My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be sued for asking a question. It was in this spirit that he approached in his weekly column the story of a schoolteacher who had been acquitted for the third time in his career of sexually molesting young boys in his care. He did not for a moment doubt the man’s innocence, JJ wrote, but he wondered: would it not be prudent for this man to take up a line of work ‘that carries a less high risk of false accusation’?
This formulation came into my mind as I read the latest news on the Duke of York’s fight against a lawsuit brought in the US by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims that she was trafficked as a teenager by Jeffrey Epstein and that Epstein’s friend Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her while she was 17 years old.
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