Wednesday night, 40 previously sealed court documents were released from a lawsuit involving child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and while there weren't as many startling revelations as internet sleuths and journalists were hoping, one piece of information involving a puppet—yes, you read that right—stood out.
The trove of documents from a lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, exposed over 150 names of prominent figures like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and David Copperfield, but one of the most…intriguing pieces of information was about the strange and upsetting way the U.K.'s Prince Andrew used a puppet version of himself.
In a deposition included in the released files, Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg said Prince Andrew put his hand on her breast when they were having a photo taken at Epstein's house back in 2001 when she was 20. And while that is awful, the weirder part comes when she says that the British prince also groped Giuffre with a puppet that looked like a big-toothed caricature of himself.
"They put the puppet on Virginia's lap and I sat on Andrew's lap, and they put the puppet's hand on Virginia's breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo," Sjoberg's deposition said, according to The Guardian.
There is nothing funny about the harrowing sexual abuse these women faced at the hands of powerful men, but…a puppet?!
Sjoberg said convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell presented Prince Andrew with the latex puppet as a gift. "It looked like him. [Ghislaine] brought it down and presented it to [Prince Andrew]; and that was a great joke, because apparently it was a production from a show on BBC," she said, the Daily Mail reports.
The puppet was reportedly from the satirical British comedy show Spitting Image, which featured latex puppets created to look like caricatures of the prominent people they were poking fun at.
Everything about the allegations against Epstein and Prince Andrew is a horror show, but adding a bonkers puppet into the mix is by far the strangest thing we've read in a long time.
