NOTE FROM MT: The following article was originally solicited by and written forUnherd,the British media outlet to which I occasionally contribute, late last week. I was asked to produce the article urgently and swiftly, given the breaking news of Andrew’s arrest, and did so, working through the night Thursday into Friday. The prose therefore contains some stylistic elements tailored toUnherd. I was even summoned to appear on an emergencyUnherdpodcastFriday morning,in which I discussed many of the same points I’d explain in greater detail in the article. The article was delayed, however, and went through several laborious edits — all factual queries were fully addressed by me, and I added some substantive/thematic modifications where reasonable, based on editorial input. However, I was just told this morning that the article is “not going to work,” for reasons that were not specified. The whole reason I agreed to do this forUnherdwas that I thought it would be useful to get some sort of corrective in a British media outlet. But apparently that was not to be. Alas.
The folly of ever conceding to the premises of a rapidly-ballooning mass hysteria, in hopes of somehow curtailing it, or making it go away, was illustrated in world-historic detail last week with the arrest of the former Prince Andrew. Though nominally apprehended on hazy suspicions of “misconduct in public office,” Andrew’s perceived offense cannot be separated from the wild and fantastical “paedophilia” crisis that has been declared to suddenly exist across Britain, the United States, and indeed much of the world. All right-minded citizens are now expected to nod in sober agreement about the pervasiveness of clandestine “child-sex trafficking” networks, and the decisive role these networks purportedly play in dictating earthly affairs. Such notions would have once been confined to the most harebrained corners of the internet, but today have been embraced as a thoroughly mainstream sensibility, following the latest release of “Epstein Files.”
Cries of “vindication” have rung out from Epstein “survivors” who hailed the news of Andrew’s arrest as precisely the kind of “accountability” they have so often vaguely demanded. And what makes the development all the more empowering, we are told, is that this long-sought “accountability” was delivered on behalf of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre — the most visible of all the Epstein “survivors,” who first made allegations of heinous child sex crimes against Andrew. While grand narratives of royal pedophilic predation were once the province of paranoid fringes, today they are splashed on every homepage and news broadcast. “We wouldn’t be here without her,” declared Virginia’s brother Sky Roberts onNewsnightlast week. On that score, he is undoubtedly correct.
Yet for all the fanfare around the newly disclosed “Epstein Files,” damning revelations from which are said to have instigated this fast-moving royal downfall, a great many other revelations found in those files could easily cast Andrew’s arrest in an entirely different light. Namely: the central claims of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who for years had maintained that she was systematically “lent out” or sex-trafficked to scores of prominent men — Andrew chief among them. Because as it turns out,US government investigatorsdetermined her claims to be brazenly un-corroborated. And by extension, the very basis for her scandalizing malignment of Andrew was deemed, effectively, groundless.
In a September 2019 interview conducted by the FBI and DOJ, who at the time were aggressively building a case against Ghislaine Maxwell, and were thus in search of exactly the sort of evidence that Giuffre could have theoretically provided, credible evidence was proven not to be forthcoming. Notably, agents declined to extend the same boundless credulity to Giuffre that journalists near-uniformly had, as exemplified by a slightly better-publicized interview that aired in November 2019: Andrew’sfamed colloquywith the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, widely credited at the time not just as a landmark feat of adversarial journalism, but as proof-positive of Andrew’s guilt — mainly by dint of his admittedly odd affectations, and even odder turns of phrase; protestations around his sweating habits and visit to Pizza Express became seared into the popular imagination.
On a more substantive level, though, Andrew always remained steadfast in his denials. Question after question was put to him by Maitlis in a manner functionally identical to a deposition that Giuffre’s own lawyers would have yearned to conduct. “All we did was amplify her words,”Maitlis said last year— a useful distillation of her interviewing philosophy, which at times could convey a surface-level ethic of “holding power to account,” but ultimately amounted to serving as a dutiful PR proxy for the “victims” and their profit-seeking lawyers, all with dollar-signs gleaming in their eyes. Hindsight should now make plain that mere credulous amplification of Giuffre’s words, as well as those of other purported Epstein victims, has not served the public well in this matter.
Because concurrent to the Maitlis interview, as federal prosecutors and FBI agents conducted their own interview with Giuffre, they were compelled to note with evident disquiet that she had strangely failed to maintain a consistent narrative of her own victimization,within just that one single interview. She had also falsified myriad claims, they said, and destroyed key evidence. And in the “continuous stream of public interviews” she was giving around this time, Giuffre had repeatedly “sensationalized” her most lurid “sex trafficking” tales. No specific examples of sensationalized interviews are cited in the internal DOJ memo, but it is dated December 19, 2019 — not long after Giuffre’s debut appearance onBBCPanorama, airdate December 2, 2019. In that well-publicized programme, Giuffre emotionally describes the infamous alleged incident in which Epstein and Maxwell first forced her to submit to Andrew’s predatory lust. “I had just been abused by a member of a royal family,” she said, weeping.
Another “Epstein survivor” featured on thatPanoramaprogramme, ostensibly to corroborate Giuffre’s account, was Sarah Ransome, who had first met Epstein as an adult escort.She once claimed to possess sex tapesof Andrew, as well as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Richard Branson — then admitted she made it all up, and there were no such tapes. As time has gone by, Ransome’s behavior has grown increasingly disturbing and erratic; emails from the past several years show her sending off frantic ALL-CAPS manifestosdemanding, for instance, the immediate arrest, on child sex-trafficking charges, of Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Emmanuel Macron. Based on evidence available only in the alternate universe she has constructed. Ransome also eventually started denouncing Virginia Roberts Giuffre, declaring “I don’t believe Prince Andrew raped you and never did,” and imploring that Giuffre “return every cent back to the British Monarchy.” Curiously, there appears to have been noPanoramasequel featuring these updates. Ransome’s appearance on the original programme was nonethelesscitedby her lawyers David Boies and Sigrid McCawley (who also represented Giuffre) as an example of how she had “bravely shared her story with the media,” and was therefore owed the maximum possible settlement payout from Epstein’s well-endowed estate.
On top of finding no corroboration for Giuffre’s foundational claim of having been sexually “lent out” to Andrew and others, US government investigators found not a single other purported victim of Epstein who ever claimed they were “directed by either Epstein or Maxwell to engage in sexual activity with any other men.” This was the sole invention of Giuffre — yet it forms the entire crux of the common Epstein mythology: that is, a massive child-sex trafficking and blackmail operation, in which scores of high-profile men were ensnared, and secretly filmed in compromising sexual encounters. But contrary to Giuffre’s longtime assertions to this effect,the FBI found no evidenceof hidden cameras in any bedrooms or bathrooms at any of Epstein’s properties. Indeed,they found no images or videos of any sexual abuse at all. It was just one big confabulation — the origins of which can be traced back ineluctably to Giuffre, who first introduced the concept of a sinister trafficking/blackmail scheme in a fateful December 2014 court motion.
Regrettably, her confabulations were progressively legitimized over the years by a cohort of unscrupulous lawyers, and then amplified uncritically by journalists. The newest “Epstein Files” not only fail to surface any evidence for these enduring myths, they have in fact yielded a wealth of flatlycountervailingevidence. One would think as the main Epstein mythos unravels, so too should the presumed veracity of any sex-crime accusations against Andrew — hinging as they always did on the personal say-so of this one individual, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. While the average casual news consumer could still point to that notorious photograph of Andrew gripping a teenaged Giuffre’s waist, the photograph unto itself has of course never constituted evidence of any sex crime. (And for what it’s worth, continues to be of disputed authenticity.)
Source: Michael Tracey
