‘Legally important’ Epstein emails that affirm photograph of Andrew with Virginia Giuffre IS actual might pressure Mountbatten Windsor to testify in US

The former Duke of York today faced further pressure to appear in front of US politicians after paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was revealed to have confirmed the infamous photo of him with a teenage Virginia Giuffre is real.

Allies of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor have long tried to muddy the waters over the years with suggestions the picture was a fake.

But 2011 messages in a bombshell cache of emails released last night showed Epstein urged a journalist to investigate Ms Giuffre while admitting: ‘Yes she was on my plane, and yes she had her picture taken with Andrew, as many of my employees have.’

The picture was unearthed by The Mail on Sunday that same year as Ms Giuffre claimed she slept with Andrew during a stay in London, claims the disgraced ex-prince has vehemently denied.

Epstein took the photo on a disposable camera before the group, along with socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, headed out for dinner and then to a nightclub, Ms Giuffre said.

So his account will come as a devastating blow to embattled Andrew, who for years has sought to cast doubt over the authenticity of an image showing him holding Ms Giuffre, then 17 and known as Virginia Roberts.

Andrew’s links to Epstein have already led to the King dramatically stripping him of his titles – putting an end to his public life.

Jack Royston, Newsweek’s chief royal correspondent, explained that Buckingham Palace could now bring in external lawyers to look through previous emails.

He told ITV: ‘The only additional step that the royals could take here is to maybe bring in outside legal counsel to review palace emails, to review Andrew’s emails…

‘That would certainly signal to the British public that the palace were taking it seriously and wanted justice, rather than simply for the story to go away.’

The latest revelations will heap fresh humiliation on Andrew, who has already been stripped of his royal titles by the King and forced to retreat from public life.

Continuing scrutiny over the former Duke and Duchess of York’s links to Epstein will also see them lose the palatial Royal Lodge on the Windsor estate they have occupied for over two decades.

Lisa Bloom, who has represented 11 survivors of Epstein, described the new emails – which also claim Donald Trump ‘spent hours’ with Ms Giuffre at Epstein’s home – as ‘really legally significant’.

She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: ‘I don’t find the emails shocking because I’ve long believed that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were good friends and that Trump was more involved than he has let on.

‘But I do find them really legally significant because here we have Jeffrey Epstein himself pointing a finger right at Donald Trump.’

Andrew is under pressure to explain the full nature of his relationship with Epstein with members of the US Congress demanded he appear before them to ‘come clean and provide justice for the survivors’.

Suhas Subramanyam, Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme yesterday that Andrew had not yet responded to its invitation to testify in the US.

He added that the former prince ‘doesn’t have to get on a plane to testify, he can do it remotely’.

Also yesterday, journalists asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt whether Mr Trump believed Andrew should co-operate with requests to testify before the committee.

She replied: ‘I can ask the President about it and get back to you.’

The new emails was part of thousands of documents unsealed from Epstein’s estate which were published by the House Oversight Committee last night.

They also lay bare a 2011 exchange between Andrew, Epstein and convicted sex trafficker Maxwell – months after the former duke said he broke off all contact with the convicted paedophile.

As the MoS sought comment for its world exclusive story, Andrew emailed Epstein and Maxwell begging them to clear his name, saying: ‘I can’t take any more of this.’

In the email chain from March 2011, Maxwell initially forwarded the Daily Mail’s press inquiry to Epstein who in turn sent it to someone listed as ‘the Duke’.

The Duke, believed to be Andrew, appears to respond: ‘What? I don’t know any of this. How are you responding?’

Epstein told him: ‘Just got it two minutes ago. I’ve asked g (sic) lawyers to send a letter.

‘Not sure… it’s so salcisous (sic) and ridiculous, im (sic) not sure how to respond, the only person she didn’t have sex with was Elvis.’

An exasperated Andrew then appears to reply to Epstein, saying: ‘Please make sure that every statement or legal letter states clearly that I am NOT involved and that I knew and know NOTHING about any of these allegations. I can’t take any more of this my end.’

Just months later in July 2011, Epstein appears to actively lobby journalists to turn the tables on Ms Giuffre, who sued Andrew in a civil sex assault case in 2021, with the pair settling for a reported £12million out-of-court but no admission of wrong-doing on the royal’s behalf.

In one email, Epstein tells a reporter that Buckingham Palace would ‘love it’ if Andrew’s accuser was ‘proven to be a liar’.

The email reads: ‘…Andrew’s accuser, criminal record, total liar.

‘I think Buckingham Palace would love it. You should task someone to investigate the girl Virginia Roberts, that has caused the Queen’s son all this agro (sic).

‘I promise you she is a fraud. You and I will be able to go to ascot (sic) for the rest of our lives.’

When the journalist expressed some interest in the story, a further email from Epstein on the same day claimed that her story has ‘no credibility’ and it was ‘total horses****’.

It continues: ‘…she was never 15 years old working for me, her story made it seem like she first worked for trump (sic) at that age and was met by ghislaine maxwell (sic).’

