The bombshell court document that claims Prince Andrew knew about billionaire friend's abuse of under-age girls

Document details conversation between solicitor and Virginia Roberts, 30



Ms Roberts regarded by prosecutors as 'victim' of financier Jeffrey Epstein

Epstein, 61, was jailed in 2008 for soliciting under-age girls for prostitution

He counted numerous celebrities, politicians and socialites as his friends

He was also on chummy terms with the Duke of York and Sarah Ferguson

Ms Roberts claims that, aged 15, she was introduced to Prince three times

Document questions how much Duke knew about his friend's peccadillos



Three months ago, a solicitor called Jack Scarola walked into the vast art-deco county courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida, and handed a 23-page legal document to its clerk.

Rubber-stamped Exhibit D, and intended to be used as evidence in a forthcoming trial, the neatly typed bundle of papers — which the Daily Mail obtained a copy of this week — offers an extraordinary insight into the life, and crimes, of one of America’s most notorious sex offenders.

It carries a transcript of a lengthy telephone conversation between Mr Scarola and a 30-year-old former resident of Florida, Virginia Roberts, who now lives in Australia.

Royal company: Virginia Roberts (centre) is pictured, aged 17, with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell

Ms Roberts is one of scores of women regarded by U.S. prosecutors as ‘victims’ of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Sixty-one-year-old Epstein achieved infamy in 2008 when he was jailed for soliciting under-age girls for prostitution. His downfall scandalised America due to both the high-profile circles in which he had moved, and the audacity of his crimes.

The billionaire had counted numerous celebrities, politicians and socialites as friends, including President Bill Clinton, businessman Donald Trump and supermodel Naomi Campbell.

Perhaps most controversially, he was also on chummy terms with two senior figures in British royal circles: the Duke of York and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.

Epstein was first arrested in 2005, after the stepmother of a 14-year-old girl told Florida police that he’d paid her daughter $200 (£120) for an ‘erotic massage’.

An FBI investigation then led to Epstein being accused of keeping a harem of women — many of them vulnerable teenagers — at his luxury homes in New York and Palm Beach, and on a private island in the Caribbean.

'On chummy terms': The Duke of York takes a stroll with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in New York

He allegedly staged orgies on board his private jet, and flew girls as young as 12 to ‘topless parties’ at his pink, £6 million Florida mansion, which was dubbed the ‘House of Sin’.

By 2008, the FBI believed it had identified at least 20 victims who might level sexual allegations against the financier in court. At that point, however, Epstein struck a ‘plea deal’ with U.S. prosecutors. It saw him confess to two relatively minor charges related to child prostitution, with the rest of the case being dropped.

He received an 18-month jail sentence, of which 13 were actually spent behind bars, and was put on Florida’s sex offenders’ register. He escaped prosecution on more serious paedophilia charges, which might have seen him jailed for life.

'Victim': Ms Roberts is one of scores of women regarded by U.S. prosecutors as 'victims' of Epstein

But Epstein’s legal travails are not over. In recent years, more than 40 women have filed lawsuits claiming that Epstein sexually abused them.

Most of their claims have been settled out of court, preventing their accounts of his alleged crimes from being made public — but Virginia Roberts is proving harder to shake off.

The mother-of-three says she spent four years in Epstein’s employment after being hired to perform ‘erotic massages’ for him when she was a vulnerable girl of 15.

She has already spoken publicly of her ordeal once, in a 2011 interview with a British newspaper. Back then, she told how she’d been paid $200 a time to grant sexual favours to Epstein from 1998 onwards, and revealed that he’d introduced her to Prince Andrew on at least three occasions.

In 2001, aged 17, she had danced with the Prince at London’s Tramp nightclub, she said, and had sat on his knee at a house party in New York. Later that year, she’d spent time with him at Little St James, a private island Epstein owns in the Caribbean.

After the first encounter, Jeffrey Epstein paid Roberts $15,000 in cash. A photo taken at the time showed Andrew standing in his shirtsleeves with an arm round her bare midriff. There is, however, no suggestion that the Duke was involved in any form of sexual exploitation.

A heated controversy followed these revelations, aggravated by the news that Sarah Ferguson had accepted a £15,000 gift from Epstein to help pay off debts.

Amid public outrage, Ferguson said she had ‘made a gigantic error of judgment’ and agreed to repay the cash. In July 2011, the Duke of York agreed to step down as the UK’s special representative for trade.

