With more than 30 years of experience behind him, covering everything from war zones to Olympic Games, the Cannes Film Festival and Princess Diana’s funeral, Kiwi news photographer Michael Thomas has plenty to be proud of.
Acknowledged for his technical mastery as well as for keeping a cool head in the most demanding and, sometimes, dangerous circumstances, he has earned his reputation among hard-to-impress picture editors.
But Michael’s long and distinguished career, he realises with a wry smile, is now defined by just one picture – one he can’t even claim to be his own work.
“I have done some serious stories over the years and taken thousands of pictures in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he says at his Arrowtown home.
“But the only one that is going to be remembered is one I copied from a cheap print lying on a hotel-room table.”
Michael’s concern, however, is not for his own legacy, but for the fate of the woman in the picture: Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
For in the eight years since he and his colleague from Britain’s Mail on Sunday became the first journalists to see it, it has become one of the world’s best known images – one at the centre of a labyrinthine of criminal and civil legal battles, and one whose repercussions for the British royal family seem limitless.
It shows, of course, Virginia at the age of 17 standing next to Prince Andrew in March 2001, at the London home of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, who beams in the background.
It was taken by Ghislaine’s sometime boyfriend, paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, shortly after the foursome returned from an evening at Tramp nightclub and, according to Virginia, just minutes before she was induced into having sex with Andrew for the first of three times.
The prince and his aides have belatedly tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the photograph, insisting he was eating pizza with his daughters that evening, had never been upstairs at the house, doesn’t remember ever meeting Virginia and never had sex with her.
“You can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked because it’s a photograph of a photograph of a photograph,” Andrew told BBC’s Newsnight.
Unnamed friends have suggested the picture might have been doctored, citing how chubby they say the prince’s fingers appear.
The excuses and obfuscation have done nothing to salvage Andrew’s career as a front-rank royal and cut no ice with Michael.
“It’s ridiculous,” he says. “The FBI have had it for eight years and at no time have they said it’s fake.
“If it was fake, why is Andrew not suing the Mail on Sunday? You can imagine, working for them, what we went through to make sure the story was legally sound.
“I spent weeks with Virginia and her family and I never had any doubts that what she told us was the truth.”
For Michael, the story that has shaken Buckingham Palace to its core began – like so many others in his 25 years working for the Mail on Sunday, both in London and New Zealand – with an order to get on a plane with little info on the task ahead.
“It was one of those ones they don’t tell you much,” he says. “And I wouldn’t claim credit for it because it had been sorted in advance by the reporter, Sharon Churcher.
“I took a flight to Sydney and drove up the coast to where Virginia lived with her husband Robert and their three kids.
“It was an old house in the suburbs and she was living a simple Australian life. They didn’t have much money.
I think Robert was working as a bricklayer.
“We knocked on the door – they were expecting us – and we sat on the patio and they discussed what might happen.
“Virginia was very likeable, a very nice girl telling a very awful story. She was certainly traumatised from all that had gone on in the past, and she was very anxious, very scared.
“Epstein had a bottomless pit of money and she was terrified about what the repercussions could be. She definitely wanted her story told, but she was terrified of his power.”
The Andrew picture was just one of 12 that Virginia kept in an envelope and which Michael was asked to copy.
“I realised it was a big picture in relation to what she was saying, but I never thought it would be as important as it has turned out to be, because of the accusations about it, which haven’t come until years and years later.”
The Mail, who reportedly paid Virginia $160,000 for her story, ran the article in March 2011, shortly after another British tabloid had published a picture showing Andrew walking in New York’s Central Park with Epstein, despite his conviction on underage prostitution charges.
“After that first week all the papers around the world were looking for her,” remembers Michael, himself a father of three. “We squirrelled them away for a while in a holiday park up the coast.
“It certainly wasn’t very luxurious. Too many people were looking for her to go anywhere glamorous. It was manic, and it was not easy for them. There were questions constantly; everything was getting checked three or four times by the lawyers.
“And reading her words in the paper were hard for her and, as a husband, for Robert.
“She was having to relive all this and at the same time having to parent her children.
“We went to a kangaroo park, went to the beach and had pizzas, but there was no champagne, no celebration – no, no, no. The whole thing was hard and stressful for everyone involved.”
“We ran stories for three weeks in a row and it was only after everything had settled down that Virginia was able to move back to the house.”
As the world knows, however, that was far from the end of the story.
Now, with Andrew an outcast from his own family, Epstein dead by suicide in his jail cell, and Ghislaine vanished without trace, Virginia and the other victims continue to fight for justice, starting with their desire to see Andrew submit to questioning under oath.
“I hope she gets it in the end,” says Michael. “She was just a kid.”