SDNY COURTHOUSE,
Jan 3 -- It was five days after the
Ghislaine Maxwell guilty verdicts when Jeffrey
Epstein's settlement deal with Virginia
Roberts Guiffre was to be unsealed in
Guiffre's case against Prince Andrew.
Kurt was following the case, and
expected to get an email alert when the
unsealed settlement agreement went into the
docket. But even mid-morning none had come.
Kurt
left the SDNY Magistrates Court, where he
was covering the case of a man being
remanded to jail to await a March 2022 trial
that would probably be postponed. He wanted
to check directly in the docket of the
Prince Andrew case, on the PACER terminal in
the press room. It was nearly empty, in the
aftermath of #MaximumMaxwell.
But
damn it, there is was - no notice had been
sent, but the previously dead link to
document number 32-1 was now live. And
settlement agreement was for $500,000 and
released from liability "the said Second
Parties and any other person or entity who
could have been included as a potential
defendant ('Other Potential Defendants')
from all, and all manner of, action and
actions of Virginia Roberts, including State
or Federal, cause and causes of action
(common law or statutory)."
Kurt
put it online, on his DocumentCloud, and was
immediately asked what it meant. Was Andrew
in the clear or not? Soon through a P.R.
firm came a statement from Guiffre's lawyer
David Boies, that day also in the news and
in Kurt's crosshairs with the deadline then
mixed verdict of Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes,
for whom Boies had played attack dog.
For Giuffre he was ostensibly pro bono, and
now said
"As we have said from the beginning, the
release is irrelevant to Ms. Giuffre’s claim
against Prince Andrew. The release does not
mention Prince Andrew. He did not even know
about it.He could not have been a 'potential
defendant' in the settled case against
Jeffrey Epstein both because he was not
subject to jurisdiction in Florida and
because the Florida case involved federal
claims to which he was not a part. The
actual parties to the release have made
clear that Prince Andrew was not covered by
it.Lastly,
the reason we sought to have the release
made public was to refute the claims being
made about it by Prince Andrew’s PR
campaign."
Fine.
But what about Elizabeth Holmes' PR
campaign, now left in the dust by four
guilty verdicts? If DOJ had gone after
Holmes despite George Schultz and Henry
Kissinger backing her up, would they go
after Prince Andrew?
Kurt was determined to keep digging into the
case. Especially when he found on Andrew's
schedule not only dictators from Azerbaijan
to Turkmenistan, to the leaders of the
Maldives which now held the President of the
UN General Assembly and banned him, but
also:
"His
Royal Highness, Special Representative for
International Trade and Investment
subsequently received Ms. Josette Sheeran
(Executive Director, United Nations World
Food Programme)."
Sheeran
has represented the censoring SG Antonio
Guterres in Haiti, where he covered up UN
rapes and killings by UN peacekeepers by
cholera. #MirroringMaxwell.
The underlying
case is US v. Maxwell,
20-cr-330 (Nathan).
***
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