Today, it seems ‘Exhibit D’ could drag new and ugly skeletons related to this inglorious affair from the closet. The document also questions how much the Prince actually knew about his one-time friend’s sexual peccadillos.

Scene: Aged 17, Ms Roberts had danced with Prince Andrew at London's Tramp nightclub, she said. Later that year, she'd spent time with him at Little St James (pictured), a private island Epstein owns in the Caribbean

In the past, whenever the Epstein case has been reported, it has been claimed there is no suggestion that Andrew was ever aware that the tycoon paid under-age girls for sex.

But in Exhibit D, Roberts alleges otherwise.

Asked whether the Prince would have ‘relevant information’ about ‘Jeffrey’s taking advantage of under-age girls’, she replies: ‘Yes, he would know a lot of the truth.’

It should at this stage be stressed that the Mail has no evidence to corroborate this and other claims made by Virginia Roberts in the document.

Infamous: Sixty-one-year-old Epstein achieved infamy in 2008 when he was jailed for soliciting under-age girls for prostitution

Exhibit D will also raise questions about the alleged role in Epstein’s sordid crimes of Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite daughter of the late disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell.

Ms Maxwell, 52, is a long-standing friend of both Andrew and Epstein. She is believed to have introduced the two in the Nineties, and was once pictured cavorting with the Prince at a Halloween-themed fetish party in Manhattan.

Since Epstein’s fall from grace, Maxwell (who was once his girlfriend) has also been accused of helping recruit under-age girls to work for the financier — allegations that she has always denied.

But in Exhibit D, Virginia Roberts goes so far as to claim that Maxwell directly participated in the tycoon’s abuse, and took ‘sexually explicit’ photographs of victims, which were used to decorate his home. It should again be stressed that the Mail has no evidence to support the claims made by Virginia Roberts in the document.

We have passed copies of it to lawyers for Mr Epstein and Mrs Maxwell, as well as a representative of the Duke of York, seeking their response. At time of going to print, none had formally commented.

The story it tells begins in 1998, when Virginia Roberts was a troubled 15-year-old. Raised in a broken home, she was first introduced to Epstein — then aged 45 — by Ghislaine Maxwell, after meeting her at a Florida spa where Roberts worked as a changing-room attendant.

After telling her she was interested in studying massage therapy, Roberts alleges she was ‘prompted by Ghislaine to come to Jeffrey’s mansion in Palm Beach that afternoon to make some extra money, and to learn about massage’.



She claims to have arrived at the property between 5pm and 6pm.

She was taken directly to Epstein’s bedroom, where she found him, face down, ‘lying naked on top of the massage table’.

Friends: The disgraced billionaire had counted numerous celebrities, politicians and socialites as friends, including President Bill Clinton (left), businessman Donald Trump and supermodel Naomi Campbell (right)



It is claimed that for more than half an hour, Ms Maxwell, who was then 36, and Epstein instructed her to give him what was ‘actually a real massage’.

But then, she alleges, the mood changed. ‘He turned over on the other side, to expose himself fully,’ she recalls.

‘Then Ghislaine told me that she wanted me to undress and began to take off my shirt and skirt... she also took off her skirt and got undressed, and so I was there with just my undies on.’

‘Jeffrey told me to wash him up and down with a bar of soap. After the encounter was finished, he told me I did well and I have a lot of potential to become a massage therapist'

Virginia Roberts



The naked Maxwell then instructed 15-year-old Roberts to perform a series of sex acts on Epstein, the account states. ‘Fearful’ of ‘upsetting or disappointing’ the powerful duo, the teenager agreed.

Afterwards, ‘Jeffrey told me to wash him up and down with a bar of soap’, she alleges. ‘They were very pleased with me.

‘After the encounter was finished, the sexual encounter, [Epstein] told me I did well and I have a lot of potential to become a massage therapist, and if I’d like I could return tomorrow, you know, and do the same thing and get paid $200 an hour.’

So began a sordid relationship, which Roberts says endured for four years. Epstein gave her an apartment in Palm Beach, and began paying her to fly from city to city with him as his ‘travelling masseuse’.

He would ask her for erotic massages on an almost daily basis, always paying her immediately afterwards.

It was at times a surreal experience. Roberts said there was ‘a constant influx of girls coming in and going out’ of Epstein’s homes over the years, of which a total of ‘definitely more than 100’ were under-age in Florida, where the age of consent is 18.

