The tape suggests that ABC News stopped its own anchor from reporting on Epstein’s crimes in order to preserve access to the royal family.

News of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sexual assault and trafficking crimes involving his circle of famous friends could have broken years earlier but was quashed by television network executives, according to video released by a right-leaning activist group Tuesday.

In the video, obtained by Project Veritas, ABC News anchor Amy Robach complains to a producer off-air that she had convinced one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, to speak on the record about her allegations against Epstein and others reportedly involved in Epstein’s web of sex trafficking — including former President Bill Clinton, attorney Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew. But, she continues, ABC refused to run the story in order to keep access to the British royal family.

“We would not put [the Epstein story] on the air. First of all, I was told, ‘Who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story,’” she says on the tape. “Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”

Referring to Kate Middleton and Prince William and the network’s desire to interview the pair, she said, “We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that ... also quashed the story.” And she added, “It was unbelievable what we had. [Bill] Clinton — we had everything. I tried for three years to get it on to no avail and now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations. And I freaking had all of it. I’m so pissed right now. Every day I get more and more pissed. ... What we had was unreal.”

Giuffre detailed her own disappointment with ABC News’s decision to kill the interview in August of this year. In an email to NPR, she wrote, “I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer. Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.”

In response to the tape’s release, ABC News released a statement from Robach in which she appeared to backtrack on statements made in the tape, saying, “As a journalist, as the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration,” adding that ABC News never told her to stop reporting on the serial predator.

The tape shows the extent of how Epstein’s attachments to the rich, famous, and powerful — his “collection” as he called it in a 2002 interview — made it difficult for journalists and others to investigate his crimes, as news agencies and others were unwilling to risk the ire of royals and politicians alike in order to learn just how many young women Epstein and his allies abused.

What we know about Epstein and Prince Andrew

As my colleague Anna North and I have detailed, the serious allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, who died in August while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, are coupled with questions about how he was able to get away with abusing young women again and again and again.

The money manager was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls, bringing them to his home for massages during which he masturbated or had intercourse with them. He was indicted in 2007, but as Julie K. Brown reported at the Miami Herald, he ultimately got just 13 months in a county jail, thanks to a deal signed by US attorney Alexander Acosta, who would later become secretary of labor under President Trump.

The allegations Robach was allegedly attempting to report on back in 2015 center on the testimony of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who at the age of 15 was working as a towel girl at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when she says she was recruited by Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to begin giving “massages” to the money manager.

As reported by Politico in 2017:

Giuffre asserts in her complaint that Maxwell, the sole defendant in the suit and the daughter of late publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, routinely recruited underage girls for Epstein and was doing so when she approached the $9-an-hour locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999 about giving massages to the wealthy investment banker.

According to Giuffre, those “massages” turned into severe sexual abuse and trafficking, as Giuffre has alleged in court filings that, as the New Yorker detailed in August of this year, “Epstein lent her out for sex to his friends.” Those friends allegedly include well-known attorney Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s attorneys who helped the serial predator get a sweetheart deal from prosecutors. Giuffre sued Dershowitz in April of this year after Dershowitz accused her of lying about his alleged abuse and, according to NPR, it was a call from Dershowitz that allegedly may have led to ABC News quashing the story.

But the allegations noted in the ABC News tape also reference Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, the third child of Queen Elizabeth II and a longtime friend of Epstein’s.

Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Epstein and Prince Andrew were so close that the Duke arranged for Epstein to help pay off $15,000 in debts owed to a former personal assistant of Prince Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson — an arrangement that took place several years after Epstein was already a convicted sex offender. In 2011, Ferguson admitted to the arrangement, telling the Daily Telegraph, “I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.”

According to claims made by Giuffre in court proceedings and elsewhere, Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew on multiple occasions in New York, London, and on Epstein’s private island, Little St James, while Giuffre was underage. And while Prince Andrew has denied the allegations, flight logs released in 2015 backed up Giuffre’s claims and the Duke and Giuffre were photographed together (though supporters of Prince Andrew say the photograph is fake.)

As detailed by NPR in August, Robach and her colleague Jim Hill spoke to Giuffre at length about her allegations against Epstein, Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew:

In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage. ”At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”

“We’re just getting started”

The group that released the tape, Project Veritas, targets news organizations and left-leaning groups by secretly filming or recording them (and occasionally deceiving them) in order to capture members of those entities taking part in illegal, abusive, or bad behavior in order to expose “corruption.”

Founded by James O’Keefe in 2010, the controversial group has been credited by right-leaning observers for his efforts to take part in undercover journalism, but it gained national (and unwanted) attention in 2017 for attempting to sell the Washington Post on blatantly false allegations of sexual assault in an effort to prove that allegations of misconduct against failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore were equally fake (it did not work).

But the ABC News tape differs in a number of important ways. The tape was not created by surreptitious recording by a Project Veritas member. Rather, the recording was obtained and leaked by the group to the public. And the network itself has not denied that the tape is legitimate or claimed it was falsely edited (which Project Veritas has done in the past).

And O’Keefe told me that there was more to come from ABC.

“I believe the ABC tape speaks for itself; however, I can tell you that we recently obtained the tape from our newest network insider,” he said in an email. “This person is still on the inside of ABC News, so we’re just getting started.”