The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in Britain on Thursday, the former prince’s birthday, has swivelled the spotlight once again onto the late Virginia Louise Giuffre. She was the girl whose allegations would draw the “favourite” son of Queen Elizabeth II into one of the biggest sexual abuse scandals in the world and eventually strip him of dignity.

Giuffre’s allegations against the late convicted sex offenderJeffrey Epstein exposed a global abuse network that preyed on vulnerable young girls to use them as “currency” against the world’s most powerful men.

On Friday, Giuffre’s brother Sky Roberts welcomed the arrest, saying he hoped it marked the start of the collapse of the “house of cards” around Epstein.

Roberts and his wife urged the US Justice Department to take action against others suspected of playing a role in the crimes of Epstein, who died in a Manhattan correctional home while awaiting trial on sexual abuse traficking charges.

On Thursday, British police arrested Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office over allegations he sent confidential government documents to Epstein.

Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, has always denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein and has said he regrets their friendship.

“This is not some sordid sex story, this is a story of being trafficked, this is a story of abuse, and this is a story of your guys’ royalty,” Virginia Giuffre told the BBC in an hour-long documentary that aired in November 2019.

That same year, in a BBC Panorama interview recorded after she had spoken with the broadcaster, Mountbatten-Windsor denied all allegations of impropriety and said he had no recollection of meeting her.

Giuffre, then 35 and a mother of three, told the BBC she was passed around to Epstein’s rich and powerful friends “like a platter of fruit.” She said she was trafficked to Andrew three times in 2001 and 2002: once in London at the home of Epstein’s girlfriend, once at Epstein’s New York mansion and once on a private Caribbean island owned by Epstein.

“It didn’t last long,” she said of the first of three alleged encounters with the prince.

“He got up, and he said thanks, I sat there in bed, just horrified and ashamed and felt dirty,” Giuffre said.

Of Andrew’s earlier denials, she had reportedly told the media: “He knows what happened. I know what happened and there’s only one of us telling the truth, and I know that’s me.”

Giuffre described to the BBC in the 2019 interview how Epstein's girlfriend told her what "to do for Andrew". She said that she, the prince, Epstein and Maxwell took her to Tramp nightclub in London, where the prince asked her to dance.

"He is the most hideous dancer I've ever seen in my life," she said. "His sweat was like it was raining basically everywhere".

Mountbatten-Windsor later told the BBC that he does not sweat because of a medical issue. After his arrest The Sun had a photograph of him with the headline: “Now he’s sweating.”

The Sun's front cover on Friday

When they had left the club, Giuffre said Maxwell gave her instructions. "In the car Ghislaine tells me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey and that just made me sick."

Two years later, in 2021, she filed the civil suit Virginia Giuffre v. Prince Andrew in the United States. The lawsuit was settled in February 2022. Andrew paid Giuffre an undisclosed amount, made a donation to her charity for victims of sex trafficking, denied wrongdoing, and settled without admission of liability.

In her memoir, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, Giuffre wrote that between the ages of 7 and 11 she was sexually abused by her father, who traded her to a family friend who later became a registered sex offender for abusing another minor.

The memoir, completed shortly before she died, provided a detailed account of the abuse she said she experienced as a teenager within Epstein’s circle.

She said she went from being in “an abusive situation, to being a runaway, to living in foster homes,” and lived on the streets at age 14, where she found only “hunger and pain and more abuse.”

In her memoir, she also wrote: "Don't be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn't know what Epstein was doing. Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls in ways you wouldn't want a creepy old man touching your daughter. They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind."

In the memoir, Giuffre described what she called the “Cinderella” grooming by Maxwell before her first meeting with Andrew in London in 2001.

“It was going to be a special day, she [Maxwell] said. ‘Just like Cinderella, I was going to meet a handsome prince!’ Her old friend Prince Andrew would be dining with us that night, she said, and we had lots to do to get me ready.”

In another passage, she reflected on what she saw as a sense of entitlement. “...as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright. At one point he told me, ‘my daughters are just a little younger than you’.”

She also referred to three unnamed figures, to whom she was sent, as Billionaire One, Billionaire Two and Billionaire Three.

She also detailed being savagely brutalised by a “Well-Known Prime Minister”.

The finger of suspicion pointed to Israel’s former PM Ehud Barak, who has denied any wrongdoing.

According to a tranche of emails released by the US Justice Department, Israeli officials coordinated directly with Epstein’s staff starting in early 2016 to secure a residence at 301 East 66th Street in Manhattan. An address where Barak frequently stayed for extended periods.

On Wednesday, Drop Site News, a US-based nonprofit investigative journalism outlet, claimed that the Israeli government had installed security equipment and controlled access at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment building. Israel has denied any involvement.

In the Miami Herald’s investigative journalism series “Perversion of Justice”, which blew the lid off the full extent of Epstein’s perversion and scheming, Giuffre described being trafficked by Epstein to provide massages and sexual services to him and his associates over a two-and-half-year-period.

Giuffre was one of the first to publicly allege, in 2011, that Epstein ran a trafficking ring that outsourced girls for sexual services to powerful men.

She provided detailed accounts to media outlets about Epstein and Maxwell, saying she had been groomed and abused by them after meeting Maxwell while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, US President Donald Trump’s luxury resort in Florida, in 2000.

Maxwell, she said, offered her a job as a travelling masseuse for Epstein after noticing her reading a book on massage therapy. She said the pair began grooming her to provide sexual services under the guise of professional training.

Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025 at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41. She had been living for several years in Neergabby, a rural locality north of Perth.

Following the release of Giuffre’s memoir, in October 2025, King Charles III initiated a formal process to remove the style of "Royal Highness" and the title of "Prince."

The former prince is now legally known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He was served notice to surrender the lease on the Royal Lodge and has since relocated to a private residence on the Sandringham Estate.

Americans generally view the Epstein case as an example of wealthy and powerful people rarely being held accountable and believe the US government is still hiding information about Epstein's clients, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

“We are trailing too far behind in justice, especially when we are sitting on the mountains of information that we have,” Giuffre’s sister in law Amanda Roberts told Reuters on Friday. “The world is looking at us to do the right thing here.”

Learning of the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor had brought “a mixed bag of emotions,” Amanda Roberts said.

"Initially we were ... vindicated and screaming, at one point at 3AM And then it just hit you - that gut punch of the fact that she's not here to see this, that we're not able to call her and tell her how astronomically proud we are of her."

Giuffre’s lawyer, Sigrid McCawley, described her as a “dear friend and an incredible champion for other victims.Her courage pushed me to fight harder, and her strength was awe-inspiring.”

In an interview last year for an NBC Dateline special on Epstein, Giuffre urged authorities to act: “Take us serious,” she said. “We matter.”

Virginia Giuffre's life showed how little girls specially from broken families are vulnerable across the globe, even in the first world, to powerful, scheming men and their accomplices.