Prince Andrew is “on a collision course” with the royal family over his decision to seek a jury trial in the civil case being brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, who alleges the queen’s son raped her three times when she was 17.
British newspaper the Daily Mail also quoted a source saying the palace is “desperate” for Andrew to settle to remove the prospect of an embarrassing New York courtroom showdown that will overshadow the queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. These formally begin on Accession Day—Feb. 6—the anniversary of the queen’s father’s death in 1952, and will peak with a four-day holiday weekend in June.
The potential for embarrassment that a full jury trial could entail was made abundantly clear by British royal expert and lawyer Mark Stephens, who told the Mail: “Questions will be asked of Virginia Giuffre about the prince’s body, any marks, his performance, what positions were adopted—every detail that is conceivable to ask and then that will be put to Andrew.”
Although the queen belatedly acted this month to fully cut off Andrew from any formal connection to the royal family, the prospect of her second—and some say favorite—son being grilled about his sexual activities in open court would still represent an unprecedented humiliation for the royal family, which may be why a source told the Mail: “Andrew is on collision course with the palace” over his apparent determination to continue fighting the case.
Of course, it is unclear if Andrew has the money to settle with Giuffre, who is likely to demand a multimillion-dollar settlement to drop her claims, even if he wanted to. Previous reports have suggested that Prince Charles and Prince William are adamantly opposed to family money being used to pay off Andrew’s accuser, believing Andrew should “clear up his own mess.”
In recent weeks, The Daily Beast has been told that Andrew is selling a $20 million chalet he and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, own in the Alpine ski resort of Verbier, Switzerland.
There has been some speculation this could provide cash to fund any settlement.
Yet attorney Spencer Kuvin, who has represented victims of Jeffrey Epstein, told British newspaper the Mirror that in fact, a sale before the trial could be a way of putting his assets beyond Giuffre’s reach, saying: “If Virginia gets a judgment against Andrew, if this went all the way through to trial and she received a financial judgment in her favor, she could execute on any properties he has, the most likely being his ski chalet.
“If Andrew had properties in any companion country that would abide by such jurisdiction of the U.S., she can execute on those properties.”
Prince Andrew’s PATHETIC Attempt To Clear His Name
Starr Chamber: The Sequel
President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team.
Can a woman be president of the United States?
Hell, yes.
I’ve covered the men who run the world my whole life. And there have been a lot of screw-ups, from Vietnam to Watergate to Afghanistan to Iraq to pushing the economy off a cliff. There has also been plenty of creepy behavior, culminating in the news that Donald Trump, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz have joined together in a pervy, hypocritical cabal to argue that Trump did not smirch the Constitution.
So please, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, stop whingeing about sexism and just show how you could wield power like a boss. Ibid: Nancy Pelosi.
When Steve Bannon called Pelosi a “total assassin,” according to the hot new book “A Very Stable Genius,” by Washington Post writers Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, he meant it as the highest compliment. You won’t find Pelosi keening about gender; she’s too busy taking care of business.
Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She faced sexism, of course, just as Barack Obama faced racism. She lost because she ran an entitled, joyless, nose-in-the air campaign and because she didn’t emulate her husband’s ethos of campaign ’til the last dog dies and the last bowling alley closes, and always make it about the voters. She lost because she and her campaign manager, Robby Mook, didn’t listen to Bill Clinton, the world’s leading expert on the white, male, rural vote, when he warned them that there was trouble and offered to help out.
Donald Trump operates from the id, which is fitting because he represents a last-gasp primal scream from working-class Americans threatened by the changes transforming the country. Women are now a majority of the work force and whites are heading toward a minority status. Hollywood cannot cling to its benighted — and self-defeating — desire to stay a white male club forever, despite the fact that women have always made up half the audience.
Trump’s ascent does not make it harder for women to ascend — just the opposite. Look at the throng of women who were outraged enough about Trump to march and run and get elected in 2018.
Once a woman electrifies Democrats the way J.F.K., Bill Clinton and Obama did — and the way Trump does his base — she will win.
Trump is once more doing his part to energize women voters. On Friday, we learned that the president will get help from Starr and Dershowitz for the impeachment trial in the Senate.
The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way.
Even Trump was appalled. “Starr’s a freak,” the bloviating builder told me back in 1999. “I bet he’s got something in his closet.” In other interviews, he called Starr “a lunatic,” “a disaster” and “off his rocker,” and expressed sympathy for Hillary having to stand by her man when he was “being lambasted by this crazy Ken Starr, who is a total wacko.”
Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle.
In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults. In other words, he’s a complete partisan hack who doesn’t give a damn about sexual assault.
And then there’s Dershowitz, whose past clients have included such sterling fellows as Epstein, Claus von Bülow, O.J. Simpson and Harvey Weinstein. How did he miss Ted Bundy? Still, Dershowitz has put himself on the side of an impressive pantheon of villainy in the realm of violence against girls and women.
Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew’s accuser, has also claimed that she was offered as a teenager to Dershowitz for sex — a contention that Dershowitz has denied in a countersuit.
On Fox News, Dershowitz has made the case that it is Pelosi who put herself above the law by delaying the delivery of the articles of impeachment. Good luck with that one.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, a few days ago deemed that Trump’s slimy Ukraine gambit violated a law. Yet Dershowitz will somehow argue that it doesn’t represent high crimes and misdemeanors.
He tweeted that he’s nonpartisan because he opposed Bill’s impeachment and voted for Hillary, even as he joined up with Bill’s persecutor. Dershowitz said that he is participating “to defend the integrity of the Constitution.”
That assertion may fly in Foxworld. But in the real world, it’s ridiculous. You can bet that Trump and his buddies will continue to turn out the women’s vote.