[imagesource: BBC]

If this was an American football match you’d say Prince Andrew is throwing out the Hail Mary passes.

His legal team appears to be exhausting every possible avenue in efforts to try and throw out the civil case being brought against him by Virginia Giuffre.

She claims that she was forced to have sex with the Duke of York multiple times while underage.

Prince Andrew’s legal eagles first attacked the credibility of Giuffre in claiming that she wanted to “achieve another payday at his expense and at the expense of those closest to him” and denied that he had ever had sex with her.

What does a Hail Mary pass look like in legal terms? Now Prince Andrew has asked Judge Lewis Kaplan to dismiss Giuffre’s complaint due to her age, reports The Daily Beast:

[He argues that] that New York’s Child Victims Act, the legislation under which she is suing him, is flawed because it classifies those under the age of 18 as minors, but the age of consent in New York is 17…

Giuffre alleges that she was 17 when she was forced to have sex with the prince multiple times at various locations around the world, in 2001.

So we’ve gone from denying that there was sex to saying that Giuffre wasn’t actually a minor? That’s quite the pivot.

Has a royal ever regretted a photo as much as Prince Andrew regrets this one?

Image: Rex / Shutterstock

At one stage allies of the royal planted stories in the press about the image being a fake but that seems to have died down on the basis of how ridiculous that claim is.

Prince Andrew’s legal team, headed by Andrew Brettler, argued further that the Child Victims Act is “not a reasonable mechanism to address the injustice of child sexual abuse in New York” :

[The legal team] acknowledge in the paperwork that it would be possible to prove lack of consent by showing evidence of an “implied threat” being made, but it would be difficult to prove “as memories fade, false memories are created, and witnesses die or otherwise become unavailable.”

There’s that classic false memory line, which we’ve also seen used by Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence team during her ongoing trial.

It’s also been reported that despite funding his very costly defence efforts, the Queen has been left in the dark regarding their strategy.

Probably best that way so she can feign ignorance and remain silent on the matter in public while bankrolling her 61-year-old son.

[source:dbeast]