In 2011, Michael Thomas was on assignment with The Mail on Sunday in Australia interviewing Virginia Roberts (nee Giuffre), when she pulled out an envelope containing about 14 different photographs of her time with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the photos depicts Prince Andrew with his arm around the then-17-year-old’s waist, while former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell — at present serving a 20-year prison sentence in the United States for sex trafficking — leans on a door frame in the background.
Mrs Roberts alleged that photograph was taken by Epstein at Maxwell’s London home after she was trafficked from the US to the United Kingdom by the pair, and pimped out to Prince Andrew.
Mr Thomas, who is in London, told The Mail on Sunday as soon as Mrs Roberts pulled the photograph out of the envelope during an interview at a hotel in Australia, he realised its importance.
"She handed me the photograph, I just put it on the table in the hotel room and I copied it.
"I think I took over 30 frames, which is ... overkill for copying one photo, but I thought I didn’t want to get it out of focus, or get it wrong, because I knew how important it was.
"Then I turned the photo over and I took ... three frames of the back of the photo."
The back of the image showed it was developed on March 13, 2001 at a Walgreens in the United States.
"It was a normal 6x4 print that you would have got from any developer at the time," Mr Thomas told The Mail on Sunday.
"At no point did I think it was fake."
The photograph started causing a ruckus in 2019 and is now making headlines after Maxwell again debated the photo’s authenticity in a recent prison interview with TalkTV, saying she did not believe it was real "for a second".
"There’s never been an original, I’ve only ever seen a photocopy of it.
"I don’t believe it happened," she said during the interview.
Of allegations the image had been doctored, Mr Thomas said he thought that "ridiculous".
"For 12 years I get emails, I’ve been asked, ‘Is it a fake?’ and I’ve said, ‘No’," he told The Mail on Sunday.
"In 2011, technology was miles back from where we are today, so for somebody to fake that photo, or to photoshop it, you would have to be [a] very, very clever, trained person, to be able to do that."
