Attorney David Boyce discusses Virginia Dufray's suicide following years of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, recounting how he vetted her credible 2014 claims of forced sex with Prince Andrew before securing her $12 million Duke of York settlement. Boyce asserts Dufray never doubted the prince's liability despite his silence, criticizing systemic bias against male traffickers while dismissing conspiracy theories about Epstein's death as inconceivable given prison security. Ultimately, he frames her tragic end as a result of sustained abuse from abusers and those protecting reputations, highlighting the urgent need for accountability in the scandal. [Automatically generated summary]
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Anger Over Virginia Dufray's Death00:01:24
Too much pain, too much torment, the consequence of years of abuse, not only by Epstein.
So far, Prince Andrew has not made any statement since the death of Virginia Dufray.
What is your response to that?
Virginia Dufray's life was torn apart by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and it may ultimately have ended it too.
Her family confirmed on Friday that she died by suicide after the toll of abuse became unbearable.
Dufray was one of the most prominent accusers in the case of convicted sex offenders, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghillaine Maxwell.
She said they trafficked her to the Duke of York when she was just 17.
Prince Andrew has always denied abusing her.
He did, however, pay a reported $12 million settlement to Dufray in 2022.
Well, David Boyce, one of America's most acclaimed attorneys, was her lawyer and came to know her well.
And exclusively, he now joins me on Uncensored.
David, great to talk to you again, albeit in extremely tragic circumstances.
First of all, your reaction to this very sad news of the apparent suicide of Virginia Dufray.
Well, of course, it's very sad.
I think sadness is a predominant reaction.
I think anger as well.
The Lawyer Who Fought For Her00:03:41
Anger that our society let this happen to this extraordinary young woman.
I think regret that we could not have done more to protect her.
But I think at this moment, I think both sadness and also appreciation for the life that she led.
She was an extraordinarily strong woman, ultimately brought down by years of abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, and then later years of verbal abuse and attacks by her collaborators.
But she accomplished a great deal.
Without her courage and without her coming forward, Jeffrey Epstein would probably still be abusing young girls.
So I think it's a sad event, but I think we also ought to take a moment to celebrate what she accomplished.
Yes, well said.
Did you, David, throughout your entire time of your dealings with Virginia, did you ever doubt what she was telling you?
Well, at the very beginning, I was unsure.
Remember when she came to me in 2014 and was about to go public, she knew that this would bring a crushing amount of abuse on her head from Epstein and his powerful collaborators.
And I wanted to be sure that she was absolutely correct in everything that she was going to say, because they were going to exploit anything, even innocent mistakes, that she made.
And so I took an extraordinary step for somebody beginning to represent someone, is I required her to not only go through a rigorous examination, but I had her take a polygraph test.
I wanted to be absolutely certain that the stories that I was being told were accurate.
And remember, at this time, Epstein was a celebrated personality, celebrated by the media.
There had been a puff piece about him in the New York Times, about his philanthropy.
He was entertaining academics, business people, as you say, princes of the United Kingdom.
So if we were going to take somebody on with that much power, those many friends, I wanted to be absolutely certain.
So I checked it out pretty thoroughly.
I never had any doubts after that.
Right, it's fascinating.
You once said everybody's entitled to a lawyer, but not everybody is entitled to me.
Now, there have been reports.
I don't expect you to confirm this, but there have been reports that you can charge $2,000 an hour for your expert advice, which is befitting somebody who's been one of the most successful lawyers in American modern history.
But you worked on Virginia's case, I believe, for free.
Why did you do that?
Well, she couldn't afford the kind of representation that she needed because it was not just me, but it was all of the resources of our firm.
Ms. Sigrid McCauley, one of the leading partners at the firm, devoted most of her time for years on this case.
We had a whole team, more than a dozen lawyers working on the case.
Fighting Abuse And Protecting Children00:03:24
So this was a situation that if she was going to come remotely to a position where she could compete and deal with the forces against her, she was going to need resources that she could not possibly possibly afford.
Also, this was one of the gravest injustices I think our system has seen.
I mean, this is a situation in which you had abuse of children going on in plain sight and nobody doing anything about it.
You had a few people trying, but the media was ignoring it.
Prosecutors were ignoring it.
It was exactly the kind of fault line in our justice system that I think lawyers have an obligation to deal with.
The facts about her life, I think, are fairly well known.
