Where is the photo of the smoking gun? Virginia Giuffre claimed the original photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around her is in a 'storage box full of Nerf guns and children's toys in Sydney

Virginia Giuffre revealed that the original copy of the now infamous photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around her, taken when she was 17 years old in March 2001, is in a storage box in Sydney.

Ms Giuffre told lawyers during a 2016 deposition that the photo of her with the prince, taken at Ghislaine Maxwell's London home, was now in one of many boxes, along with “Nerf guns, my children's toys, photos'.

Giuffre said she gave the photo to FBI investigators in 2011 and it was returned to her after they made copies. She said the last time she saw the photo was when she moved from Colorado to Australia around 2019.

In that same interview, Giuffre said she was pressured by Maxwell to have sex with different men. Prince Andrew is among the names mentioned by lawyers.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre holds a photo of herself at age 16 when she says Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein began sexually abusing her

Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's powerful friends and acquaintances were exposed as part of a massive exposé ordered by a judge just before the New Year

Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, during the Christmas Day church service at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham last month

In January 2023, The Mail on Sunday debunked online rumors that the photo showing Giuffre and Andrew in an embrace was fake. Maxwell was among those who said the photo was fake.

While Prince Andrew's lawyers argued that without the paper original there was no way to prove the image had not been manipulated.

A photo of the photo was taken by a professional photographer, and that reproduction first appeared in the Mail on Sunday in 2011. The original is believed to have been lost, so it is unclear whether Giuffre's copy is a replica.

Giuffre claims the photo – which has earned her $160,000 in media fees – was taken the same night the Duke of York allegedly sexually assaulted her for the first time at Maxwell's London home.

In her statement, she says it was later developed in Florida when she returned to the US with Epstein.

She said in a 2016 deposition in a defamation case against Maxwell that she gave the original to the FBI in 2011 when they visited her home in Australia.

According to documents released in the same case, two FBI agents collected 20 original photos of Giuffre, including one of her with Andrew.

They gave her a copy of the footage on a CD and kept the originals, which her attorneys, David Boies and Sigrid McCawley, say are still with the FBI.

But confusion remains over whether it was the original that was returned to Giuffre, who said in her 2016 statement that it could be in a storage box in Australia.

A source close to Giuffre (pictured in August 2019) told the Daily Beast in 2022 that her lawyers are unaware of the photo's whereabouts and that no one on her legal team has ever seen the original image.

In 2022, a source close to Giuffre said The everyday beast that the photo was not in her possession.

That source also said that at the time she gave it to the FBI in 2011, she was not receiving legal advice and therefore could have lost the original without understanding its meaning.

Epstein mingled with Wall Street titans, royalty and celebrities before pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. He took his own life in 2019 at the age of 66 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

Dozens of women have accused Epstein of forcing them to provide sexual services to him and his guests on his private Caribbean island and homes he owned in New York, Florida and New Mexico.

The names of more than 150 people named in a lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, were kept under wraps for years until a federal judge ruled last month that there was no legal justification for keeping them private.