The settlement between late disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre has been unsealed and made public for the first time since the settlement was reached nearly a dozen years ago.
The settlement shows that Epstein paid Giuffre $500,000 to drop the legal case, without any admission of fault or of liability. Giuffre accused Epstein of sexual abuse and of sex trafficking her at the age of 17 to men, including Prince Andrew.
The document was released to the public as part of an ongoing separate, but connected, lawsuit from Giuffre against Prince Andrew.
The suit against Andrew alleges that she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew after being sex trafficked by Epstein and that Andrew was aware she was under the age of consent.
The royal’s legal team has said that Giuffre’s case against him violates terms stipulated in the agreement with Epstein. In the settlement, Giuffre agreed to a “general release” of legal claims against Epstein and others.
However, Andrew’s name does not explicitly appear whatsoever as a party in the unsealed legal settlement. It does not explicitly name any individuals outside of Epstein, in fact. The wording is that the agreement will “remise, release, acquit, satisfy, and forever discharge” parties and others “who could have been included as a potential defendant,” but falls short of saying who that would include.
Giuffre’s lawyers have maintained that the settlement is irrelevant to the ongoing lawsuit against Prince Andrew, since it does not mention him, and he did not even know about it.
Therefore, her lawyer said in a statement, Andrew could not have been a ‘potential defendant’ because he was not subject to jurisdiction in Florida — where the Epstein lawsuit was filed — and because the case involved federal claims, of which Andrew was not a part.
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