She was sexually abused when she was seven years old by a man known to her family.
She ran away from home when she was 14.
In 2000, when she was 17, she met Guillain Maxwell while she was working as a locker room assistant at Donald Trump's Florida Resort Mor-a-Lago.
Maxwell offered her a job as a masseurs to Epstein, who later trafficked her to his friends and clients, passing around, it was said, like a platter of fruit.
And among them, she said, was Prince Andrew, who she said she was forced to have sex with on three occasions.
Is that pretty much her life crystallized into a few paragraphs?
Well, I think it is an accurate description of some events and of some of the abuse.
I think what it doesn't capture is the triumph of the human spirit that she represented.
Because despite that background, she became a passionate, courageous, strong, effective advocate for the vulnerable.
She dedicated the last 11 years of her life fighting to make sure that other children didn't have to go through what she went through.
So I think that it's right to focus on those years and it's right to focus on that abuse.
I think it's also right to focus on the abuse, the verbal abuse that continued as Epstein's collaborators tried to salvage their own reputations by attacking hers.
But I think we don't want to lose sight of the success that she had, the strengths that she had, the accomplishments that she made, because I think those will live on.
Obviously.
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Prince Andrew Must Take Responsibility00:15:00
The most infamous part of her story became Prince Andrew, who was the son of Queen Elizabeth II, of course, the late great queen.
He always denied the allegations.
He said he wanted his day in court when she brought a civil case against him in New York.
You were involved in that case, of course.
But having said he wanted his day in court, he then chose not to have his day in court and settled for this reported sum of many millions of dollars without admitting liability.
So far, Prince Andrew has not made any statement since the death of Virginia Duffray.
What is your response to that?
I think that, and I've said this before, as a matter of human compassion and religious faith, I believe in redemption.
I think Virginia did too.
I think Virginia hoped that the settlement that was made by Prince Andrew would be the start of his accepting responsibility.
I think that he needs to take responsibility for what he did.
Virginia was always more interested in fighting the sin than attacking the sinner.
And I think that she would accept, would have accepted Prince Andrew taking responsibility and would have recognized that.
And I think that it's not too late.
It's never too late.
And I think that if he wants redemption, if he wants forgiveness, he's got to take responsibility for what happened.
He came pretty close in that statement.
It was a step in the right direction.
And I think I hoped, and I think Virginia hoped, that he would take the next step as well.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, maybe his advisors, he didn't.
But I think, as I say, it's not too late for him or for anyone.
What would you like him to say?
I think that's up to him.
I think I'd like to have him say, I'm sorry.
He sort of said that, but I'd like him to be more direct about that.
I'd like him to say, even if he doesn't remember what happened, I think he needs to recognize that he had, he clearly had, sex with young girls with Jeffrey Epstein.
I mean, he may not remember that it was Virginia, but he can't forget the event.
And he needs, I think, to just come clean.
He's not somebody that Virginia had animus towards.
I think the settlement that she worked out was something that indicated that she didn't necessarily want to drag him into court if that wasn't necessary.
It's just a question of taking responsibility, accepting responsibility for what happened.
Maybe he has a version of what happened that's different, but he can't deny that he was with her.
I mean, you've got the photograph.
You've got the testimony from other people.
You know, continuing to deny he didn't know her.
He never met her.
He had nothing to do with her.
That's not productive.
It's also not right.
Did you have any doubt, David, from all your conversations with Virginia that she had sex with Prince Andrew, as she claimed, on three occasions?
I never had, after my initial vetting of her, I never had any doubt about her reports of what happened.
I think everybody who met her was impressed with her credibility.
I think a lot of people attacked her who didn't know her.
A lot of people in the media repeated attacks on her that came from people who had an agenda of trying to protect themselves by attacking her.
But the people who actually knew her, actually talked to her, I think always found her to be extraordinarily credible.
I mean, she didn't overstate.
She was somebody who was careful.
As I say, she knew that any mistake she made, even an innocent one, would be used by people trying to take her down.
So she was careful about what she said.
And I and many other people thought she was a very credible person.
Do you think if he had gone ahead with the court appearance that he would have been exposed in that environment?
And that is perhaps why in the end they came to such a big settlement?
I don't think there's any doubt that they settled when they did for what they did, because they recognized that a court defense was unsustainable.
I don't think anybody seriously thinks that he would have withstood cross-examination in an open court.
