The Caribbean house party included at least seven Russian models flown out specially, a multi-millionaire financier and a British prince. ‘Jeffrey was so excited. He said: ‘We’re going to do a big photoshoot with you and the girls,’ ‘ Virginia Roberts, his teenage ‘sex slave’, recalls Jeffrey Epstein telling her.
‘We were topless, and he had us in sexual positions. Then we’re told to assemble in a big cabana. When I walked in, Andrew and Jeffrey were seated in chairs,’ she claims in a bombshell new book about Epstein and alleged fellow sex abuser Ghislaine Maxwell. She alleges that Epstein then said: ‘ ‘Why don’t you girls start kissing and having some fun!’ Jeffrey and the Prince were just sitting back, laughing.’
Ms Roberts, who would elsewhere describe the events that evening nearly 20 years ago as an ‘orgy’, says Prince Andrew was gone the next day, ‘whisked away’ by his Scotland Yard bodyguards who had spent the night aboard a small boat moored off Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Andrew has denied he had any sexual contact or relationship with Ms Roberts, telling the BBC he didn’t recollect meeting her.
Depraved love nest: Jeffrey Epstein’s private island
Now, a new book — The Spider: Inside The Criminal Web Of Jeffrey Epstein And Ghislaine Maxwell, by Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative reporter Barry Levine — provides disturbing new allegations about the Prince’s alleged relationship with Ms Roberts.
She has long insisted she was forced to have sex with Andrew three times — once in London in 2001 when she was 17, a second time two months later in New York and a third time on the island.
Levine’s book, published yesterday, also reveals new details of the alleged encounter in New York.
According to Ms Roberts, she arrived at Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion to find Prince Andrew sitting in a leather armchair in Epstein’s library. Behind him, on a desk, were nude photos of girls and young women, including one of her. ‘I don’t think Andrew could have missed seeing it when he walked in,’ she now recalls.
Maxwell, daughter of disgraced tycoon Robert, was there and had given the Prince a blow-up toy based on his Spitting Image puppet that had left Andrew ‘smiling from ear to ear — it was like a kid going to Disney World’.
She believes Andrew recognised her but couldn’t remember her name, adding that Johanna Sjoberg, a college student working as Epstein’s assistant, was sitting on his lap.
‘We kissed each other on the cheek and Ghislaine placed me on his other knee,’ she is quoted as saying in Levine’s book. ‘Ghislaine told me I should take him upstairs for a massage.’
The billionaire with Prince Andrew
The massage room was dark and classical music was playing. Ms Roberts says she noticed a 6ft-long oil painting of her in a sexual position with another girl that hung on the wall. The Prince couldn’t have missed it and ‘I was so embarrassed,’ she says.
She gave the Prince a massage and then, ‘just as she had been taught by Epstein and Maxwell’, engaged in oral sex with him.
According to Levine, Epstein regularly made introductions on his royal friend’s behalf, including in 1999 phoning Donald Trump — a neighbour in Florida’s Palm Beach — and asking him to let Andrew play at his golf club there.
The following February, the three of them reportedly flew back to Palm Beach for a house party.
The Prince was later famously photographed, surrounded by topless women, on Epstein’s yacht in Thailand in 2001. Levine reports that Epstein once arranged for the Prince to make a midnight visit to a Miami club ‘notorious for its theme evenings that featured sadomasochistic scenes and performers in cages’.
According to the club’s ‘greeter’, Epstein phoned to warn them he was ‘sending over a friend, Andrew York, Prince Charles’s brother’.
Levine says a former friend of Epstein and Maxwell recalled a dinner party at the financier’s Manhattan house, attended by Andrew, that was packed with women ‘clearly there to be their playthings’. The same friend said Andrew and Epstein shared an ‘arrogance and lack of charm’ and ‘came across as bored billionaires trying to amuse themselves’.
The friend added: ‘I’ve been around royals enough to know how you should behave around them and how most people do, this was the opposite.
