The Duke of York has been accused of hiding from a sexual assault lawsuit, but that may be about to change after a court ruling last night.

Prince Andrew is currently holed up at Balmoral Castle after his team argued that he hadn’t properly been served legal papers.

Lawyers for Virginia Roberts Giuffre were given another week, and on Wednesday the UK’s High Court agreed to serve papers on the American’s behalf if necessary.

So far Andrew, 61, has managed to dodge them, but last night a US district judge ruled that the papers could be served to Andrew’s lawyer in LA instead.

In Manhattan, Lewis Kaplan said this plan of Ms Giuffre’s was ‘reasonably calculated to bring the papers served to the defendant’s attention’.

He said it did not matter whether Andrew had ‘authorised’ his lawyer to accept the papers.

Kaplan ruled barely six hours after Giuffre formally requested his intervention, with lawyers saying ‘service is not intended to be a game of hide and seek behind palace walls’.

In a statement, Ms Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley said: ‘We are grateful that the Court has granted alternative service on Prince Andrew. This moves the case forward.’

Lawyers for Giuffre argued they already served Andrew in England, when a copy of the lawsuit was left with a police officer guarding his home in Windsor.

The Duke’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler, who earlier called the lawsuit ‘baseless’, had no immediate comment.

The civil case in New York has been brought by Ms Giuffre, 38, who claims she was forced to have sex with the Duke three times when she was 17 – meaning she was a minor under US law.

She says this was arranged by his former friend and paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found hanged in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting sex-trafficking charges.

Andrew, who has not received any criminal charges, vehemently denies the allegations against him.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, but there is speculation that the sum could be millions of dollars.

Lawyers for Ms Giuffre, now 38, filed the civil suit against the duke citing allegations of battery by sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Under the claim for battery, the lawsuit says the Duke’s actions ‘constitute sexual offences as defined in (New York law) including but not limited to sexual misconduct as defined (as) rape in the third degree, rape in the first degree’.

It also claims Andrew’s conduct amounted to ‘forcible touching, sexual abuse in the third degree, and sexual abuse in the first degree’.

The lawsuit says Ms Giuffre has suffered ‘extreme emotional distress, humiliation, fear, psychological trauma, loss of dignity and self-esteem, and invasion of her privacy’.

Ms Giuffre accuses Andrew of forcing her to have sexual intercourse at the London home of Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

She also said the Duke abused her at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Maxwell faces trial in November on charges she helped recruit and groom underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. She has pleaded not guilty.

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