By Matthew Russell Lee, Author Amazon Patreon Song
BBC - Decrypt - LightRead - Radio - Podcast
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.
Inner City Press covered the trial, and all the comes before and after it; #CourtCaseCast and song I, Song 2, Song 3, fifth song, Nov 27 song and now, the Dec 29 verdict song here
The underlying case is US v. Maxwell, 20-cr-330 (Nathan).
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