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He's also, as I said, he's not made any statement at all since the news of her death.
Do you think at the very least, as you said, talking about compassion, should he at the very least have said something publicly about her death?
I think I would have liked to have seen that.
On the other hand, I think we have to recognize how complicated it would be for him to say anything at this point.
I think that, you know, on the one hand, I think he will be criticized for not saying something.
On the other hand, almost anything he said, I think, would probably be attacked.
So I think he, while I would have liked to have seen a statement, I would have liked to have seen something, I've got a lot of sympathy for the position he is in in terms of trying to craft something that wouldn't just make things worse.
I think we all saw when he's tried to talk before about this, his failure to really come to grips with it has ended up making him worse off.
So I would have loved to see him take some responsibility at this moment, but I'm totally understanding why he would not rush out to make a statement.
There is a belief he's been trying to get back into public life in the UK and that this may, this tragic development may have put the kibosh on that.
But do you think that if he was now, even at this late stage, given that Virginia has so sadly died, do you think if he was now, as you put it, to come clean, even if you phrased it as, I don't remember, but then conceded that this may well have happened for the reasons that you stated, do you think that that would go some way to absolving him in terms of the, as you see it, the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility?
I don't think it absolves him, but what I think it does do is I think it opens a path for redemption.
Redemption doesn't require people to accept that what happened was right.
What it does is it recognizes that there, for 2,000 years, there's not been a perfect person on this earth.
And we are all guilty of sin.
And I think that I think Virginia believed, as I do, that redemption is always a possibility.
And I think that if he were to come forward, I think that that would hopefully set him on the path to redemption and that people would recognize that however horrific some of the abuse was,
there was never an allegation that he drugged anybody or that he physically harmed anybody or threatened anybody with physical harm.
It's not to in any way minimize what he did, but to recognize that this is the kind of conduct that can lead ultimately to redemption.
And I think that it's hard for somebody who is as powerful and as public as Prince Andrew to really accept responsibility.
But I think that is the only pathway towards redemption.
Obviously, there's a new monarch in the UK, King Charles III.
This is his brother, his younger brother.
If Andrew is reluctant to do what you suggest, do you think that it would be the right thing for the king to try and urge him to?
I think it would be the right thing of an older brother to do it.
I don't have any insight as to what the king as the king should do.
But I think family should urge family to do the right thing, and I think family should be supportive of people often even when they don't do the right thing.
So I think family is very important here.
And I would like to see every family work closer together to make sure everybody in that family does the right thing and to be supportive of them.
If Prince Andrew was to make any admissions now, of course he would be confessing to a crime because Virginia Dufray was underage in the locations that she talked about having sex with him in the United States.
And that may be, of course, a major factor in his decision-making about whether to make such admissions.
I think it could be.
I don't think that a criminal prosecution in the United States at this stage is likely.
The prosecutors in the United States, like the prosecutors in the United Kingdom, have been remarkably absent in terms of going after participants in the Epstein sex trafficking enterprise.
So I don't think that he ought to focus primarily or even in an important way on the prospect of criminal sanctions.
I think if he were to come forward, I think that would not be something that exposed him to criminal liability at this point.
I mean, you touched on something very interesting there, which is the extraordinary lack of people being brought to account here, with the exception of Epstein and Ghillane Maxwell.
I mean, there is an irony that the only person who is currently languishing in prison in the United States for any of this is a woman.
None of the men who we believe participated in this kind of activity with Epstein.
Why do you think that's happened?
And is it likely to change?
I mean, could anything surrounding Virginia Duffray's death, do you think, recharge an effort to bring accountability?
I think realistically it won't.
I think that while we've made enormous progress in exposing the evil of sex trafficking, there is still a perception, a bias, if you will,
among most of society, including prosecutors, including the media, that looks down on the girls who are trafficked with a sense that somehow this must have been their fault in some way.
Most of them are people who have had troubled childhoods.
They are not the kind of people that prosecutors and people in the media easily identify with them.
They don't think of them as their sister, their wife, their mother, their girlfriend.
There is a class issue here.
And I think that if what happened to Virginia and the many other Epstein victims had happened to professional women, you would have had a very different reaction.
A different reaction from prosecutors, a different reaction from the media.
A Tragedy For Our Legal System00:07:38
And I think that this is one of the tragedies here, and one of the tragedies for our legal system here is that we have devalued the humanity of these young girls and young women.
