“Deny, deny, deny. Shame, shame, shame – or attempt to shame, I should say.” David Boies, Virginia Giuffre’s New York attorney, shakes his head. The ‘greatest deposition-taker’ in modern American justice has seen a lot of foolish and foolhardy moves over the course of his 50-year career, but the legal papers filed by Prince Andrew on Wednesday – as we sat down for our Zoom interview – genuinely appear to have astounded him.
“This was Maxwell’s playbook and it’s now Prince Andrew’s playbook,” says the 80-year-old, “and blanket denials coupled with attacks on the victim are simply not a very credible defence. Particularly in view of all the evidence we have against him. If we didn’t have the photographs, if we didn’t have other people identifying him, that would be one thing. But as things stand, denying and victim-shaming is not a plausible defence strategy.”
This was the Prince’s belated official response to claims made against him by Virginia Roberts (suing under her married name of Giuffre) five months ago, and his most robust to date. Roberts claims that she was trafficked to him by his friend, paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and forced to have sex with the Duke on three occasions when she was 17.
And although the damages being claimed are still unspecified, they are estimated to run into millions of pounds.
This week, after years of refusing to assist first a probe into the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking allegations, and then investigations into Virginia Giuffre’s accusations, the Queen’s ‘favourite’ son finally issued 41 denials, rejecting all allegations of wrongdoing, and stating a further 40 times that he ‘lacks sufficient information to admit or deny’ other claims.
The Duke of York’s official rebuttal comes after a motion to dismiss the case on a legal technicality at the beginning of January was denied, which means Prince Andrew could be forced to take the stand in New York to argue his case in front of jurors. Something his lawyers stated on Wednesday he would welcome: “Prince Andrew hereby demands a trial by jury on all causes of action asserted in the complaint.”
“Well, we’re looking forward to confronting Prince Andrew with his denials and attempts to blame Ms Giuffre for his own abuse, both at the deposition and the trial,” a twinkly eyed Boies tells me from the New York office of the company he founded in 1997, Boies Schiller Flexner, which also has a base in London. “But an unfortunate fact for him is that if you say these things when you’re filing papers, it becomes really hard to sustain that under cross-examination. And when you can’t sustain those broad denials, you’re not just back to ground zero, you’re behind, because you’ve lost your credibility.”
With his tousled salt and pepper hair and lean build, the veteran lawyer may look warm, genial, and like the grandfather of 12 that he is, but Boies is a legal colossus in the US, where he is both a trial attorney and a hired gun for billion-dollar corporations and said to charge up to $2,000 (£1,460) an hour.
In his career, he has secured or won nine economic recoveries for clients over a billion dollars, something most lawyers don’t even do once. He represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 election, made a name for himself leading the federal government’s successful antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001, racked up win after win defending the likes of IBM and CBS, and paved the way for marriage equality in 2013 by convincing the Supreme Court to eliminate California’s discriminatory Proposition 8, thereby allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. Even Covid proved no match for Boies, with a recent bout of omicron earlier this month shrugged off as lightly as an unworthy court opponent.
Few top lawyers have an unblemished client record, however, and before representing some of Epstein’s victims Boies also worked with Harvey Weinstein and the (since) convicted fraudster and founder of blood-testing firm Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes.
But nobody will argue that the Illinois-born, Yale-educated lawyer is not “a master of his art”, “an eccentric genius” – as one former boss described him – and perhaps most importantly “the Michelangelo of deposition-taking.” After all, this man is a chess player, he informs me, and “always thinking several moves ahead, always bearing in mind the possible combination of permutations.”
As a gambling man too – Boies has just returned from a long weekend in Vegas – he sees depositions as “a cards on the table moment.” A moment that, he argues, didn’t have to happen, had Prince Andrew played those cards right. And as a lifetime admirer of the Queen, Boies assures me this pains him. “This has got to be any mother’s nightmare. And to have it play out so publicly because of Prince Andrew’s position is particularly unfortunate. Because it must be of a magnitude that is far worse for her.”
In his calm Midwestern tones, he goes on: “But we tried to avoid this, even in the face of his denials and avoidance last year before we brought the lawsuit. We tried to avoid litigation; we suggested a mediation. But to say ‘I never met her’ is so contrary to all the other evidence that’s out there. Evidence that is so strong: testimonies from uninvolved people, photographs, things it’s hard to explain away.”
