Virginia Giuffre's lawyer says Prince Andrew can no longer 'hide behind wealth and palace walls' now that he's been sued

• Giuffre's lawyer says Prince Andrew "stonewalled" her for years, leaving her no choice but to sue.
• Andrew can't hide behind his royal status now that he's being sued in the US, David Boies said.
• Giuffre has accused the prince of sexual assault when she was 17, a charge he denies.

Virginia Giuffre's lawyer has said that Prince Andrew can no longer "hide behind wealth and palace walls" now that he has been sued.

In an interview with Sky News Tuesday, David Boies described Giuffre's decision to sue the Duke of York in a US court as a last resort, following years of attempts to get him to engage with her - each of which was "stonewalled," Boies said.

Giuffre has accused Andrew of having sex with her when she was 17 at the mansion owned by the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a charge that the prince has repeatedly denied. Giuffre said she was a victim of sex trafficking by Epstein at the time.

She filed a civil suit against Andrew on Monday in New York, after what Boies describes as years of trying to get Andrew to respond any other way.

"We've reached out to Prince Andrew's legal team, a number of times over the last five years, we've made an attempt to engage with him to give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story, to provide any explanation or context, that he might have for his actions to try to resolve this without the necessity of litigation," Boies told Sky News.

"Every such effort has been rebuffed."

In a November 2019 interview with the BBC's "Newsnight," Andrew repeated his denials and said that he stood ready to help law-enforcement officials to look at the case.

But US prosecutors have expressed similar frustration to Boies in their investigations of Epstein, with whom Andrew was friends. Attorneys for the Southern District of New York said in January and July 2020 that they had heard nothing from the prince.

Boies suggested to "Newsnight" on Tuesday that Andrew had been using his wealth and royal status to hide from accountability.

"You cannot hide behind wealth and power and palace walls," he told the show.

The case papers, as reported by the BBC, expressed a similar sentiment: "In this country [the US], no person, whether president or prince, is above the law, and no person, no matter how powerless or vulnerable, can be deprived of the law's protection," they said.

Boies told the BBC that if Andrew totally ignores the lawsuit, he would be subject to a "default judgement" that "will be, in effect, enforced not only in the United States, but in virtually every civilized country in the world."

A spokesperson for Andrew did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, but told both the BBC and Sky that it would not comment on the case.