Judge Rules That Epstein Settlement Won’t Protect Prince Andrew

A New York federal judge ruled against Prince Andrew’s motion to dismiss Wednesday in a lawsuit in which the prince is accused of having sexually abused a minor, multiple sources reported.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York stated in a 46-page opinion that the 2009 settlement between Virginia Giuffre and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would not prevent Giuffre’s 2021 suit against the Duke of York from going forward, BBC News reported.

Prince Andrew has denied Giuffre’s allegations, BBC News reported.

“[T]his is a motion to dismiss Ms. Giuffre’s complaint as legally insufficient — not to determine the truth or falsity of charges in [Giuffre’s] complaint,” Kaplain wrote.

“As is well known to lawyers but perhaps not known to the lay public, the defendant — by making this motion — placed upon the court the unyielding duty to assume — for the purposes of this motion only — the truth of all of plaintiff’s allegations and to draw in plaintiff’s favor all inferences that reasonably may be drawn from those allegations,” Kaplan wrote.

Giuffre received $500,000 in Epstein’s 2009 settlement, which was unsealed in December after the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted on five counts pertaining to a sex trafficking conspiracy. Maxwell is awaiting sentencing.

Lawyers for the Duke of York said that the settlement with Epstein precluded Giuffre’s complain, in which claims she had sex with Prince Andrew on multiple occasions while she was a minor. A similar case against Alan Dershowitz was dismissed on those grounds.

Epstein, who had connections to Prince Andrew and many others, was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges. He committed suicide while awaiting trial, and although two guards were charged in connection with the suicide, but the charges were dropped during Maxwell’s trial.

Prince Andrew’s attorney did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.