With his tousled salt and pepper hair and lean build, the veteran lawyer may look warm, genial, and like the grandfather of 12 that he is, but Boies is a legal colossus in the US, where he is both a trial attorney and a hired gun for billion-dollar corporations and said to charge up to $2,000 (£1,460) an hour.
In his career, he has secured or won nine economic recoveries for clients over a billion dollars, something most lawyers don’t even do once. He represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 election, made a name for himself leading the federal government’s successful antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001, racked up win after win defending the likes of IBM and CBS, and paved the way for marriage equality in 2013 by convincing the Supreme Court to eliminate California’s discriminatory Proposition 8, thereby allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. Even Covid proved no match for Boies, with a recent bout of omicron earlier this month shrugged off as lightly as an unworthy court opponent.
Few top lawyers have an unblemished client record, however, and before representing some of Epstein’s victims Boies also worked with Harvey Weinstein and the (since) convicted fraudster and founder of blood-testing firm Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes.
But nobody will argue that the Illinois-born, Yale-educated lawyer is not “a master of his art”, “an eccentric genius” – as one former boss described him – and perhaps most importantly “the Michelangelo of deposition-taking.” After all, this man is a chess player, he informs me, and “always thinking several moves ahead, always bearing in mind the possible combination of permutations.”
As a gambling man too – Boies has just returned from a long weekend in Vegas – he sees depositions as “a cards on the table moment.” A moment that, he argues, didn’t have to happen, had Prince Andrew played those cards right. And as a lifetime admirer of the Queen, Boies assures me this pains him. “This has got to be any mother’s nightmare. And to have it play out so publicly because of Prince Andrew’s position is particularly unfortunate. Because it must be of a magnitude that is far worse for her.”
In his calm Midwestern tones, he goes on: “But we tried to avoid this, even in the face of his denials and avoidance last year before we brought the lawsuit. We tried to avoid litigation; we suggested a mediation. But to say ‘I never met her’ is so contrary to all the other evidence that’s out there. Evidence that is so strong: testimonies from uninvolved people, photographs, things it’s hard to explain away.”
Boies shakes his head, the chess player in him almost saddened by such a clumsy move. “He could have said: ‘I didn’t know she was underage.’ He could have said: ‘This was an entirely consensual affair.’ There are a number of things he could have said that would have been hard to attack. But this is incomprehensible.”
Should it go to court, Boies says he “doesn’t think we would need” either the Duchess of York or her daughters to testify. “I don’t think Prince Andrew will call them either.” And although he says that conversations the Duke has had with the Queen “could be used, it’s hard to get at those, because he’s probably not going to admit to them, and we’re not going to depose her. So while those conversations are fair game, on a practical level we’re probably not going to get at them.”
We now know that Prince Andrew’s deposition must be done before the July 14 deadline set by the judge. “So it has been agreed that we will go to London to depose him,” says Boies, who after all these months has not yet met him. What is he expecting?
“Somebody who is going to be a little uncomfortable.” To put it mildly. After all, depositions can last up to seven hours, and Boies anticipates this one to last “a day, or probably two.” “But I’m going to try to get him to understand that this is not going to be combative. Obviously, I’m going to ask him a lot of questions. And although some of the questions may be uncomfortable, I’m not going to be aggressive or in any way offensive to him. I’m going to be very respectful.”
I’m curious to know whether for Boies, Prince Andrew’s BBC Newsnight special with Emily Maitlis back in 2019 was a gift? “I will never understand how his advisors could have let him do that interview, which was a series of really relatively soft questions,” he says. “It was not a hard probate interview, yet he came across so poorly. It was mostly his attitude. He showed no remorse. No concern for the victims. And if it gets played to the jury, which I think it probably will be, then it just demonstrates his callousness. As for those photos of him scurrying from castle to castle, trying to avoid the legal process? They just delayed the inevitable and made him look guilty.”
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