A documentary set to air on Tuesday will allege that Ghislaine Maxwell, the former socialite found guilty of child sex trafficking on the behalf of Jeffrey Epstein, shared an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew and could enter Buckingham Palace “at will.”
Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile, due to be aired by ITV at 9 pm on Tuesday, will outline a series of eyewitness accounts including that of Paul Page, the Duke of York’s protection officer from 1998 to 2004.
“I first met Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001,” said Page. “From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace at will, we realised and suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew. A colleague of mine remembered her coming in four times in one day. She kept coming in and out, in and out.”
Last week, the Queen stripped Prince Andrew of his military titles and royal patronages after a US civil court allowed a civil action lawsuit against the Duke to proceed. Andrew has pledged to “continue to defend himself” against the case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, who alleges that the Prince had sex with her at Maxwell’s London townhouse in 2001 — the same year Maxwell’s alleged visits to Buckingham Palace began.
Page’s claims were supported by Euan Rellie, a friend of Maxwell during university. Rellie, a banker, reportedly told ITV that he “got the sense that Prince Andrew and Ghislaine had probably been girlfriend and boyfriend in the past,” with Maxwell once claiming at a dinner party at Epstein’s New York home that Andrew was “her friend, not Jeffreys.”
“[Maxwell and Andrew had an] easy warmth around each other,” recalled Rellie.
Maxwell faces up to 65 years in prison after being convicted last month of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with Epstein, the American financier, between 1994 and 2004. Sharing a long-standing friendship with Maxwell after meeting at the University of Oxford, Andrew in 2000 hosted a 39th birthday party for the socialite at the royal residence at Sandringham and, in the same year, also invited Maxwell and Epstein, her then-boyfriend, to a combined birthday ball for four royals hosted by the Queen at Windsor Castle.
**Source