Prince Andrew has always categorically denied any sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Giuffre but she has said it was “past the time for him to be held to account” for allegedly sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager.
The royal is named as the only defendant in her civil suit though Jeffrey Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell are mentioned frequently throughout.
The lawsuit was brought under the Child Victims Act, a 2019 New York state law that allows victims to temporarily make legal claims of abuse that occurred when they were children regardless of when or how long ago the alleged abuse occurred.
“In this country no person, whether president or prince, is above the law, and no person, no matter how powerless or vulnerable, can be deprived of the law’s protection,” Ms Giuffre’s lawsuit stated.
Ms Giuffre has repeatedly made her allegations against Epstein, Maxwell, and Andrew, but the suit is the first time she has directly confronted Andrew in such a formal setting.
Ms Giuffre states she was recruited by Maxwell into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation when she was working at Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
She said between 2000 and 2002 she was flown all over the world by Epstein and sexually abused by him at “numerous locations”.
Prince Andrew has said he first met Epstein in 1999 through Maxwell, who was a close friend. He and Maxwell were photographed at social events together many times.
Flight logs have shown that Prince Andrew began flying on Epstein’s private plane in 1999 when he travelled to his private island, Little St James.
His name also appears in other logs from the same time for journeys to Florida and New Jersey. The royal has confirmed he went on Epstein’s private plane and stayed in his homes.
In 2000, Epstein and Maxwell attended Prince Andrew’s 40th birthday party. That same year, Prince Andrew threw Maxwell a birthday party in Sandringham, UK, and Epstein was among the guests.
In 2006, Prince Andrew invited Epstein to his daughter’s 18th birthday party, despite Epstein being charged with procuring a minor for prostitution only one month prior.
Members of staff at Epstein’s properties have confirmed seeing Prince Andrew at his homes, both to the media and in sworn testimony.
Ms Giuffre has accused Prince Andrew of abusing her a number of times, on separate occasions.
The court documents state: “Prince Andrew committed sexual assault and battery upon Plaintiff when she was 17 years old.”
She claims she was sexually abused by the duke at Maxwell’s home in London and that this is where the photograph showing him with his arm around her waist was allegedly taken.
In a Newsnight interview, the duke said he had no memory of the photo and questioned whether it was his own hand in the image.
The victim also says she was sexually abused by him when he visited Epstein’s homes in New York and Little St James.
Ms Giuffre says she was “compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew, and feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth and authority”.
The court document states that Ms Giuffre believes Prince Andrew knew that she was 17 and a sex trafficking victim.
She says she did not consent to engaging in any of the sexual acts with him and that she had suffered “emotional and psychological distress and harm”.
Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in Manhattan federal court, where she faces trial in November, while Epstein took his own life in a federal jail in the borough in August 2019, a month after he was arrested on sex trafficking charges.
Donald Trump described the hush money case against him as a “mess” after the jury who will decide his fate has been selected.
Leaving the court in New York after proceedings were adjourned for the day, Trump addressed reporters, saying he was supposed to be in states like Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina as part of his campaign for the 2024 presidential election.
“[But instead] I’ve been here all day,” he said, labelling the trial as “unfair”.
Trump held up a stack of news stories and editorials that he said were critical of the case while he continued railing against the trial.
“The whole thing is a mess,” he said.
It comes as all 12 jurors have been seated in the first criminal case against a former US president.
Members of the jury include a sales professional, a software engineer, an English teacher and multiple lawyers.
Sky News’ US partner network, NBC News reported there are seven men and five women on the jury.
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It comes after lawyers grilled hundreds of potential jurors asking questions on everything from their hobbies and social media posts to their opinion of the former president.
More than half of a second group of prospective jurors were dismissed by Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday after most said they doubted their ability to be fair and impartial.
One juror was also dismissed after she said she “slept on it overnight” and woke up with concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in the case.
The challenge now is to select six alternate jury members before the trial can move to opening statements, with Mr Merchan hopeful this will be completed on Friday.
Trump is accused of criminally altering business records to cover up a $130,000 (£104,200) payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, during his 2016 election campaign.
His lawyers say the payment was meant to spare himself and his family embarrassment, not to help him win the election.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted.