‘It was like [Epstein] wanted to prove he could do what he wanted and was so friendly with the Prince that he could speak in this way. He was like, ‘Oh, Andy, Andy.’ He kept calling him Andy. It made me really uneasy.’
A source close to the Prince was quoted as saying that the fresh claims were an ‘unsubstantiated and lurid’ attempt to sell books. Andrew has always denied knowing Roberts or having any sex with her.
The new book also sheds light on Epstein’s odd relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, 58, who is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges that she lured girls as young as 14 for Epstein to abuse. She denies the claims.
Her lawyers are expected to say at her trial that she was more of a victim of Epstein than an accomplice, although some of the women he abused insist she was the chief instigator. She faces further humiliation after a New York appeals court ruled on Monday that a 418-page deposition she gave in 2016 can be released. Her lawyers say it contains ‘intimate, sensitive, and personal details’ about her, including her sex life, that could prejudice her trial.
A string of women who say they were sexually abused by the late Epstein (who killed himself in jail as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges) claim Maxwell enthusiastically joined in the assaults.
Levine’s book says that, far from the long-held assumption that Epstein and Maxwell were once lovers, friends believe that was never true and that she is either bisexual or gay.
‘I never thought she liked guys. I don’t think she ever dated a guy,’ a former friend of Maxwell told the author. ‘I thought she was all about control.’ Epstein and Maxwell are believed to have first met in the late 1980s but became close friends after she moved to New York after her father’s death in 1991.
Prince Andrew and Virginia Roberts, who was aged 17 at the time, pictured together in 2001
According to Levine, Epstein filled the gulf left by her father, a similarly deeply controlling man. Maxwell made herself indispensable to the nerdy, shy and agoraphobic Epstein by organising his social life and transforming his personal style.
An entrepreneur in the same social circles said Maxwell was on first-name terms with media moguls and bankers in New York: ‘She was the best-connected person in the city. And she was an easy friend to have,’ said the source. ‘At cocktail parties, she would invariably be speaking with the most interesting people in the room. [So] you wanted to be where she was. We all did.’
Although Maxwell liked to boast she was Epstein’s girlfriend, many were struck by the asexuality of their body language, says Levine.
‘He’d put his arm around Ghislaine’s neck. It was collegial, affectionate, not a sexual act,’ a friend recalled. Another insider was never convinced that they dated. ‘It was more of a partnership,’ said the source. ‘They didn’t touch like a couple. He’d have his arm around her shoulders, not her waist.’
Yet it still paints a portrait of a relationship that was far from healthy. Christina Oxenberg, sister of Dynasty actress Catherine and a friend of Maxwell, told the writer: ‘Ghislaine was starving herself, I asked her about it. She said it’s because Jeffrey likes women thin.’
Christina went on: ‘And I could see the delusion, because she was his employee, albeit being paid very well. The more she tried to push it that she was having an affair with Jeffrey, I could see with my own eyes that that just wasn’t the case. There was no romance.’
The book provides insights, too, into Epstein’s final days in jail.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite and heiress, who has been arrested by the FBI accused of being sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘pimp’, pictured here with Epstein
Inmates said Epstein, perhaps anxious not to be labelled a paedophile, told them he was only motivated by ‘p***y’. The financier confided to inmate Michael Tisdale: ‘You know how p***y acts, how her mood will be next month and maybe in two months — that’s the same way to look at currency.’
He also told Tisdale that although he was accused of having sex with very young girls, they were in reality ’15, 16, 17, 18 years old — not eight or nine years old!’.
He also boasted of his connections. Bill Clinton was once a ‘lothario’ but ‘can’t do anything like that now because he’s had a couple of heart surgeries’.
As for Trump, he recounted how a French girl flying with them both had said she didn’t understand the meaning of ‘white trash’. Trump reportedly told her: ‘That would be me without the money.’
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