Lady Victoria Hervey: Prince Andrew’s former girlfriend in profile

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world

Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

A former girlfriend of Prince Andrew has hit the headlines after she claimed Ghislaine Maxwell used her as “bait” to find underage girls for paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to abuse.

Lady Victoria Hervey is a socialite and aristocrat who dated the beleaguered Duke of York briefly in 1999.

Her claims about Maxwell featured in a ITV documentary about the royal broadcast last month.

But she also stuck up for Maxwell, saying the convicted sex offender has been a “scapegoat” in the Epstein scandal.

She has previously defended the Duke of York, too, saying she believes he is innocent.

‘Lady V’, as she’s known, was dubbed an ‘It Girl’ while working as a model in the 1990s. She was a staple in glossy magazines and the celebrity press.

In the early 2000s, she would socialise with Maxwell, Epstein and Prince Andrew.

Appearing the documentary, Ghislaine, Prince Andrew And The Paedophile, the 45-year-old suggested she was used by Maxwell to “find however many girls were needed” to entertain Epstein and his friends.

But, in a separate interview on Lorraine, she described Maxwell as a “victim who became the accomplice”.

She said Maxwell “is a scapegoat right now because there is no-one else to blame.”

The two were once friends. Hervey says she met Maxwell and Epstein 20 years ago, and was invited to stay at Epstein’s apartment in New York when she was “really young and naïve”.

Born in 1976, Lady Victoria Frederica Isabella Hervey is the eldest child of the 6th Marquess of Bristol and his third wife Yvonne, Marchioness of Bristol (née Sutton). The Hervey family have an ancestral coat of arms.

She spent the first two years of her life at Ickworth House, the family’s sprawling Sussex seat.

Lady Victoria went to Benenden School, a private boarding school in Kent, and reportedly enraged her mother by turning down a place to read French and History of Art at Bristol University.

She spent a gap year in Florence before working at advertising agencies in London.

The young Lady Victoria became a receptionist for film-maker Michael Winner, and went on to become a model.

She opened a short-lived fashion boutique called Akademi in Knightsbridge in 2000, which was reportedly visited by the likes of Victoria Beckham and Meg Mathews. But the business failed, and closed in 2001.

She made controversial comments on homelessness in 2003, saying: “It’s so bad being homeless in winter. They should go somewhere warm like the Caribbean where they can eat fresh fish all day.”

And she came under fire again in 2017 when she accused one of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims of being “desperate for attention”.

Hervey has starred on several reality TV programmes, including ITV’s Love Island in 2006.

She now lives in Los Angeles.

She has claimed that unless he was innocent, Prince Andrew would not have agreed to appear in the “car crash”2019 BBC interview where he responded to allegations he had had sex with a then 17-year-old girl, Virginia Roberts.

Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and a friend of the Duke of York, was convicted on December 29 of procuring teenage girls for Epstein to abuse and will be sentenced this summer.

Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in Manhattan in August 2019 while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. The death was ruled a suicide.