I think one of the things that Virginia was most interested in fighting is giving voice to, was giving voice to these children, giving voice to these young women so that hopefully she could reduce at least, if not eliminate, the chance that what happened to her would happen to more people.
David, do you believe that Epstein took his own life?
There's so many conspiracy theories that have whirled around since then.
It is inconceivable that all of those things could have happened to allow him to take his own life, but it is even more inconceivable that this could have been a, in effect, murder.
There's no doubt that there were many rich and powerful people who had an incentive not to see Epstein talk, but the idea that somehow they were able to penetrate the American prison system and without leaving any trace and to have accomplished this is even more inconceivable to me than the idea that he was allowed to commit suicide.
Peter Mandelson, who's the current UK ambassador, new UK ambassador to Washington, was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's.
Do you think that people in his position should be asked difficult questions about exactly what they knew and when they knew it?
Because it seems like everyone who moved in his orbit has thrown their hands up and gone, I had no idea.
All right.
Well, I think that he had a lot, as we were talking about before, a lot of people that he had connections with.
And some of those people, I'm sure, those connections were innocent.
Some of the people, they were not.
I do think that people who had a lot of contact with Jeffrey Epstein have questions that they should answer.
But I think that we also need to be careful that we don't go on sort of a witch hunt in which sort of anybody who ever had any contact with Jeffrey Epstein is presumed to be involved in the sex trafficking.
There were plenty of people that we know were involved in the sex trafficking to go after.
And I think those are the people we ought to start with.
Finally, in the last few months of her life, she seemed to be spiraling Virginia in a very sad way.
There were restraining orders against her estranged husband.
There was a bizarre hospital admission.
There was a bus crash, which she said she was days away from dying following it, but it seemed to be massively exaggerated and so on.
There was a previous Instagram post several years ago in which she said, you know, don't ever believe it if I'm reported to have committed suicide.
It won't be true and so on.
Her family said after she died that the trauma inflicted on her by her abusers was not over when the court case was over.
Do you think that everything that was going on in the latter stages of her life was all basically something that can be charted back to the abuse that she suffered?
Well, I think the abuse that she suffered continued.
I think she was abused sexually By Epstein and his collaborators, and then she was abused reputationally and verbal abuse and very serious attacks on her that would have affected almost anybody.
So I think that there were two stages of that abuse, and that abuse didn't end with Epstein's death.
It didn't end with Maxwell's imprisonment, and it didn't end with the settlements with Prince Andrew and others.
What happened was that because she was such a fierce advocate and because she was such a strong advocate, Epstein's collaborators, who wanted to protect their own reputations, just savaged her, continued to savage her in ways that would have been difficult for anybody to deal with,
but were particularly difficult for somebody who was as vulnerable as a result of the past abuse.
So I think that the spiraling down that you refer to was the consequence of years of abuse, not only by Epstein, but by others, and not only physical abuse, but emotional and reputational abuse.
So I think the family said it well when they really described this ultimately me just being too much, too much pain, too much torment for her to continue to deal with.
Incredibly sad and a very sad and tragic life and with so little account of it.
Tragic but also tragic but also inspirational.
I think we want to recognize the tragedy.
I think we want to recognize the unfairness.
I think we want to use this to rededicate ourselves to attacking the sin that brought her down.
But I think we also need to recognize her courage, her accomplishments, and, as I said, the triumph of the human spirit that she represented.
And David, just finally, one last question.
You have recently hit Boeing with a wrongful death suit spurred by the suicide of a whistleblower called John Barnett, who worked for them for 30 years.
Is there any possibility of any similar wrongful death suit being linked to Virginia taking her life?
I don't think so.
I think the Boeing situation was a pretty unique situation.
And I think that here it would be very hard to single out any individual other than Epstein himself, perhaps.
And he has already gone to his reward.
So I think that it is very unlikely there would be any wrongful death.
It would not be the kind of suit that I would feel was strong enough to bring.
David Boyce, thank you so much for your time today.
It's, as you said, very.
Thank you very much.
Good to talk to you.
Yeah, I really appreciate it.
You knew her very well.
I think you summed her up perfectly.
A sad, tragic loss, but also a very inspiring woman in many ways.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
Yes.
Thank you.
Remembering An Inspiring Woman00:00:24
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