Prince Andrew has been served with papers for Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit claiming the British royal sexually assaulted and abused her when she was 17.
A court filing on Friday in Manhattan said that the Duke of York was served ― via a Metropolitan Police officer on duty ― at his home at Royal Lodge in Windsor on August 27.
The service was “consistent with provisions for service upon an individual Defendant, under Section 6 of the Civil Procedure Rules, as required by the Supreme Court of Judicature in England & Wales”, the court filing said.
The royal’s press representative told HuffPost they had no comment on the matter.
The Duke of York has been accused of avoiding the lawsuit, something Giuffre’s legal team spoke about on Friday.
“Process servers have shown up at his residence, and they have refused to take the summons and refused to let the process servers in to serve,” David Boies, chairman Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, which represents Giuffre, said to ABC News. “He has stopped coming out in public. He has been moving around.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court under the Child Victims Act in New York on August 9, alleges that convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and his assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, trafficked and abused Giuffre after she began working at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
The lawsuit claims the Duke of York, a friend of Epstein, sexually assaulted Giuffre three times: in London at Maxwell’s home, at Epstein’s residence in New York City and at the financier’s private island in the US Virgin Islands.
“During each of the aforementioned incidents, Plaintiff was compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew,” the lawsuit states, adding that Giuffre “feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth, and authority”.
The filing says that Andrew’s alleged “sexual assault and battery of Plaintiff have caused her, and continue to cause her, significant emotional and psychological distress and harm”.
Giuffre was involved in a 2015 defamation suit against Maxwell in which she described enduring abuse at the hands of Maxwell and Epstein, including being forced to have sex with Prince Andrew. The case was settled out of court two years later.
Though the alleged abuse occurred over 20 years ago, Giuffre is filing a lawsuit now because of the Child Victims Act, which was signed into law by New York governor Andrew Cuomo in 2019. (Cuomo recently announced that he’ll resign after facing his own allegations of sexual misconduct.)
The Child Victims Act extends the amount of time victims of childhood sexual abuse can file a civil lawsuit and, among other allowances, gives them a one-year window to file even if the statute of limitations on their case has expired. In Giuffre’s case, delays due to the coronavirus pandemic pushed her deadline to file back to August 14, 2021.
Both Andrew and representatives for Buckingham Palace have strongly denied all allegations over the years. The duke said during a sit-down interview with BBC’s Newsnight programme in 2019 that he had “no recollection of ever meeting [Giuffre], none whatsoever” and had never assaulted her.
Giuffre, now 38, issued a statement to ABC News alongside her federal court filing.
“I am holding Prince Andrew accountable for what he did to me,” she said. “The powerful and rich are not exempt from being held responsible for their actions. I hope that other victims will see that it is possible not to live in silence and fear, but to reclaim one’s life by speaking out and demanding justice.”
“I did not come to this decision lightly,” Giuffre added. “As a mother and a wife, my family comes first — and I know that this action will subject me to further attacks by Prince Andrew and his surrogates — but I knew if I did not pursue this action, I would be letting them and victims everywhere down.”