‘The game is finally up’: Prince Andrew’s key Jeffrey Epstein claim collapses
The latest revelation about Andrew, and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, isn’t just embarrassing for the royal family. It’s far worse.
Comment
It’s becoming rather difficult to rank all the own goals on Prince Andrew’s lowlight reel, isn’t it? There is a stupendous body of work to comb through. So many classics.
We have a strong new contender for second place though. It’s been out there, on public display, for a few days now, without quite attaining the bombshell status or wall-to-wall coverage it merits.
(Yes, only second place. Top spot is permanently closed to new applicants, courtesy of the British Clown Prince’s spectacular self-immolation on the BBC’s Newsnight program in 2019, the embers of which are still burning six years later. ’Twas the Bradman of trainwreck interviews. There is no surpassing it.)
We speak of a recently revealed email Andrew sent to his pal Jeffrey Epstein in early 2011, the day after a now infamous photo emerged, showing the royal with his arm around one of the sex trafficker’s victims, Virginia Giuffre.
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Ms Giuffre, who took her own life earlier this year, accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her multiple times when she was 17. He has always vociferously denied any wrongdoing.
Her civil lawsuit against him was settled out of court, at great expense, in 2022.
The royal family has responded to the email, whose contents we’ll recap momentarily, by employing its go-to strategy: ignore the Very Embarrassing, Morally Unacceptable Thing the King’s brother has done, and hope the commentariat will move on, preferably to some horrendous Meghan Markle faux pas.
And that is, to speak in the sort of obnoxiously understated tone any British aristocrat should understand, insufficient. Less than ideal. Not good enough.
The royal family should be hounded relentlessly about this story. It needs to stop seeing Andrew’s behaviour as a mere PR problem, to be periodically shoved out of public view whenever it pops up, in one of the world’s more perverse games of whack-a-mole.
There are more important things to consider, here, than the family’s reputation.
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The email, then. Here is what the Duke of York – a title Andrew still holds and unironically flaunts, by the way, despite his exile from royal duties – wrote to Epstein just after that photo with Ms Giuffre emerged.
“I’m just as concerned for you! Don’t worry about me!” said Andrew.
“It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
A couple of preliminary points, before we bite into the meat of this.
First: ew. Two grown-ass men, well into middle age, talking about “playing” like they’re kids hanging from a primary school jungle gym would be unsettling even if one of them were not a notorious sex criminal.
It doesn’t help that the other guy signs off his correspondence with a pompous “His Royal Highness the Duke of York, Knight of the Garter” either. There’s a tonal dissonance there.
Second: note what wasn’t in the email.
Publicly, Andrew claims to have no recollection of ever meeting Ms Giuffre, and has suggested the photo of him with her has been “doctored”, i.e. faked. In his private message to Epstein, there’s no hint of that conspiracy theory.
He doesn’t say, “Jeffrey what in the name of Queen Victoria’s ample left teat is this photo? Where the ruddy hell did it come from? It must be a fake.”
That doesn’t disprove Andrew’s doctoring claim, but it’s an interesting data point.
There’s an even more serious issue with the email though, one that mercifully doesn’t require us to parse the meaning of a posh, repressed man’s little winks and nudges: it blows Andrew’s version of events, regarding his friendship with Epstein, to bits. He has been caught in an absolute humdinger of a lie, one that destroys whatever sparse credibility he had left.
I’ll note, here, that Buckingham Palace has not disputed the email’s veracity, nor has Andrew himself. Both have declined to comment on the matter. If it were not real, you would expect a firm denial; the silence carries its own implicit meaning.
The key is the date. It was sent on February 28, 2011. Months after the Prince flew off to stay at Epstein’s mansion in New York, for the better part of a week, in December of 2010 – a visit whose purpose, Andrew has since insisted, was to cut all ties with his friend.
Here is what he told Newsnight during the aforementioned trainwreck interview, the transcript of which genuinely never fails to amaze, even after multiple readings. Control-F “sweat” for a good chuckle.
“I went there with the sole purpose of saying to (Epstein) that because he had been convicted, it was inappropriate for us to be seen together,” he explained to interviewer Emily Maitlis.
“I felt that doing it over the telephone was the chicken’s way of doing it. I had to go and see him and talk to him.
“And I went to see him, and I was doing a number of other things in New York at the time, and we had an opportunity to go for a walk in the park.
“Which was when I said to him, I said, ‘Look, because of what has happened, I don’t think it is appropriate that we should remain in contact.’ And by mutual agreement during that walk in the park, we decided that we would part company.
“And I left, I think it was the next day. And to this day, I never had any contact with him, from that day forward.”
Not much wiggle room, is there? How do you square “I never had any contact with him from that day forward” with “two months later I told him to keep in ‘close touch’ and promised the two of us would ‘play some more soon’”?
It’s impossible. Not even the most generous interpretation of Andrew’s words to Ms Maitlis can survive the existence of that email.
Which is partly why British commentators, including some who typically defend the royal family, have been seeking action.
“Andrew must understand that for him, the game is finally up,” Sarah Vine wrote in The Daily Mail, for example, calling the Prince “pathetic”.
“He has disgraced himself to the point where his very existence has become a liability to the royal family. For a long while, his doting mother protected him from the consequences of his mistakes. But sadly, she is no more. He has to go.
“He can either carry on acting like the arrogant, deluded toff he’s been all his life, or take a long hard look in the mirror and make the right choice for once.”
“Huzzah,” you might say. “The pressure is on! Even the monarchists want Andrew gone. So what’s the problem?”
It’s the framing. That is the problem. You see it every time we learn of something indefensible in Andrew’s past, or witness his self-absorbed gormlessness firsthand.
The royal family’s ... apologists? That might be too strong a word. Supporters, maybe. They fret that Andrew is embarrassing the family and the monarch, as though that is of paramount importance here. They quarantine the scandal, blaming it on one rogue, hapless idiot.
Wrong on both counts. The salient element here, and the reason Andrew’s scandals refuse to fizzle out, is that he has been shielded from proper investigation or accountability, and not just by his late mother. The British monarchy, as an institution, seeks not to interrogate his relationship with Epstein, but to hide him, lest the answers be too awkward.
I asked how you could possibly square “I never had any contact with him from that day forward” with Andrew chummily emailing Epstein months later. Andrew should answer that question. He should be made to answer it.
Telling the guy he’s not welcome at most royal events. Prince William giving him the cold shoulder in front of the TV cameras. King Charles pushing him to move out of his mansion. Stripping him of some titles. These are petty, meaningless gestures. They leave him a little lonelier, perhaps, but with a long and comfortable retirement ahead of him.
We don’t need the other senior royals to demonstrate how much they dislike Andrew, or acknowledge that he’s a stain on the family, or even disown him. We need the barrier of privilege that has protected him from tough questions to come down.
Twitter: @SamClench
