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In the early months of 2022, as the world celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, her second son, Prince Andrew, found himself ensnared in a significant legal controversy. Known to many as the Queen’s purported favorite, Andrew’s predicament quickly became a focal point of public and media attention.
Central to this turmoil was a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, a woman who alleged that she was a victim of the notorious financier Jeffrey Epstein. For months, the case wound its way through the American legal system, capturing headlines with its serious accusations.
Giuffre’s claims were incendiary: she alleged that as a 17-year-old, she was trafficked across the globe and coerced into three sexual encounters with Prince Andrew, an accusation he firmly denied. The legal battle saw Andrew assembling a formidable team of attorneys, who promptly moved to dismiss what they characterized as a ‘baseless claim’ in an attempt to protect the prince’s reputation.
Despite these efforts, the presiding judge rejected the motion to dismiss, opting instead to bring the matter before a jury in a full trial. This decision underscored the seriousness of the allegations and marked a significant moment in the ongoing saga surrounding the prince and his alleged connections to Epstein’s criminal activities.
But the judge refused, announcing that he instead wanted the matter to proceed to a full trial, in front of a jury.
The stage was, in other words, set for a blockbuster trial, in which both Giuffre and the prince would be grilled in excruciating detail about their private lives and sexual histories.
For Andrew, who (despite photographic evidence to the contrary) had thus far insisted that he was unable to recall ever having met his accuser, it was a moment of extreme peril. He was scheduled to spend at least two full days being cross-examined under the glare of the global media.
Buckingham Palace quite understandably viewed this prospect with horror.
Epstein victim: Virginia Giuffre, who died last year, claimed to have had sexual encounters with the ex-duke
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor famously declared that he had no recollection of ever meeting Virginia Giuffre – a victim of his sex trafficking friend Jeffrey Epstein
Andrew, in an already infamous image of his release from custody under investigation
Then, on the afternoon of February 15, the problem suddenly went away. Out of the blue, the prince announced that he’d reached an out-of-court settlement with Miss Giuffre.
A trial was averted. And the Queen’s jubilee year saved. But controversy has dogged the settlement ever since, with critics characterising it as (to quote an MP during a Parliamentary debate this week) a grubby back-room deal in which up to £12million in ‘hush-money’ was paid to silence an alleged victim ofsex abuse.
Here are the unanswered questions that still surround this disturbingly murky chapter in Royal history…
Where does the £12m figure come from?
In short, no one knows. Neither the terms of the settlement, nor the amount it ended up costing Andrew, were ever officially disclosed. And inquiries to both Royal press officers and Giuffre’s spin-doctors about the matter continue to go unanswered.
Perhaps the most widely quoted figure – that whopping £12million – was first reported by The Telegraph, a few hours after the deal was announced.
Its accompanying article stated that the Queen had agreed to contribute a portion of the sum, using ‘income from her private Duchy of Lancaster estate, which recently increased by £1.5million to more than £23million a year’.
Whether that number is accurate is, however, anyone’s guess. As is how the total amount might have been broken down between compensation for Giuffre, a donation to her charity, and the cost of each side’s legal fees.
The terms of any payment are similarly opaque. It’s possible that an agreed sum was paid straight away, with further cash handed over in instalments. But that hasn’t stopped news outlets drawing their own conclusions.
In August 2022, The Sun was reporting that the actual settlement was ‘far less’ than £12million and could be ‘as low as £3million’.
The Times seemed to agree: it reported in early 2023 that while pundits had initially put the amount at ‘about £10million’, that figure was now considered wide of the mark because ‘insiders have since said the total amount was nearer £3million’.
Media outlets have, however, reverted back to the £12million figure in recent days.
Could Andrew afford it?
Mystery has always surrounded Andrew’s wealth. An acquaintance once compared him to a ‘hot air balloon’ telling the Daily Mail: ‘He seems to float serenely around, in very rarefied circles, without any visible means of support. No one has ever had a clue how he pays for it.’
For most of the 2000s, he lived like a billionaire, maintaining endless staff plus a large household while relentlessly travelling the world, often via private jet.