The former president faces two other criminal trials accusing him of trying to subvert his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and another that accuses him of mishandling classified information after he left the White House in 2021.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.
Crisis-hit Boeing has rushed to defend itself from fresh whistleblower allegations of poor practice, as the airline continues to grapple its latest safety crisis.
A Congressional investigation heard evidence on Wednesday on the safety culture and manufacturing standards at the company – rocked in January by a mid-air scare that saw an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 flight suffer a panel blowout.
One Boeing quality engineer, Sam Salehpour, told members of a Senate subcommittee that Boeing was taking shortcuts to bolster production levels that could lead to jetliners breaking apart.
He said of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, that has more than 1,000 in use across airlines globally including at British Airways, that excessive force was used to jam together sections of fuselage.
He claimed the extra force could compromise the carbon-composite material used for the plane’s frame.
“They are putting out defective airplanes,” he concluded, while adding that he was threatened when he raised concerns about the issue.
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The engineer said he studied Boeing’s own data and concluded “that the company is taking manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 programme that could significantly reduce the airplane’s safety and the life cycle”.
Boeing denied his claims surrounding both the Dreamliner’s structural integrity and that factory workers jumped on sections of fuselage to force them to align.
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Two Boeing engineering executives said this week that its testing and inspections regimes have found no signs of fatigue or cracking in the composite panels, saying they were almost impervious to fatigue.
The company’s track record is facing fresh scrutiny amid criticism from regulators and safety officials alike in the wake of the incident aboard the Alaska Airlines plane.
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What’s going on at Boeing?
It has become a trust issue again after the worst period in Boeing’s history when two fatal crashes, both involving MAX 8 aircraft, left 346 people dead in 2018 and 2019.
All 737 MAX 8 planes were grounded for almost two years while a fix to flawed flight control software was implemented.
A separate Senate commerce committee heard on Wednesday from members of an expert panel that found serious flaws in Boeing’s safety culture.
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Boeing CEO: ‘We fly safe planes’
One of the panel members, MIT aeronautics lecturer Javier de Luis, said employees hear Boeing leadership talk about safety, but workers feel pressure to push planes through the factory as fast as they can.
In talking to Boeing workers, he said he heard “there was a very real fear of payback and retribution if you held your ground”.
Pressure on Boeing to focus on safety has included restrictions placed on production, limiting its manufacturing output.
At the same time, it is still facing three separate investigations by the Federal Aviation Administration, the Justice Department and the National Transportation Safety Board relating to the panel blowout.
Joe Biden has suggested his uncle may have been eaten by cannibals after his plane was shot down during the Second World War – as he said Donald Trump was unworthy of serving as commander in chief again.
The US president visited a war memorial near his Pennsylvania hometown to honour his late uncle Ambrose J Finnegan’s service in the conflict.
“He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Mr Biden told reporters afterwards.
“They never recovered his body.”
But there appears to be no record of his uncle’s death being the result of hostile action or any indication that cannibals played any role in the inability to recover his remains, according to the US defence department.
Military records show he was killed when the reconnaissance plane he was in crashed in the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea in May 1944 after engine failure.
“We have a tradition in my family my grandfather started,” Mr Biden said. “When you visit a gravesite of a family member – it’s going to sound strange to you – but you say three Hail Marys. And that’s what I was doing at the site.”
He attempted to draw a contrast between his family’s record of sacrifice to remarks allegedly made by Mr Trump that fallen service members were “suckers” and “losers”.
Former aides to Mr Trump have said he made the comments when he did not want to visit a cemetery for American war dead in France during his first term as president in 2018.
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Mr Trump has denied making those remarks.
The president said Mr Trump – the presumptive Republican candidate to take on Mr Biden in November’s presidential election – “doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief for my son, my uncle.”
Mr Biden’s elder son, Beau, died in 2015 of brain cancer. The president has linked his son’s death to his year-long deployment in Iraq, where the military used burn pits to dispose of waste.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement to Sky’s US partner network NBC News that the president was “proud of his uncle’s service in uniform, who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
He added: “The president highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honouring our ‘sacred commitment… to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home’, and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers’.”
Mr Bates did not comment on the cannibalism claim.