Prince Andrew accuser Virginia Giuffre seen for first time in a year while out shopping in Australia

Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Giuffre has been seen in public for the first time in a year as she went shopping in her adopted homeland of Australia.

The 39-year-old, who received an out-of-court settlement reported to be worth £12million from the Duke of York last year, visited a mall in the suburbs of Perth with her service dog.

The alleged Jeffrey Epstein victim, who is set to release a tell-all memoir, bought a milkshake and visited H&M during the rare public outing.

It comes on the same day that leading US lawyer Alan Derschowitz urged Prince Andrew to challenge the £12million settlement he gave Ms Giuffre. 

Ms Giuffre, from Sacramento, California, moved to Australia after meeting Robert Giuffre in 2002 who she then married.

She accused Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was a minor under US law but Andrew has consistently denied the allegations. 

Alan Dershowitz was also sued by the Jeffrey Epstein victim for calling her a liar over her claims that she had been forced to have sex with him.

But in a statement in November Mrs Giuffre – who was known by her maiden name of Roberts when she was abused by Epstein – admitted she ‘may have made a mistake’ in pointing the finger at Mr Dershowitz, who denied her claims. 

Prince Andrew is said to believe that this now raises serious questions over Mrs Giuffre’s credibility, even though he has already settled the case outside court in the US.

Mr Dershowitz told The Daily Telegraph that the Duke of York made a ‘mistake’ in not taking the case to trial and should now try to overturn the settlement.

He said: ‘I have never understood why he accepted the settlement. There were many, many good defences he could have raised. I’ve thought right from the beginning as soon as the deal was done it was a mistake to do it. He should pursue every legal remedy and the media should investigate thoroughly all of the allegations because this is just the tip of the iceberg.’

He added: ‘I think that the media ought to do a deep investigation to determine the whole truth.

‘Everybody should be interested in the truth coming out, the whole truth about everything, and it’s very important for the media to start digging deeply into all the allegations and do their due diligence on it. That’s what should be reported, not just one side of the story.’

Yesterday, sources close to the King said Prince Andrew’s attempts to restore his reputation with an eye on returning to public life were ‘wishful thinking’.

While the King respects his brother’s right to try to clear his name, any hopes this will pave the way back to official duties and a frontline royal role are ‘way off the mark’, a well-placed source told the Mail.

‘That is very much not the King’s thinking,’ they said.

King Charles finds himself in a tricky position, but knows that he must act as a monarch, not as a brother.

The source said the issue was about ‘so much more’ than Andrew’s US out-of-court settlement with Virginia Roberts over allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he has always denied.

There is frustration in some parts of the Royal Household that the beleaguered prince and his advisers – who have recently launched a media blitz to try and turn the tide of public opinion – fail to understand this fact.

‘The decisions that were made previously about his position within the Royal Family are also about his professional judgment and his personal associations,’ the source said.

The King is backed by his son and heir, the Prince of Wales.

William also firmly believes that the decisions made by the late Queen to strip Andrew, who was thought to be her favourite son, of his official duties and associations were the right ones. 

She also stripped Andrew of the right to use his HRH title in public so he could fight the case as a ‘private citizen’.

Mrs Giuffre, 39, claimed she was forced to have sex with Andrew when she was 17 after she was trafficked by convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew, 62, denied the accusation but paid a reported £12million out-of-court settlement to get her to drop the civil claim in the US.

Legal sources close to the prince said he would launch an £81million lawsuit against her if she repeated the accusation in an upcoming memoir. He has hired Los Angeles lawyers Andrew Brettler and Blair Berk to get her to retract any claims and possibly secure an apology.

Meanwhile, friends of Mrs Giuffre scorned a bizarre ‘stunt’ said to disprove her account of her encounter with the Duke of York. A photograph on the front page of Saturday’s Daily Telegraph showed a man and a woman lying fully clothed in a bath in the former home of convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. They were wearing masks of the faces of Andrew and his accuser.

It was published under the headline: ‘The photo that ‘clears Duke’ over bath sex’. Maxwell’s brother Ian told the newspaper that the photograph, posed by two of his sister’s acquaintances, disproved Mrs Giuffre’s account of her sexual encounter with Andrew.

Mr Maxwell said the picture showed ‘conclusively that the bath is too small for any sort of sex frolicking’.

Mrs Giuffre claimed that Andrew licked her toes in the bath before they had sex in a bedroom in 2001. A source close to Mrs Giuffre told The Mail on Sunday: ‘If this shameful stunt is the best Maxwell’s side can do in defence of Prince Andrew then it’s laughable… It’s a disgusting attempt to discredit a victim of sexual abuse and would be risible if it were not so offensive.

‘Plus they have their facts totally wrong. Virginia never said they had sex in the bath.’

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represented several victims of Epstein and Maxwell, said: ‘What a surreal, bizarre photograph. It proves nothing… Virginia said that she and Andrew were in the bath. The photo shows that two full-sized humans can fit in the bath.’

Mrs Giuffre’s lawyers declined to comment. Elsewhere, evidence has emerged which may prove the infamous picture of Andrew with his arm around a teenage Ms Roberts is real.

The photograph was said to have been taken on March 10, 2001, the night Mrs Giuffre said Andrew first sexually abused her.

The Mail on Sunday said it could prove the picture was printed at a one-hour lab a two-minute drive from her former home in Florida on March 13, 2001, and that it would have been ‘virtually impossible’ to fake.

Last week in a TV interview from prison, Maxwell said: ‘It is a fake. I don’t believe it’s real for a second.’ In 2019 Andrew said he had ‘no recollection’ of the photo being taken.