Yet despite also managing to acquire an extensive collection of wristwatches – including several Rolexes and Cartiers, a £12,000 gold Apple Watch and a £150,000 Patek Philippe – as well as a small fleet of luxury cars (including a green Bentley) his only official income came via a small Navy pension of about £20,000, plus the £249,000 annual stipend he received from the Queen before being forced to retire from Royal duty.
This does not, to put it mildly, suggest that he’d be able to get his hands on millions of pounds to settle an awkward legal battle.
Yet Andrew has for years pursued a potentially lucrative secret career as a sort of professional ‘fixer’, using his Royal status and contacts book to help grease the wheels of commerce in corners of the world where who you know, in business, remains as important as what you know.
He also maintained potentially lucrative links to a raft of wealthy benefactors, including offshore banker David ‘Spotty’ Rowland, once dubbed ‘shady’ in the House of Commons, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The question of what he did to repay their generosity is now being pored over by Scotland Yard.
What about his assets?
At the time of the settlement, it was reported that Andrew was meeting his financial obligations by selling his Swiss ski chalet in Verbier.
But the sale had not been completed when the deal with Giuffre was reached and it was subsequently claimed that it would not raise the necessary funds because the property was saddled with mortgage debt.
There were other complications. Andrew and Fergie originally bought Chalet Helora directly from French businesswoman Isabelle de Rouvre, who agreed to sell it to them for £18million rather than place it on the market because they had previously rented it from her. But they only paid her £13million upfront.
The remaining £5million was to be paid in instalments, with interest. By 2021, this had still not been paid, and with the then-Duke and Duchess of York owing a total of £6.8million, Ms De Rouvre threatened legal action.
She eventually settled for just £3.4million, in part because she believed the couple were short of money. In other words, Andrew did not appear to have sufficient property wealth to fund a large legal settlement.
Andrew’s other historic asset had been Sunninghill House, the former marital home he sold to a Kazakh chum for £15million – £3million above the asking price – in 2007.
Some of the proceeds of that sale helped fund the ski chalet purchase. The rest are likely to have been used to pay off debts arising from the £7.5million he’d spent doing up Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s former pile, in 2003, under a deal that saw him also pay £1million rent up front.
Did the bank of Mum and Dad help out?
In February 2022, it was widely reported that much of the settlement was being paid by the Queen.
Earlier this month, that plot thickened. The Sun claimed that her contribution amounted to £7million. But it also suggested that the money came in the form of a loan, which has yet to be repaid.
As to the rest, it was further suggested that Prince Philip’s estate helped to fund £3million of the settlement.
Philip died aged 99 in 2021 and his will, in keeping with royal convention, was ‘sealed’ ensuring it would remain secret for 90 years. Such secrecy was greeted with outrage and there were legal attempts by the Guardian to challenge the ruling, which failed.
How Philip would view part of his reported £30million inheritance being used by his son as ‘hush money’ has been a topic of conversation in London’s smarter clubs and in military circles.
What about King Charles?
Among other suggestions it has been claimed that Charles, then Prince of Wales, coughed up £1.5million towards the settlement. This contribution, too, was said to have been in the form of a loan.
Friends of the King have previously suggested that Charles provided no financial contribution at all, adding that elements of the loan narrative are ‘false’.
One told us: ‘If the suggestions are that the King agreed to chip in, they are wrong. He wanted nothing to do with it and he had no agency at the time it was drawn up.’
What instead seems to have occurred is more complicated: the settlement , we understand, was to be paid in instalments, and at least one portion remained outstanding when the Queen died in 2022.
Although Charles was not party to the original deal, he felt obliged to honour his mother’s commitment to sort it out.
‘The details of the settlement remain confidential and previous reports or claims should not be relied on as accurate,’ adds the friend.
How much Charles was obliged to pay and where the funds came from is not known.
His friend says: ‘Clearly there are circumstances in which individuals may be obliged to uphold residual financial commitments undertaken by others.’
Did taxpayers foot the bill?
In the summer of 2022, the Treasury received a Freedom of Information request asking if the former duke’s ‘legal fees and/or his undisclosed settlement fee regarding the civil sexual assault case involving Virginia Giuffre involved any money from HMT’s Sovereign Grant to the Royal Family or if any other government-funded money was used in the case or settlement’.
