A photograph of Prince Andrew with a woman abused by Jeffrey Epstein as a teenager is definitively not fake, the woman has said, in her first comments on the row over the image.

Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, now 35, claims that she was forced to have sex with the Prince, a former friend of Epstein’s, when she was 17.

A 2001 photograph of Ms Roberts-Giuffre with the Prince’s arm around her waist was dismissed as a fake by the Prince’s allies in August, with a source telling The Telegraph that the image had been doctored.

“The picture is a fake, and the girl’s story is a fantasy,” a source said. “Look at the picture. It has clearly been faked. Andrew’s fingers appear quite slender, like a girl’s fingers. They are also a strange shade of red.

“His real fingers are actually much chubbier - quite small and chubby.”