This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 13 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
One of the most important revelations to come from the more than 20,000 documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, released by Congress on Wednesday, hasn’t actually received a ton of attention here in the U.S. — but it is a huge deal overseas.
The story centers on a photograph of Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as then-Prince Andrew — who has now been stripped of his title by the British monarchy — and a girl. In the photo, Andrew’s hand can be seen around the girl’s waist.
That girl was later identified as then-17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, the late Epstein survivor who tragically died by suicide just this past spring.
In her posthumous memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” Giuffre wrote about that encounter with Andrew. According to Giuffre, she was staying with Epstein and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home in London, just about seven months after she was first recruited from Mar-a-Lago.
Giuffre wrote that Maxwell woke her up that morning and told her that it was going to be a special day and that she would meet a prince.
When Andrew arrived at the house that evening, Maxwell asked him to guess Giuffre’s age. The then-41-year-old guessed correctly: 17.
Realizing her mom would never forgive her if she met someone as famous as Andrew and didn’t pose for a picture, Giuffre got her camera. She wrote that Epstein snapped the photo and then they all went to a nightclub, where Andrew bought her a cocktail and danced with her.
On the way back to the house, Giuffre said Maxwell told her: “When we get home, you are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey.”
I’ll spare you the rest of the truly wretched details, but Giuffre said that she and Andrew had sex that night at Epstein and Maxwell’s direction. It was the first of three such encounters.
Both Maxwell and Andrew have vehemently denied that any of this ever happened. A key part of that denial has been asserting that the photo of the trio is fake.
Even just this summer, in an interview with Donald Trump’s personal lawyer-turned-deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, Maxwell flat-out denied it and told him she believed it was “literally a fake photo.”
However, according to one of the emails included in the trove of documents released on Wednesday, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
On July 1, 2011, just months after the photo was first published in the British tabloids, Epstein allegedly sent an email in which he wrote: “Yes she was on my plane, and yes she had her picture taken with Andrew.”
Epstein denied everything else that took place and seemed to defend the photo by adding that many of his employees had taken pictures with Andrew.
It should be noted that Epstein himself is not exactly a reliable or trustworthy source. But the idea that Epstein, way back in 2011, said this photo was real throws into question everything both Andrew and Maxwell have said about the rest of that story.
The fact that, just months ago, Maxwell told Blanche that the photo was fake now adds all the more reason to be skeptical that anything she told the deputy attorney general in that meeting was true. The email is a gigantic story in the British media right now. It is an absolute scandal. It’s also a massive piece of potentially vindicating evidence for Giuffre, who Maxwell, Epstein and Andrew have all claimed for more than a decade made everything up. Already, Trump and the White House are trying to discredit everything in this trove of documents — and they’re trying to use the name of an Epstein survivor to get away with it. On Wednesday, the very first email that the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released showed Epstein writing Maxwell to say that Trump was the “dog that hasn’t barked” and that a victim spent hours at Epstein’s house with Trump. The Democrats on the committee redacted that victim’s name, as they have tried to do with the names of all of Epstein’s survivors, in part to allow them to tell their own stories on their own terms. But within an hour of the release, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee promptly outed the victim as Giuffre, apparently doing so just so they could point to past statements of hers in which she said she had never seen Trump do anything wrong. So they’re outing an Epstein survivor for political gain. But, just to be clear, this was not a one-off. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt promptly did the same in a press release. Then, at the White House press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt had the gall to again invoke Giuffre’s name to defend Trump — without even learning how to pronounce it. The email is a gigantic story in the British media right now. It is an absolute scandal. It’s also a massive piece of potentially vindicating evidence for Giuffre. “Ms. Giuffre maintained, and God rest her soul, that she maintained that there was nothing inappropriate she ever witnessed, that President Trump was always extremely professional and friendly to her,” Leavitt said from the podium. Now, again, the reason Leavitt and House Republicans are invoking Giuffre’s name is not to help tell her story, or to push for releasing more documents as her family wants, but to try to cover for the president. The Republicans have co-opted the story of a young woman, whom many survivors credit with inspiring them to tell their own stories and who is no longer here with us to keep telling hers, all for their own political gain.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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