Its reply seemed unequivocal: ‘No public money has been used to pay legal or settlement fees you refer to.’
Yet when it comes to Royal finances, there are many grey areas, and the truth tends to hinge on semantics: can the family’s money (which almost certainly did end up funding the settlement) be described as personal wealth? Or since almost all of it derives from duchies and grants, does it ultimately belong to the nation?
Uncertainty around this matter is, arguably, at the heart of the mess that currently surrounds Andrew.
What happened to the money?
The cash Virginia Giuffre received from Andrew didn’t buy happiness. She took her own life last April, shortly after separating from Robert, her martial arts instructor husband of 22 years.
Since there was no valid will, a legal battle over control of her estate is currently making its way through the Australian courts.
It pits Giuffre’s two sons, Christian and Noah, against her lawyer Karrie Louden and a former carer, Cheryl Myers, who claim to have been verbally appointed as executors and trustees shortly before her death. What remains unclear is the value of the assets under dispute.
Giuffre was believed to own at least four properties, two of which were valued at more than £1million, including the small ranch 50 miles north of Perth where she died.
But initial reports from Australia’s Supreme Court in October suggested that her net worth, once debts were taken into account, amounted to less than half a million dollars (£250,000).
It was later clarified that those reports were wide of the mark: official paperwork had merely stated that her estate was worth more than A$472,000 (£350,000), a legal threshold in Western Australia which governs how assets are divided when there is no will.
Much of the money that had come her way was, meanwhile, diverted into an entity called the Witty River Family Trust.
It was established in 2020 and lists Virginia and her estranged husband as co-directors with equal shares.
The trust was also used to hold compensation received from Ghislaine Maxwell to settle a defamation claim, and from JP Morgan, Epstein’s bank, which has paid out £215million to the sex offender’s victims via a class action lawsuit.
What became of her charity?
When Andrew settled Giuffre’s lawsuit, he promised to make a ‘substantial donation’ to her victims’ rights charity.
On paper, that referred to an organisation called ‘Victims Refuse Silence’ which his accuser had launched in 2015.
It was supposed to help combat human trafficking, but doesn’t seem to have received any of the Prince’s cash and had been defunct for years when America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revoked its charitable status in 2023.
Miss Giuffre had by then launched a second non-profit named Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) which claims on its website to be ‘dedicated to providing a safe and empowering space for survivors of sex trafficking to reclaim their stories and stand up for themselves and each other’.
Yet by the time of her death, the status of SOAR was shrouded in mystery. No US company records appeared to exist, and the organisation was not registered with the IRS.
Though the website has been live for several years, visitors are told that ‘at this early stage, we are not yet accepting donations’.
What’s Andrew up to now?
In the 27 days since Andrew was spirited away from Royal Lodge in the dead of night, he has been seen only once – haunted and wide-eyed in the back of a car, in a picture that went around the world hours after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
He’s since been holed up in modest accommodation at his late father’s bolthole, Wood Farm, on the King’s Sandringham estate. He is due to move into his new full-time home at Marsh Farm in April.
This property is far more visible to the public – but privacy is the least of his problems.
Shorn of his royal titles, he has also lost many of the privileges of his royal birthright that he once took for granted.
At Royal Lodge he was cosseted by staff – but the former prince will now have to make do with one valet-cum-house manager – an ex-Scots Guards soldier – and one cook, responsible for the weekly shop at a nearby Sainsbury’s. The future of his privately funded bodyguards is unknown.
One fixture in his inner circle is lawyer Gary Bloxsome, who was originally hired to help fight the sex abuse claims made by Virginia Giuffre in 2020.
The golf-loving solicitor gained the nickname ‘Good News Gary’ for his insistence on only briefing Andrew with ‘the best case scenario’.
His only other companions are his horses and dogs – corgis Muick and Sandy, who belonged to the late Queen, and five Norfolk terriers.
As his life implodes, might Andrew now decide that who paid to settle the case, and how much, is the one question the public has a right to know? If nothing else it would remove the stench of ‘hush money’ clinging, perhaps unfairly, to royal reputations.