Boies shakes his head, the chess player in him almost saddened by such a clumsy move. “He could have said: ‘I didn’t know she was underage.’ He could have said: ‘This was an entirely consensual affair.’ There are a number of things he could have said that would have been hard to attack. But this is incomprehensible.”
Should it go to court, Boies says he “doesn’t think we would need” either the Duchess of York or her daughters to testify. “I don’t think Prince Andrew will call them either.” And although he says that conversations the Duke has had with the Queen “could be used, it’s hard to get at those, because he’s probably not going to admit to them, and we’re not going to depose her. So while those conversations are fair game, on a practical level we’re probably not going to get at them.”
We now know that Prince Andrew’s deposition must be done before the July 14 deadline set by the judge. “So it has been agreed that we will go to London to depose him,” says Boies, who after all these months has not yet met him. What is he expecting?
“Somebody who is going to be a little uncomfortable.” To put it mildly. After all, depositions can last up to seven hours, and Boies anticipates this one to last “a day, or probably two.” “But I’m going to try to get him to understand that this is not going to be combative. Obviously, I’m going to ask him a lot of questions. And although some of the questions may be uncomfortable, I’m not going to be aggressive or in any way offensive to him. I’m going to be very respectful.”
I’m curious to know whether for Boies, Prince Andrew’s BBC Newsnight special with Emily Maitlis back in 2019 was a gift? “I will never understand how his advisors could have let him do that interview, which was a series of really relatively soft questions,” he says. “It was not a hard probate interview, yet he came across so poorly. It was mostly his attitude. He showed no remorse. No concern for the victims. And if it gets played to the jury, which I think it probably will be, then it just demonstrates his callousness. As for those photos of him scurrying from castle to castle, trying to avoid the legal process? They just delayed the inevitable and made him look guilty.”
Reading between the lines.. If he offers her enough money she will consider settling out of court… Hmm..
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By Celia Walden28 Jan 2022 – 09:00PM GMT
“Deny, deny, deny. Shame, shame, shame – or attempt to shame, I should say.” David Boies, Virginia Giuffre’s New York attorney, shakes his head. The ‘greatest deposition-taker’ in modern American justice has seen a lot of foolish and foolhardy moves over the course of his 50-year career, but the legal papers filed by Prince Andrew on Wednesday – as we sat down for our Zoom interview – genuinely appear to have astounded him.
“This was Maxwell’s playbook and it’s now Prince Andrew’s playbook,” says the 80-year-old, “and blanket denials coupled with attacks on the victim are simply not a very credible defence. Particularly in view of all the evidence we have against him. If we didn’t have the photographs, if we didn’t have other people identifying him, that would be one thing. But as things stand, denying and victim-shaming is not a plausible defence strategy.”
This was the Prince’s belated official response to claims made against him by Virginia Roberts (suing under her married name of Giuffre) five months ago, and his most robust to date. Roberts claims that she was trafficked to him by his friend, paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and forced to have sex with the Duke on three occasions when she was 17.
And although the damages being claimed are still unspecified, they are estimated to run into millions of pounds.
This week, after years of refusing to assist first a probe into the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking allegations, and then investigations into Virginia Giuffre’s accusations, the Queen’s ‘favourite’ son finally issued 41 denials, rejecting all allegations of wrongdoing, and stating a further 40 times that he ‘lacks sufficient information to admit or deny’ other claims.
The Duke of York’s official rebuttal comes after a motion to dismiss the case on a legal technicality at the beginning of January was denied, which means Prince Andrew could be forced to take the stand in New York to argue his case in front of jurors. Something his lawyers stated on Wednesday he would welcome: “Prince Andrew hereby demands a trial by jury on all causes of action asserted in the complaint.”
“Well, we’re looking forward to confronting Prince Andrew with his denials and attempts to blame Ms Giuffre for his own abuse, both at the deposition and the trial,” a twinkly eyed Boies tells me from the New York office of the company he founded in 1997, Boies Schiller Flexner, which also has a base in London. “But an unfortunate fact for him is that if you say these things when you’re filing papers, it becomes really hard to sustain that under cross-examination. And when you can’t sustain those broad denials, you’re not just back to ground zero, you’re behind, because you’ve lost your credibility.”
