GHISLAINE Maxwell has claimed an infamous picture of Prince Andrew with Virginia Giuffre is fake – but won’t reveal why.
The photo shows the Duke of York with his arm around the then 17-year-old teen sex slave at Maxwell’s London home in 2001.
Ghislaine Maxwell claims the infamous Andrew photo is a fake
Ms Giuffre used it as evidence for her claims Andrew sexually abused her on three occasions after she was trafficked to the UK by Jeffrey Epstein.
The royal vehemently denies the allegations and has always insisted the photo has been doctored.
Jailed socialite Maxwell has now revealed she agrees with his claims in an astonishing U-turn.
In an interview from prison, she said: “This photo is not real.
“There was never an original one produced.”
But Maxwell refused to say more on Giuffre — who sued the Prince for sex abuse and accepted a reported $12million in damages earlier this year — adding, with a dismissive wave: “I don’t even want to start talking about Virginia.”
The Prince dropped his defence against Giuffre’s lawsuit and agreed to pay up — turning him into the Palace pariah, banned from royal duties — after a damaging 2015 email from Ghislaine emerged.
Epstein’s lawyer Alan Dershowitz had asked her if the picture was real. She replied: “It looks real. I think it is.”
Challenged on that now, Maxwell insisted: “I don’t recognise that picture and I don’t believe it is a real picture.”
Then she claimed that all she meant to say in that email was that she recognised her own house.
“I said, it is that image that, whatever it is, I recognise it as my house,” she explained in a rambling response.
“But I have come to discover that image I don’t believe is true. And the original has never been produced because it doesn’t exist. I don’t believe that image is a true image.”
So did she reply to Dershowitz without thinking? “If you see a photograph and it’s a photograph of you in your home, and someone says to you, is that a picture of you? So you don’t question.
It would never occur to me that at that time that somebody would have created a photograph or, you know, done something with a picture . . . I recognised the surroundings of that photograph, nothing more than that.”
Maxwell claims there are “over 50 problems with the picture” that led her to come to the conclusion that it was a fake.
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Maxwell spoke out in her first interview from prison
She was jailed for trafficking girls to be abused by lover Jeffrey Epstein
