London's Metropolitan Police said they were not conducting any new investigations into Prince Andrew after a 2016 deposition accusing him of groping a woman's breast was released this week. The deposition was among hundreds of pages of mostly unredacted documents related to Jeffrey Epstein unsealed this week under the order of a judge in a now-settled defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's victims.
In the deposition, Johanna Sjoberg alleges she was groped by Prince Andrew in 2001, when she was 21. The allegation is not new, and BBC News reports Buckingham Palace previously called her allegations "categorically untrue."
Sjoberg says she met Andrew when she was brought to Epstein's home in New York in 2001 by Ghislaine Maxwell. Virginia Giuffre, whose lawsuit accusing Prince Andrew of sexual abuse was settled out of court in 2022, was also at the house at the time.
Sjoberg said she initially didn't know who the British royal was, until Maxwell took her to get a caricature puppet of him from a BBC show. Then, she said, she sat on Andrew's lap, while Giuffre sat beside him on the couch with the puppet in her own lap. The group took a photo with the Prince Andrew puppet groping Giuffre's breast, and Andrew himself groping Sjoberg's.
In an excerpted transcript from a deposition of Maxwell released among the documents unsealed this week, she seemingly confirmed the existence of the puppet — which she called "Not a puppet. I don't know how you would describe it. A caricature of Prince Andrew that was in Jeffrey's home." When asked about the incident Sjoberg described, she said, "I don't recollect. I recollect the puppet but I don't recollect anything around the puppet," before saying again it was a "characterization of Andrew."