It's No Fake Andrew! Kiwi Snapper's Picture Proof

The true story behind the infamous photo

- Stephen D'antal

With more than 30 years of experience behind him, covering everything from war zones to Olympic Games, the Cannes Film Festival and Princess Diana’s funeral, Kiwi news photographer Michael Thomas has plenty to be proud of.

Acknowledged for his technical mastery as well as for keeping a cool head in the most demanding and, sometimes, dangerous circumstances, he has earned his reputation among hard-to-impress picture editors.

But Michael’s long and distinguished career, he realises with a wry smile, is now defined by just one picture – one he can’t even claim to be his own work.

“I have done some serious stories over the years and taken thousands of pictures in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he says at his Arrowtown home. “But the only one that is going to be remembered is one I copied from a cheap print lying on a hotel-room table.”

Michael’s concern, however, is not for his own legacy, but for the fate of the woman in the picture: Virginia Roberts Giuffre. For in the eight years since he and his colleague from Britain’s Mail on Sunday became the first journalists to see it, it has become one of the world’s best known images – one at the centre of a labyrinthine of criminal and civil legal battles, and one whose repercussions for the British royal family seem limitless.

It shows, of course, Virginia at the age of 17 standing next to Prince Andrew in March 2001, at the London home of tycoon’s daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, who beams in the background. It was taken by Ghislaine’s sometime boyfriend, paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, shortly after the foursome returned from an evening at Tramp nightclub and, according to Virginia, just minutes before she was induced into having sex with Andrew for the first of three times.