With his tousled salt and pepper hair and lean build, the veteran lawyer may look warm, genial, and like the grandfather of 12 that he is, but Boies is a legal colossus in the US, where he is both a trial attorney and a hired gun for billion-dollar corporations and said to charge up to $2,000 (£1,460) an hour.
In his career, he has secured or won nine economic recoveries for clients over a billion dollars, something most lawyers don’t even do once. He represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 election, made a name for himself leading the federal government’s successful antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001, racked up win after win defending the likes of IBM and CBS, and paved the way for marriage equality in 2013 by convincing the Supreme Court to eliminate California’s discriminatory Proposition 8, thereby allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. Even Covid proved no match for Boies, with a recent bout of omicron earlier this month shrugged off as lightly as an unworthy court opponent.
Few top lawyers have an unblemished client record, however, and before representing some of Epstein’s victims Boies also worked with Harvey Weinstein and the (since) convicted fraudster and founder of blood-testing firm Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes.
But nobody will argue that the Illinois-born, Yale-educated lawyer is not “a master of his art”, “an eccentric genius” – as one former boss described him – and perhaps most importantly “the Michelangelo of deposition-taking.” After all, this man is a chess player, he informs me, and “always thinking several moves ahead, always bearing in mind the possible combination of permutations.”
As a gambling man too – Boies has just returned from a long weekend in Vegas – he sees depositions as “a cards on the table moment.” A moment that, he argues, didn’t have to happen, had Prince Andrew played those cards right. And as a lifetime admirer of the Queen, Boies assures me this pains him. “This has got to be any mother’s nightmare. And to have it play out so publicly because of Prince Andrew’s position is particularly unfortunate. Because it must be of a magnitude that is far worse for her.”
In his calm Midwestern tones, he goes on: “But we tried to avoid this, even in the face of his denials and avoidance last year before we brought the lawsuit. We tried to avoid litigation; we suggested a mediation. But to say ‘I never met her’ is so contrary to all the other evidence that’s out there. Evidence that is so strong: testimonies from uninvolved people, photographs, things it’s hard to explain away.”
Boies shakes his head, the chess player in him almost saddened by such a clumsy move. “He could have said: ‘I didn’t know she was underage.’ He could have said: ‘This was an entirely consensual affair.’ There are a number of things he could have said that would have been hard to attack. But this is incomprehensible.”
Should it go to court, Boies says he “doesn’t think we would need” either the Duchess of York or her daughters to testify. “I don’t think Prince Andrew will call them either.” And although he says that conversations the Duke has had with the Queen “could be used, it’s hard to get at those, because he’s probably not going to admit to them, and we’re not going to depose her. So while those conversations are fair game, on a practical level we’re probably not going to get at them.”
We now know that Prince Andrew’s deposition must be done before the July 14 deadline set by the judge. “So it has been agreed that we will go to London to depose him,” says Boies, who after all these months has not yet met him. What is he expecting?
“Somebody who is going to be a little uncomfortable.” To put it mildly. After all, depositions can last up to seven hours, and Boies anticipates this one to last “a day, or probably two.” “But I’m going to try to get him to understand that this is not going to be combative. Obviously, I’m going to ask him a lot of questions. And although some of the questions may be uncomfortable, I’m not going to be aggressive or in any way offensive to him. I’m going to be very respectful.”
I’m curious to know whether for Boies, Prince Andrew’s BBC Newsnight special with Emily Maitlis back in 2019 was a gift? “I will never understand how his advisors could have let him do that interview, which was a series of really relatively soft questions,” he says. “It was not a hard probate interview, yet he came across so poorly. It was mostly his attitude. He showed no remorse. No concern for the victims. And if it gets played to the jury, which I think it probably will be, then it just demonstrates his callousness. As for those photos of him scurrying from castle to castle, trying to avoid the legal process? They just delayed the inevitable and made him look guilty.”
Reading between the lines.. If he offers her enough money she will consider settling out of court… Hmm..
Holy sheet – Virginia Giuffre has *the* [David Boies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies) acting for her… and Andrew keeps putting both feet in it.