Buckingham Palace issued a new denial on Sunday of allegations that a US woman was kept as an underage “sex slave” and forced to have sexual relations with Prince Andrew.
The woman, identified in legal documents as “Jane Doe #3,” has alleged in a US court filing that she had been kept as a “sex slave” by Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of the prince.
Prominent US attorney Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer, was also named in the papers.
In a strongly worded response on Friday last week, Buckingham Palace said that “any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”
However, the palace took the unusual step of issuing a second statement after newspapers on Sunday printed details of interviews the plaintiff has given in recent years.
“It is emphatically denied that the Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship” with the woman, the palace said.
“The allegations made are false and without any foundation,” it added.
The Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Mirror both published details of interviews given by the woman in recent years, in which she discusses three alleged encounters with Andrew.
According to the motion filed in a Florida court last week, the woman alleges she was “forced to have sexual relations” with 54-year-old Andrew, meeting him in London, New York and the Caribbean at Epstein’s behest.
Epstein, a friend of Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, was convicted in 2008 of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution and served a prison term.
Dershowitz said the story was “made up.”
In a new interview with the BBC, the Harvard Law School professor said he wanted the plaintiff to speak on oath in court.
“I unequivocally and without any reservations totally deny all the allegations about sexual contact,” he said.
“My goal is to bring charges against the client and require her to speak in court. If she believes she has been hurt by me and by Prince Andrew, she should be suing us for damages,” he said. “What they’ve done was so underhanded: simply asserting it in a legal proceeding, not asking for any opportunity to prove it, not alleging that they could prove it, not giving me an opportunity to disprove it. That’s Kafkaesque.”
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