🔴A lawsuit has been filed against Prince Andrew in New York, seeking damages for allegedly sexually abusing Virginia Roberts Giuffre when she was underage.
From taking the stand to ignoring the claim, @Telegraph assesses Prince Andrew's options.
Quite possibly. Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts) has claimed in court papers filed in a New York civil court that the Prince sexually abused her 20 years ago on three separate occasions: in London, New York and in the US Virgin Islands
❌Will Prince Andrew take the stand in New York?
Unlikely. That’s not an attractive proposition since a cross-examination of Prince Andrew is unlikely to go well.
❌The alleged events happened 20 years ago - why is there a civil lawsuit now?
New York introduced a Child Victims Act in 2019 that allowed alleged survivors of under-18 sexual abuse to bring a case which was previously time-barred
❌Can Prince Andrew avoid court?
One option is to settle the case out of court but that is not a very welcoming prospect.
Prince Andrew has always denied any wrongdoing but settling the case before it comes to court would nevertheless seriously damage his reputation
❌Could he just ignore the legal claim?
Yes. One possible course of action is to do nothing and ignore any attempts by Ms Giuffre’s legal team to serve him with legal papers.
❌A civil trial going ahead in the Prince’s absence and would hugely increase the chances of a judge finding in the claimant's favour.
Such a ruling would be catastrophic for the Prince because then a court would be officially labelling him a child sex abuser
❌Could the case be switched to the UK?
Lawyers with good knowledge of the case suggest that the Prince could try to force the case to be switched to the High Court in London where they could try and have it struck out on grounds of lack of evidence
The Prince might also argue that he has some form of sovereign or crown immunity because he was a working member of the Royal Family and part of the British state apparatus at the time of the alleged incidents.
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.