He concludes: ‘I will ask if they will cooperate – Prince people.’

Andrew and his allies have long questioned the authenticity of the damning picture taken by Epstein of the then prince and Ms Giuffre at Maxwell’s London home in 2001.

The image has become the enduring symbol of Ms Giuffre’s shocking allegations before she took her own life in April this year.

She claimed she was forced to have sex with Andrew at Maxwell’s townhouse – where the picture was taken – as well as at Epstein’s address in Manhattan and on his private Caribbean island of Little St James.

Andrew, in his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview, denied ever meeting Ms Giuffre in London and claimed the image might have been doctored.

Maxwell also dismissed the image as fake in a recent interview from prison, while Andew’s allies insisted his fingers were ‘chubbier’ and he was taller than depicted.

Meanwhile the 23,000-page email release pulled former US ambassador Lord Mandelson deeper into the scandal with messages showing he was still in contact with Epstein as late as 2016 – years after his conviction.

The correspondence shows that Mandelson took relationship advice from the paedophile and urged him to steer clear of Andrew.

In one email from Epstein to Mandelson on 6 November 2016, he writes ’63 years old. You made it’ not long after his birthday.

Mandelson replies within hours saying: ‘Just. I have decided to extend my life by spending more of it in the US’ before Epstein replies ‘in the Donald White House’ referring to the US presidential election due later that week.

Epstein goes on to say ‘you were right about staying away from Andrew. I was right in your staying with Rinaldo [sic]’, seemingly a reference to Mandelson’s partner Reinaldo Avilda da Silva.

In another exchange in March 2011, an email shows Mandelson urging Epstein not to do a BBC interview about his links to Andrew.

After being forwarded a request from BBC Radio 4’s Today to interview Epstein about ‘stories which are circulating’, about him and Andrew, Mandelson replied ‘No!!’

Mandelson was until recently the UK’s ambassador to Washington, but was sacked over his close friendship with the convicted paedophile.

Mandelson has sought to distance himself from Epstein saying he felt ‘utterly awful about my association with Epstein 20 years ago’.

But the latest disclosures show his association with the sex offender continued much later – and into 2016.

Until now the last reported contact between the pair had been in March 2010, when the then-business secretary took advice from Epstein in a banking deal, just months after his release from prison for child sex offences.

Meanwhile Mr Trump’s links to Epstein were brought back into the spotlight after Democrats released emails in which Epstein referred to Mr Trump in correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell and author Michael Wolff.

Mr Trump’s Republican party later published more than 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate.

The Democrats had redacted the victim’s name, including in a 2011 email Epstein sent to Maxwell which claimed ‘[Virginia] spent hours at my house with him’ while another sent by Epstein in August 2018 said: ‘I know how dirty Donald is.’

Ms Leavitt confirmed the victim referred to in the emails is Ms Giuffre.

She called the email release a politically motivated ‘smear’ campaign and repeated earlier comments from Ms Giuffre, who took her own life in April, about Mr Trump in which she absolved him of wrongdoing.

‘The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,’ Ms Leavitt said.

‘The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions.’

In a post on his Truth Social platform, President Trump said the documents were a way to ‘deflect’ from the US government shutdown, where thousands of workers have been furloughed in a dispute over federal funding.

‘The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the shutdown,’ he said.

‘There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats.’

Ms Giuffre was recruited by British socialite Maxwell aged 16 while working as a spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2000.

Maxwell is serving 20 years in prison for facilitating the crimes of convicted sex offender Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 in a New York jail while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking charges.

In an email released by Democrat members of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Epstein’s crimes, dated April 2, 2011, Epstein wrote to Maxwell: ‘I want you to realise that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Virginia] spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned. Police chief etc. I’m 75 per cent there.’

Maxwell replied: ‘I have been thinking about that…’

Mr Wolff recorded more than a hundred hours of conversation with Epstein from roughly 2014 to 2019, and described their contact as a working relationship for several book projects, including Fire and Fury – an account of the first Trump administration.

The White House has said Mr Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 ‘for being a creep’ and the President himself has claimed Epstein ‘stole’ young women who worked at the spa.

In an email between Epstein and Mr Wolff in January 2019, the sex offender refers to his expulsion. ‘Trump said he asked me to resign. Never a member ever… he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.’

In another email, Mr Wolff wrote to Epstein with the subject line ‘heads up’ on December 15, 2015 – the day of a Republican primary election debate televised by CNN. ‘I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you – either on air or in scrum afterwards,’ he wrote. 

Epstein replied: ‘If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?’

Mr Wolff responded: ‘I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. 

‘You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.’

Last night Mr Wolff said: ‘Some of those emails are between Epstein and me, with Epstein discussing his relationship with Donald Trump. I have been trying to talk about this story for a very long time. These two men… had the closest of relationships for more than a decade.’

Mr Trump did not send or receive any of the emails released and has not been charged with any crime relating to Epstein or Maxwell.