Virginia Giuffre told Epstein victim ‘I had sex with Prince Andrew’, Ghislaine Maxwell witness claims

Virginia Roberts Giuffre told one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims that she had sex with Prince Andrew, witness in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial Carolyn Andriano has claimed.

Ms Giuffre has filed a lawsuit claiming she was forced to have sex with Jeffrey Epstein’s friends when she was 17, including the Duke of York, who denies the claims.

If the case goes ahead, the Queen’s second son will face a full trial before a jury in New York.

Now, Maxwell victim Andriano has made the bombshell claim that Ms Giuffre, then 17, texted her from London in March 2001 claiming to have had dinner and sex with the prince.

Prince Andrew’s representative offered no new comment on the story but he has previously strongly denied Ms Guiffe’s allegations that she was forced to have sex with him.

In the new interview, Andriano made further claims Ms Giuffre showed her the now-infamous photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around her in Maxwell’s central London apartment.

She told the Daily Mail that Ms Giuffre - then Miss Roberts - texted her to boast that she was going for dinner with Andrew, Maxwell and Epstein.

She told the paper: “I asked her if she’d been to the palace. And she said ‘I got to sleep with him’.

“I said ‘What? You’re f****** with me’ and she said ‘no, I got to sleep with him’.”

The victim added: “She said they had dinner and they had sex. She didn’t say anything about what they ate or where they were – that’s not what we were talking about.

“It was just that she couldn’t believe she got to sleep with Prince Andrew.”

Judge Lewis A Kaplan is expected by many observers to reject the prince’s call for the case to be dismissed.

He has promised to deliver his verdict “pretty soon” after a hearing earlier this week.

If the judge allows the case to continue, that would pave the way for a high-profile trial and disclosure of full details of the allegations against the prince, who Ms Giuffre accuses of sexually assaulting her in New York, London and the US Virgin Islands when she was a teenager.

Speculation is mounting that the prince, who has strongly denied any wrongdoing, could decide to seek a “no liability” settlement with Ms Giuffre to avoid the damaging publicity that a trial would bring.