FILE – This July 27, 2006 arrest file photo made available by the Palm Beach, Fla., Sheriff’s Office shows Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, has been arrested in New York on sex trafficking charges. Two law enforcement officials said Epstein was taken into federal custody Saturday, July 6, 2019, on charges involving sex-trafficking allegations that date to the 2000s. (AP Photo/Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, File)

Last Friday, one day before sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide, the U.S. attorney’s office in the SDNY released a treasure trove of records from a civil defamation lawsuit filed by plaintiff Virginia Giuffre against Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. The case has since been settled.

Included in the documents is a statement from Giuffre stating that Epstein paid her to have sex with Prince Andrew, an allegation which Andrew denies.

An article which appeared in The Sun, a British tabloid, provides more detail:

Prince Andrew slept with her [Giuffre] three times, and Epstein’s ex-lover Ghislaine Maxwell.

He was accused of having a sexual encounter with her when she was 17 in London and New York and a year later at a party on Epstein’s private island in the Virgin Islands.

Another document describes an alleged sexual encounter between Ms Giuffre, now 35, and Andrew in a bathtub.

Unfortunately for the Duke of York, contained in the documents was a photograph of him taken in London in 2001 with his arm around Giuffre, who was 17 at the time. Ghislaine Maxwell is standing in the background.

In an additional court paper, Giuffre’s lawyer writes, “This particular photograph corroborates Ms. Giuffre’s claims, and there is no other reasonable explanation why an American child should be in the company of adults not her kin, in the London house owned by the girlfriend of a now-convicted sex offender.”

The photo can be viewed in the tweet below.

#RECAP on the (partially) unsealed #JeffreyEpstein related docs: though it’s not earth-shaking as most alegations are public, it’s extremely damaging to #GhislaineMaxwell & for #PrinceAndrew who’s also accused by a witness. Obviously very helpful in USA v #Epstein #Giuffre pic.twitter.com/bSpFZvy8lT

— Marta Dhanis (@MartaDhanis) August 9, 2019

Fox News reports:

Included in the documents are portions of a deposition from Johanna Sjoberg, who said she was 21 years old in 2001 when Andrew grabbed her breast at Epstein’s mansion in New York.

Sjoberg testified the incident was sparked when “someone” suggested those gathered take a picture, at which point Sjoberg said she and Maxwell went to a closet and grabbed a puppet of Andrew.

“They told us to go get on the couch,” she said in the 2016 deposition. “And so Andrew and Virginia sat on the couch, and they put the puppet, the puppet on her lap. And so then I sat on Andrew’s lap, and, I believe on my own volition, and they took the puppet’s hands and put it on Virginia’s breast, and so Andrew put his on mine.”

“I knew it was Prince Andrew because I knew him as a person,” she said.

According to The Sun, Buckingham Palace released a statement which said this is “related to US proceedings to which the Duke Of York is not a party…Any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”