Can't believe they told him to go private and fight this himself then go and pay her off for him, this has done the royal family zero favours in the public's eyes now.
Yup, I mean it's pretty stingy of them, it would have been a huge blow for him financially but if the queen is paying it off then it's rather meh... he's still basically gotten away with it(allegedly), had to step back from public life etc.. but he's avoided a court case and the queen has seemingly stumped up for the bill.
Perhaps they thought he had a good shot at ending it earlier, the thing she signed for Epstein or arguments re: jurisdiction or whatever so were happy for andy to try that approach for a bit first, in the end though that seems to have done more damage. Maybe they shouldn't have been so stingy and instead of going down the route of basically making her out to be a liar they should have made her an offer like this in the first place.
On her part I guess her expensive lawyers would rather get paid than have to risk not getting paid in a trial with an outcome that might well be a super-sized (if they win) but would no doubt be appealed, leading to more work and end up perhaps with a settlement anyway.
There are the inconvenient parts too like the alleged victim, in this case, was also later an alleged sex trafficker herself as an adult in the wider Epstein case, she allegedly recruited young girls for Epstein and there were apparent inconsistencies with her accounts. It wasn't necessarily a slam dunk.
Would have been amusing for the rest of us to see a court case over this though.
I've just read that a civil case has a lower barrier to be found guilty than a criminal case, If this is true unless you have rock solid evidence of your innocence you're basically guaranteed to lose.
Your conclusion is flawed. Criminal trials in the UK require proof
beyond a reasonable doubt, civil cases are
on the balance of probabilities, it's a lower standard but it doesn't imply you're at a huge disadvantage if sued. Similar standards in the US for civil cases AFAIK.
Alleged criminals can be found not guilty even if it is more likely than not that they did commit the crime, so long as there is some reasonable doubt there then... That doesn't wash in a civil case - see for example OJ Simpson being found not guilty of murder in the criminal trial but then being successfully sued in the civil case.
