Out of court settlements should be illegal.

[Rev. Rye]

Just for the record, the case Virginia Giuffre filed was actually a civil suit, not a criminal one, therefore, that payout was probably the only thing she was ever going to get out of him. This was not an issue of Prince Andrew and his lawyers talking the courts into turning a criminal case into a civil one, or the lawyers making a plea deal where he has to pay such and such amount of money instead of going to jail.

It probably could have been a criminal suit at some point, but that would hinge on the criminal statute of limitations not passing, and due to the varying degrees of sexual assault on the books in New York, not even going into how the 2019 change to the SoL in New York changed matters, I'm not certain whether or not they even could have done it. I suspect that if a criminal case had much of a chance of going anywhere, they probably would have just extradited him to New York (bear in mind that the Royal Family appears to have washed their hands of him completely in recent years) and done that.

Feel free to say that it's shit that a rapist can settle out of court instead of going to jail (because, frankly, it is), I'm just saying there's a legal reason it ended up going that way. And, frankly, if there was no chance of a criminal case against him, the civil option at least provides some degree of justice, even if it's miniscule.