Virginia Giuffre gives clean chit to Prince Andrew?

Virginia Giuffre did not mention Andrew in her emotional statement against Ghislaine Maxwell which was read by her lawyer in her absence in the court on Tuesday.

 Prince Andrew's accuser Giuffre did not appear in the court, but her heart-wrenching statement against Maxwell was read by her lawyer Sigrid McCawley.

Virginia Giuffre, who was said to have been subject to a gagging order about her settlement with Prince Andrew, did not mention the royal in her emotional statement.

'Ghislaine, 22 years ago, in the summer of 2000, you spotted me at the Mar-a-Lago Hotel in Florida, and you made a choice,' McCawley reads from Giuffre's statement.

'You chose to follow me and procure me for Jeffrey Epstein. Just hours later, you and he abused me together for the first time. Together, you damaged me physically, mentally, sexually and emotionally. Together, you did unthinkable things that still have a corrosive impact on me to this day.'

'When you did that, Ghislaine, you changed the course of our lives forever,' Giuffre wrote.

'You joked that you were like a new mother to us. As a woman, I think you understood the damage you were causing -- the price you were making us victims pay.

'You could have put an end to the rapes, the molestations, the sickening manipulations that you arranged, witnessed and even took part in. You could've called the authorities and reported that you were a part of something awful.'

'There is not a day that goes by that I don't ask, 'Why?' Why, Ghislaine, did you enjoy hurting us so much?' Giuffre says in the statement.

'I worry every single day and night that you will get away with it and evade being punished. I will worry about that until you are brought to justice. And what should that justice look like? Ghislaine, you deserve to spend the rest of your life in a jail cell. You deserve to be trapped in a cage forever, just like you trapped your victims.'

'My promise to you is as follows: As long as you and perpetrators like you continue to prey upon the vulnerable, I will not stop standing up and speaking out. Together, with so many others you abused, we will do all we can to keep predators from stealing the innocence of children. I will never give up. I will never go away. If you ever get out of prison, I will be here, watching you, making sure you never hurt anyone else again.'

Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years in jail after being convicted of recruiting and trafficking underage girls including Giuffre for the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, found dead in his New York jail cell aged 66 in 2019 after an apparent suicide.