Politicians, celebrities and even members of the Royal family had waited for this moment with bated breath, dreading what might be disclosed.

Yesterday, after months of legal wrangling, a Manhattan court released 1,200 pages of documents detailing lurid claims of the alleged abuse carried out by Jeffrey Epstein on teenage girls.

The files relate to the case of Giuffre v Maxwell, in which Virginia Giuffre, who claims to have been the US ­businessman’s teenage “sex slave”, sued Ghislaine Maxwell, a British ­socialite and the billionaire’s former girlfriend, for defamation.

Testimony includes claims by Giuffre that she had sex with the Duke of York when she was 17. All the allegations about Prince Andrew were struck from the court record in 2015 after being described as "immaterial and impertinent" by the judge. The Prince has always denied the allegations and any involvement.

In releasing the latest claims, the Federal Appeals Court in New York warned the media to "exercise restraint" in reporting them. It noted that materials submitted to a court should not be understood as firm findings or as "some sort of marker of reliability. That would be a mistake.”

Ms Guiffre also alleged that she was made to have sex with the billionaire’s other famous friends, such as Alan ­Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor.