Just before 3pm on Tuesday, Prince Andrew will log in to his computer at Royal Lodge, his 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park, and click on an internet link that has been emailed to him by his lawyers.
Seconds later, via an online video stream, the Duke will be staring into the eyes of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a grizzled legal veteran in New York in whose hands the fate of the Queen's second son will rest.
On both sides of the Atlantic the stakes could not be higher. The beleaguered Prince is desperately fighting a civil lawsuit filed by Virginia Roberts who alleges she was raped by him when she was the teenage 'sex slave' of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
During this week's hearing – precisely 7,600 days since the first of three occasions on which Ms Roberts claims she was forced to have sex with the Duke – Andrew's legal team will try to persuade Judge Kaplan that the case should be thrown out.
If their bid fails, Andrew faces the unimaginable prospect of a public trial where he would be accused of 'rape in the first degree'.
A surge of Omicron cases in New York means the application will be heard remotely instead of inside Judge Kaplan's courtroom in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
The hearing, which is expected to last around an hour, comes just days after Andrew's former friend Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking in a case in which Ms Roberts, who now uses her married name Giuffre, was referenced as a victim.
The beleaguered Prince is desperately fighting a civil lawsuit filed by Virginia Roberts who alleges she was raped by him when she was the teenage 'sex slave' of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein
Maxwell was found to have groomed girls as young as 14 for Epstein, a billionaire financier and friend of Andrew, to sexually exploit. The Duke vehemently denies any wrongdoing and says that has no recollection of ever meeting Ms Roberts.
Andrew's lawyer Andrew Brettler, who has defended a string of Hollywood celebrities, will join this week's hearing from an office in Los Angeles with his colleague Melissa Lerner. Ms Roberts's lawyers – 80-year-old David Boies and the formidable Sigrid McCawley – will be in New York, while the Duke's British legal team, led by solicitor Gary Bloxsome, will watch from an office in Central London.
Sources have told The Mail on Sunday that Andrew will not participate but is expected to watch from his home.
He will cut a lonely figure as his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson and their two daughters were last night pictured in Verbier, Switzerland, where they were enjoying a skiing holiday. If the embattled Duke's bid is successful, then 2022 could be the year in which he finally starts to rebuild his shattered reputation.
If he faces a civil trial, however, the consequences could be devastating, not least because it will overshadow the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and cause irreparable damage to the Royal Family.
Indeed, his family's reputation has arguably already been tarnished by the FBI's claim that the Duke has refused to speak to the agency as part of its ongoing investigation into Epstein's sex ring.
Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein take a stroll through New York’s Central Park in December 2010
What will be at the heart of this virtual court showdown, with the participants separated by thousands of miles? The MoS has pieced together the stories behind Ms Roberts's jaw-dropping allegations and assessed the veracity, and inconsistencies, in both her case and Andrew's defence.
Ms Roberts, 38, alleges that she was forced by Epstein to have sex with the Duke on three separate occasions in 2001 and is seeking unspecified damages.
The first alleged occasion, on March 10, 2001, when Ms Roberts was 17, is perhaps the most notorious, seared as it is in the public consciousness by a widely published photograph that has been subjected to intense scrutiny.
The image, first printed by this newspaper almost 11 years ago, shows Andrew, then 41, smiling with his left arm around the bare midriff of Ms Roberts at Maxwell's mews house in London. Earlier that evening, according to Ms Roberts, she went for dinner with Epstein, Maxwell and the Prince, and then on to Tramp, a members-only nightclub.
'Prince Andrew was like, 'Let's dance together', and I was like, 'OK', and he was a hideous dancer,' Ms Roberts claimed in an interview with NBC News in 2019. 'He was sweating profusely all over me.'
She alleges that they returned to Maxwell's mews house in Belgravia, where Epstein took the infamous photograph, before leading Andrew to a bathroom.
'The abuse went on for a little bit in the bathroom and then it continued to the bedroom, and he wasn't rude or anything about it, he said thank you,' she alleged.
Although Andrew's advisers have attempted to cast doubt on the authenticity of the photograph, further evidence that the Duke and Ms Roberts were in London at the same time is contained within flight logbooks belonging to Epstein's pilot, which suggest that the tycoon's Gulfstream jet flew from Tangier in Morocco to Luton Airport on March 9, 2001. On board, according to the passenger manifest, were Epstein, Maxwell, Ms Roberts and a young woman who is said to be Maxwell's assistant.
During his infamous Newsnight interview in 2019, Andrew said he had 'no recollection' of ever meeting Ms Roberts and that he had been 'at home' all evening after taking his daughter, Beatrice, then 12, to Pizza Express in Woking.
It has been assumed that by 'home', Andrew was referring to Sunninghill Park, the Berkshire mansion that he then shared with his ex-wife.
Andrew also dismissed Ms Roberts's account of their nightclub dancing, claiming that 'an over-dose of adrenaline in the Falklands War' meant that he was unable to sweat at the time.
In January 2015, according to legal testimony given under oath, Ms Roberts said she had sex with Andrew during an orgy on Little St James, Epstein's so-called 'Paedo Island' in the Caribbean. 'Epstein, Andy, approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together, she claimed. Epstein’s home on Little St James is pictured above
Aspects of his alibi have been questioned over the past two years. In February 2020, a former Royal protection officer told the MoS that he believed the Prince may have returned to Buckingham Palace in the early hours of March 11, 2001.
In an effort to confirm this, the ex-officer asked for access to his shift roster at Buckingham Palace, but was eventually told the records had been destroyed.
The Daily Mail last year reported that, according to a family
