Lawyers acting for the woman who alleges she was forced by a billionaire financier to have sex with Britain’s Prince Andrew when she was 17 are formally requesting that he respond to her accusations under oath.
A letter addressed to the prince at Buckingham Palace asking him to take part in a two-hour interview was filed with a court in Florida on Wednesday.
It features a photograph of Andrew with his arm around Virginia Roberts, referred to in court as Jane Doe No 3, who last month alleged that she was made to have sexual relations with Andrew by his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a former hedge fund tycoon and convicted sex offender.
“This letter is a formal request ... to interview you, under oath, regarding interactions that you had with Jane Doe No 3 beginning in approximately early 2001,” the letter states.
The letter was part of a legal submission from Roberts that contains new details about her alleged encounters with Andrew that she said occurred when she was 17.
In a sworn affidavit to the court, contained in the same legal bundle, Roberts also states she has asked her lawyers to “pursue all reasonable and legitimate means” to have criminal charges brought against “powerful people” whom she claimed Epstein made her have sex with.
The new documents were filed in a Florida court 24 hours before Andrew was expected to deliver his first public remarks about his controversial relationship with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, and the accusations leveled by Roberts.
Buckingham Palace has repeatedly and forcefully denied Andrew had sex with Roberts but so far declined to respond to any specific questions about his friendship with Epstein, or comment directly on alleged specific encounters with Roberts when she was a teenager.
The prince was scheduled to speak at a reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday evening — his first public appearance since Roberts’ allegations resurfaced in court papers on Dec. 30 last year.
Buckingham Palace previously described Roberts’ allegations as “categorically untrue” and forcefully denied “any form of sexual contact or relationship” between Andrew and Roberts, adding: “The allegations made are false and without any foundation.”
Palace aides have said Andrew plans to use the appearance at Davos to publicly deny the allegations.
Shortly after the court documents were filed on Wednesday, a palace spokesperson said: “We have nothing to add to our earlier comments.”
In her sworn affidavit, Roberts said: “I have seen Buckingham Palace’s recent ‘emphatic’ denial that Prince Andrew had sexual contact with me. That denial is false and hurtful to me. I did have sexual contact with him as I have described here — under oath. Given what he knows and has seen, I was hoping that he would simply voluntarily tell the truth about everything. I hope my attorneys can interview Prince Andrew under oath about the contacts and that he will tell the truth.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of