BBC NewsnightEmily Maitlis, a journalist, said that Prince Andrew was not satisfied with the questions she had asked her in a 2019 interview. “almost too surreal to ask”.
In a ColumnThe BBC website states that she is direct in her questions to Duke of York. “catch [her] breath”When she listens to the interview again today.
Maitlis’s column comes as a New York judge is set to decide on Whether to dismissA civil suit against the royal.
Virginia Giuffre is suing the Queen’s son for allegedly sexually assaulting her when she was 17 and a minor under US law. All allegations have been denied by Prince Andrew.
Maitlis’ 2019 interview, in which the Duke made claims about his positionHis alleged inability to sweat and his alleged visit at a Pizza ExpressShe said that Woking was an opportunity for him to tell his side of the story.
Maitlis wrote this in an article published Tuesday night: “At the time, the specifics seemed almost comical. They spawned memes and riffs, quiz-show questions and stand-up routines. But now, suddenly, they feel deadly serious.”
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She claimed that the team entered the interview knowing what they had. “one chance to get it right”.
She wrote: “The answers he gave me on camera may have seemed astonishing, jaw-dropping, even, in places. But bizarrely, I had been expecting them. We had talked through the things he wanted to say earlier, so part of my job that day was just to let him speak.”
Maitlis met Prince Andrew at Buckingham Palace to discuss what he wanted the film to tell. Newsnight.
Prince Andrew and Giuffre were photographed during this meeting. “was likely a doctored fake”Maitlis wrote.
During the meeting, he also spoke out about his inability sweat to sweat due to an adrenaline overdose from the Falklands War.
He was told by her that the BBC team wanted to hear from her “as much detail of his account as we could”.
She stressed that “point of the interview was not to catch him out”. Rather, it was to serve as a record of the royal’s “own version of events”.
She said that she takes a deep breath when she thinks back to the interview. “directness”These are her questions. “can’t quite believe that the words came out in the order [she] intended”. “But they had to”She said, “because we had just one chance”.
She continued: “And we had to be very, very sure – not of the answers – but of the things we needed to find out. Virginia Giuffre alleged she had dined and danced with a sweating Prince Andrew in that London club. And that afterwards she was made to have sex with him in Ghislaine Maxwell’s house.”
“I was already prepared for much of what he was going to say – although never the exact manner in which he said it. But I had to ask those questions in the way I did – to hear and to capture those answers on tape – for wherever the story would take us next,”She ended her remarks.
Follow this link to receive live updates as the hearing happens The Independent’s live blog.