any type of activity whatsoever.”
In the deposition, Maxwell does confirm one of the weirder details that has emerged over the last year. In an unpublished manuscript made public in August, Giuffre claims that she saw Andrew playing with a “doll made in his image.” When they broke the story, The Mirror reported that it was actually the latex puppet made for a portion of the 1980s BBC show Spitting Image lampooning him and his then wife Sarah Ferguson. After a bit of dissembling about the nature of puppets (“I don’t know what you mean by puppet,” she said. “There [are] hand puppets, all sorts of puppets.”), Maxwell admits that there was a “caricature” of Andrew at Epstein’s Manhattan house. She claims that she doesn’t know how it got there, only that Andrew didn’t bring it, and that she could’t “place the caricature” and anyone else “in the same context.”
Somewhere near the middle of the testimony, Maxwell says something unintentionally revealing. She admits that she and Andrew had a conversation about Giuffre, but that “he asked me if he even knew her.” It shines a bit of light onto why it’s difficult to understand why Andrew was hanging around Epstein and Maxwell in the first place. The players themselves seem fuzzy on the basics too.
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