The Epstein/Maxwell story has, in a sense, always boiled down to Prince Andrew & Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Very few people outside of Palm Beach had heard of Epstein before that infamous photo—taken in March 2001 of a then-17yo Giuffre—first appeared in a British tabloid in 2011. 
The picture was reportedly taken at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home.
There is Andrew, in a white button-down shirt, top button undone, with his arm around the bare midriff of the 17-year-old Giuffre. Smiling proudly off to the side, like some sort of triumphant mama hen, is Ghislaine Maxwell. And Epstein? He’s said to have taken the photo.
Giuffre says that was the night she first met Prince Andrew and was first trafficked to him—the first of three times they’d have sex, according to a 2014 Florida court filing.
Andrew told the BBC’s @maitlis that he has “absolutely no memory of that photograph ever being taken” and that “you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph.” (Giuffre gave the original to the FBI.)
There is still much to learn about the relationship between Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. I get into some of their strangely competitive dynamic in Episode 9 of “Chasing Ghislaine” — audible.com/pd/Episode-9-G…
In 2014, the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday re-ran the photograph. This time, it came with a legal claim from Virginia that was supported by court papers she’d filed in Florida—that she was being trafficked to Prince Andrew as a sex slave.
There’s even more in Episode 10 about the chain of events that set off: audible.com/pd/Episode-10-…
No one could have foreseen the long-term consequences that a single photo could have. But that picture was, in many ways, the snowball that gets us to the avalanche of today. And there's more yet to come...
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