A deep dive into the troll account set up to bring down Virginia Giuffre

@letsgiuffre, the account’s handle, was named after Virginia Giuffre, the woman who claimed she was trafficked by Maxwell from the US to London and forced to have sex with Prince Andrew – something he has always denied.

Even though her name was not on the indictment, Giuffre’s claims were central to the criminal case against Maxwell. Prosecutors said her account of sexual abuse validated their theory that Maxwell was an active participant rather than a bystander.

But supporting Giuffre was the opposite of @letsgiuffre’s intention. The account profile read: “Let’s talk about Virginia Giuffre. The truth has not been reported.”

Over three months, until it was quietly deactivated in January 2021, the account posted more than 1,200 messages and retweets. Almost every one was critical of Maxwell’s accuser.

“#VirginiaGiuffre Why did you traffic minors to #Epstein despite not being held captive by him,” read one post. “#VirginiaGiuffre Why did you lie about your age and state that you were 15 when you met #Epstein.”

Another said: “You were not a child when you self-proclaimed as a child victim. You were a predator too.”

Giuffre died by suicide in April aged 41. In her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published last week, she claimed that Prince Andrew’s team tried to hire “internet trolls to hassle” her. While the @letsgiuffre account was created prior to her lawsuit against Prince Andrew, experts said it bore all the hallmarks of a troll account set up specifically to attack her. However, there is no evidence of any involvement by Andrew or his team.

“Letsgiuffre strongly resembles a troll account,” said Zhouhan Chen, the founder of Information Tracer, a misinformation tracking tool. “Its posting pattern is spammy and aggressive. Among 479 deleted posts I reviewed, there were 232 mentions of Virginia Giuffre, 143 mentions of Prince Andrew and numerous identical sentences.”

The Observer recovered hundreds of deleted messages from the account. Analysis shows it posted some messages within seconds of each other – another sign of automated activity.

One of the accounts @letsgiuffre mentioned most frequently belongs to an independent journalist, Jay Beecher. A former Ukip organiser who was once deputy chairman of the party’s Peterborough branch, Beecher has spent the last five years investigating the Epstein case and considers Giuffre to be a fraud. On his Twitter account, he has called Giuffre a “child-­trafficking, money-grabbing slapper”.

In a series of now deleted tweets, the @letsgiuffre account “recommended” a report – We Need to Talk About Virginia – that Beecher had written on Giuffre to dozens of other Twitter users, even using almost identical language to his to promote it.

@letsgiuffre posted 36 tweets from 24 October to 28 December 2020 which said: “The mainstream media are intentionally ignoring facts to irresponsibly promote @VRSVirginia lies about #PrinceAndrew for financial gain and to cater for a sensationalism-driven society.”

During that time, Beecher launched a fundraiser for ­a ­pro-Ghislaine Maxwell documentary in which he said that the “media are intentionally printing demonstrable lies in relation to the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell … because those lies sell newspapers … and pander to a sensationalism-driven society”.

Maxwell has long maintained that Giuffre lied about her abuse. In 2015, Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation and the case was settled two years later for an undisclosed sum. In Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre describes Maxwell as an “apex predator” who recruited her for Epstein when she was 17. She also describes in detail three occasions on which she claims to have had sex with Prince Andrew.

Beecher declined to comment, but it is understood that he strongly maintains he had nothing to do with the @letsgiuffre account and had never heard of it before it was flagged to him.

The Observer has seen nothing to contradict this. The account could have used Beecher’s phraseology without his knowledge or approval.

However it can be revealed that Brian Basham, a close friend of the Maxwell family, says he paid Beecher about £80,000 to investigate Giuffre.

Basham, who says he is not a spokesperson for the family but whose contact details are published on Maxwell’s official website, RealGhislaine.com, said he wanted to “support” Beecher and had reached out after the journalist had already gathered evidence of “serious allegations against Ms Giuffre”.

“I said: ‘I’ll pay your rent; I’ll pay for you to go down to America,’” Basham said. “He went to New York, interviewed Alan Dershowitz [a lawyer once accused by Giuffre of abuse, which he denied]; he met Mark Epstein [Jeffrey Epstein’s brother]. He went down to Florida. I directed him to a woman called Carolyn [Andriano].”

In 2021, Maxwell was convicted unanimously on five of the six charges against her. Four of the guilty verdicts were underpinned by testimony from an Epstein victim called Carolyn Andriano.

“She is the sole reason that Ghislaine Maxwell was given a 20-year sentence,” Basham said. “I paid for Jay to go find people who knew Carolyn. He found her boyfriend. Most significantly, he found Carolyn Andriano’s mother, Dorothy.”

In May 2023, Andriano, 36, died of an overdose in a Florida hotel room, leaving behind five children and her husband, John Pitts Jr.

Basham said that Dorothy Groenert, Andriano’s mother, had signed a notarised statement that apparently undermined her daughter’s evidence. Basham said he had passed this on to Maxwell: “I’ve fed this in [to Maxwell’s lawyers].” The Observer attempted to contact Groenert but did not receive a response.

Although Basham said he paid Beecher independently of the Maxwell family, he was clear that he would like them to pay him back. “I’m £80k up the swanny,” he said. “I’ve said to [the Maxwells] that there’s a clear benefit [to Beecher’s information].”

Basham and Beecher are now planning to publish a book on Beecher’s investigation called The Prince, the President and the Puppets. “I was supporting him to allow him to continue to conduct an investigation that had started some years before I met him,” Basham said. “The puppets is an oblique reference to the fact that these girls have been used, to their benefit, by newspapers, by lawyers and by everyone else for their mutual gain.”

Beecher does not appear to have previously disclosed that he received funding from a party connected to the Epstein case. Last night, he declined to comment further.

In a statement released via the Real Ghislaine website, the Maxwell family said it had no knowledge of or association with the @letsgiuffre account or any anonymous social media account. They said Basham had asked them for funding to help “defray the costs of publishing” Beecher’s book and they were “inclined to view that request favourably”. They said no one in the family had read Beecher’s book and they had no editorial control over its content.

“It is worth emphasising that, some years prior to being contacted by Mr Basham, Mr Beecher had discovered much if not all the information relating to the many lies told by Virginia Giuffre and other facts helpful to our sister Ghislaine’s case,” the family said.

Photographs by Emily Michot/Miami Herald, Tribune News Service via Getty, PA, US Department of Justice