So it turns out that (ex?) Prince Andrew is going to face up to Virginia Roberts' sexual abuse claims in a public-trial - he wants a jury to judge whether he really did sexually assault her all those many years ago.
I wonder then they decided on this strategy? it was probably months ago, and they've been waiting for a suitably other-news-saturated period to announce it so it gets glossed over - and today is the PERFECT time for that - one day's headlines and then probably tomorrow we'll be back on Boris-party gate.
Apparently (according this BBC news article) Andrew's lawyers don't have 'enough information to either admit or deny' the existence of this infamous photo:
That's the photo with the prince grinning - some might say like a guy who knows he's about 'to get some' - with his arm around the then 17 year old Virginia Roberts and the now-convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in the background. Allegedly the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein is behind the camera.
What to make of all this...?
Was Jeffery Epstein a Paedophile? Most probably.
Did Maxwell establish a network of teenage girls to groom for him? Probably
Did they think they were untouchable...? Certainly.
But then on the question of how much Andrew knew about all of this..... it's very possible he was unaware of just how bad this pair of, let's call them friends, were. I mean just the fact that Andrew (let's say) 'was' royalty would have put him in a social class way above their new-rich status, which probably means contact between them was on the level of 'socialite acquaintances' rather than 'intimate friends' - so do I believe Andrew when he says he didn't know Maxwell? I find that quite believable.
But then we get onto the sweaty details of the night itself - about whether they actually slept together, about consent or lack of it, about culpability..
I mean it's quite feasible that as far as Andrew was concerned this 17 year old was just a friend of Epstein and Maxwell, albeit odd that a 17 year old is hanging with friends twice her age, it's quite possible that he had no idea she was part of a whole manipulated network of teen girls and that he was just getting lucky with a consenting girl half his age on that one night.
If this were the case it's probably not the best judgement call for a Prince twice her age to make, but he wasn't knowingly doing anything illegal either.
Or is that no excuse for historical cases where people have slept with trafficked sex-slaves?
Whatever the outcome of the trial, and maybe like or maybe unlike on the night in question, Andrew the Prince is screwed.