Mega Edition: Judge Kaplan Blasts Prince Andrew And His Legal Team (7/16/26)

Judge Lewis Kaplan made it clear early in Virginia Giuffre’s civil lawsuit that he would not allow Prince Andrew’s attorneys to bury the case beneath procedural disputes or use technical arguments to postpone confronting the allegations. When Andrew’s legal team challenged whether he had been properly served with the lawsuit, Kaplan authorized Giuffre to deliver the papers through Andrew’s American attorneys and pushed the parties toward addressing the substance of the case. The judge indicated that the litigation should not be made unnecessarily complicated, rejecting the idea that disputes over international service rules should be permitted to stall the proceedings indefinitely. Andrew’s lawyers had argued that formal service had to proceed through British legal channels, while Giuffre’s attorneys accused the prince of avoiding service and playing a prolonged game of procedural hide-and-seek. Kaplan’s rulings removed that obstacle and established that Andrew would have to respond rather than continue contesting how the papers reached him.

Kaplan showed the same impatience when Andrew’s attorneys later attempted to dismiss the lawsuit through a series of legal technicalities, including Giuffre’s residency, the constitutionality of New York’s Child Victims Act and the wording of her earlier settlement with Jeffrey Epstein. During oral arguments, Kaplan directly cut off claims that Giuffre had failed to include enough factual detail in her complaint, telling Andrew’s lawyer that she had no obligation to provide that level of specificity at the pleading stage and that dismissal on that basis was “not going to happen.” He ultimately denied Andrew’s motion to dismiss in all respects, finding that the Epstein settlement was too ambiguous to clearly release Andrew from liability and allowing discovery to proceed. The message was unmistakable: Andrew’s legal team was entitled to mount a defense, but procedure would not be transformed into a mechanism for endlessly delaying Giuffre’s opportunity to have her claims heard.


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