Allegations: Ms Roberts said she had sat on Prince Andrew's knee at a house party in New York. There is no suggestion, however, that the Duke was involved in any form of sexual exploitation

Over the years, she believes he had sexual relations with scores of under-age girls, including two from France who were just 12 years old.

Epstein required them to be ‘young, pretty, you know, a fun personality. They couldn’t be black. If they were any other descent other than white, they had to be exotically beautiful’.

The financier’s Florida home, she claims, contained a ‘secret room’ that was decorated ‘ceiling to the floor in pornographic pictures of the girls he had met’.

After a short while, one of Roberts was added to the collection, she claims.

‘Ghislaine took several nude photographs of me for Jeffrey,’ she says. ‘He wasn’t shy; that wasn’t the only place in the house that he kept the photos. He liked photos all over his house.’

Aggravating factor: The controversy following the revelations about Prince Andrew was aggravated by the news that Sarah Ferguson had accepted a £15,000 gift from Epstein to help pay off debts

This home, according to previous reports, had soap in its bathrooms shaped like male and female genitalia, and was an occasional haunt of Prince Andrew, who is said to have stayed there on at least three occasions during the years that Epstein was abusing young girls.

Roberts claims that Maxwell also used to buy erotic outfits for Epstein’s girls. ‘Jeffrey loved the latex outfits that Ghislaine had for us girls,’ she says. ‘He had bondage outfits, he had all different kinds of outfits, but his favourite was the schoolgirl.’

When he was away from home, life was equally decadent. Sometimes, Roberts and Epstein would travel by private jet, often accompanied by Maxwell and a selection of other young women kept on his pay-roll.

‘There was a bed in there, so we could basically re-enact exactly what was happening in the house,’ says Roberts. ‘It would start off with massaging, or we would start off with foreplay. Sometimes, it would lead to, you know, orgies.’

Roberts further claims to have travelled in the jet with a host of Epstein’s famous friends, including models Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons cartoons.

She does not accuse any of those individuals of being engaged in ‘improper activities’ during the flights, and there is no evidence that they were aware of Epstein’s crimes.

Their presence on Epstein’s jet is understood to be confirmed by flight manifests currently held as an exhibit by the court, which reveal (according to U.S. reports) that Clinton flew on the plane on ‘more than ten occasions’.

Other exhibits now held by the court, according to a list obtained by the Mail, include details of ‘sex toys’, a ‘massage table’ and ‘lotions’ taken from Epstein’s home by police executing a search warrant.

The exhibit list also includes a receipt from Amazon for the purchase of several erotic books.

They include Slave Craft: Roadmap For Erotic Servitude Principles, Skills And Tools, S&M 101: A Realistic Introduction, and A Workbook For Exotic Slaves And Their Owners.

Several months after she began working full-time for Epstein, Roberts claims that he began to pay her to provide erotic massages to his male friends.

‘I’d start with [Epstein's] feet, go up to his calves, up his legs, buttocks, back, his neck, his head, his arms, yada yada, and then it would be time to flip over'

Virginia Roberts



‘I’d start with his feet, go up to his calves, up his legs, buttocks, back, his neck, his head, his arms, yada yada, and then it would be time to flip over,’ she recalled.

‘Some of the men would want me to continue massaging the front side of them, and they would instigate me to begin having sex with them or foreplay, whatever you want to call it.’

She claims to have provided sexual services to at least eight of Epstein’s famous friends, but declines to name them, saying ‘some of these people are really influential in power’.

It wasn’t until 2002 that she escaped prostitution, after going on holiday to Thailand and starting a relationship with an Australian.

The million-dollar question now is whether Virginia Roberts will end up being cross-examined about her experiences in court, where she will be speaking under oath. The answer, at present, is anyone’s guess.

Exhibit D, originally created in 2011, was filed as part of a long-running civil dispute between Epstein and solicitor Jack Scarola’s client, Brad Edwards.

Mr Edwards, a lawyer who previously acted for four of Epstein’s under-age victims, claims that Epstein has tried to intimidate him to stop representing them — a charge Epstein denies.

He argues that the testimony in Exhibit D proves he was justified in pursuing compensation for the women. Edwards said this week that, if the case and another related matter go to court, Virginia Roberts is willing to travel from Australia to give evidence.

‘The victims want and deserve justice, and we will not quit fighting until they get it,’ he said this week.

‘Along those lines, there are many witnesses with information that could assist the victims in their quest for justice.’

Another potential witness, Edwards added, is Prince Andrew.