Prince Andrew and Epstein - what's the latest?

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1:28Anoushka:BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Fame Under Fire from BBC Sounds with me, Anushka Matandadauti. when celebrities, sports stars, politicians, influencers and royalty find themselves in the firing line whether it's a lawsuit or a scandal we are here to pre-bunk, debunk, fact check, myth bust, interrogate and of course answer your questions you can send them to me on social media or whatsapp at 0330 678 1114 that's 0330 678 1114 and don't forget to subscribe and turn on your push notifications so you never miss a thing six years after his death paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is still posing a massive problem for the British royal family and President Donald Trump.

2:14The people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn, either by him or because of him, were actually very useful. He himself, not as it were as close as you might think, we weren't that close.

2:31Anoushka:I sit down with a royal historian whose new book claims to uncover just how close the Duke of York, that's Prince Andrew, really was with the disgraced financier. And Sean is back, telling us how he thinks Ghislaine Maxwell is after a big decision from President Trump. Essentially, pardon me, please. It's to be assumed one of the things she requested is, get me out of this awful facility that I am, take me to this low-risk facility in Texas so I can have a better time. It is my belief the reason that they are doing this so publicly, so loud, making statements on why she's doing this, is she's trying to angle for a presidential party.

3:09Anoushka:But first, this brand new book. It's called, entitled, The Rise and Fall of the House of York. It took four years to write, and the author, Andrew Loney, said he conducted hundreds of interviews while researching it. But if you don't really remember who Prince Andrew is, it's hardly like he's turning up at every social function. Here's a quick refresher. News has just come from Buckingham Palace. The Queen has had her baby. It's a boy. the prince was just 19 when he signed up for a 12-year commission and trained at dartmouth naval college a day when andrew and sarah became the duke and duchess of law and people came in their thousands to see them it is said of course that prince andrew is the queen's favorite son your royal highness we've come to buckingham palace in highly unusual circumstances normally we'd be discussing your work but today you've chosen to speak out for the first time.

4:06Anoushka:We're getting reports that a woman has filed a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in the United States accusing him of sexually abusing her. Prince Andrew has emphatically denied all of the allegations against him. Buckingham Palace has announced that Prince Andrew is returning his royal and military titles to the Queen and will no longer be referred to as his Royal Highness in any official capacity. The Prince is liked by just 6 % of the British public, according to a recent poll. Earning the nicknames Air Miles Andy and Randy Andy. Andrew Loney is with me now. Hi, Andrew. Hi. Now, it might feel a little bit weird for you to do a recap of who Prince Andrew is, but considering my best friend's little brother thought that he was married to Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, I think it's fair to say that for younger people, they perhaps only know him through his association with Epstein.

4:58Anoushka:So who was Prince Andrew before what you term in the book The Downfall? Well, he's the second son of the late Queen, born in 1960, very popular during the Falklands War in which he served, and was conducting really royal duties in the way that his siblings were. So he served in the Falklands in 1982. His career in the Navy went on till 2000. And then he became basically a trade representative for Britain to promote British trade. As we can hear, the book focuses heavily on Prince Andrew. We asked the palace and his team for a response to the book in general. Buckingham Palace said, as the Duke of York is not a working member of the royal family, we would not speak for him.

5:37Anoushka:We would not comment on this matter. The prince's team has not responded yet. You spend some time putting forward the idea that he was an abusive boss who shouts at his staff for things like cutting up his meat wrong, an easily led individual who you quote one diplomat referring to as a bit thick and boring, and someone devoid of purpose. you reference a friend of his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, calling him a poor judge of character, easily impressed and characterised him as going from a couch potato to a man about town with nothing better than to go on one holiday to the next. But you also spend a fair amount of time fleshing out this image of him as the Playboy Prince.

6:11Anoushka:Now, if you said to me, I'm 24, I was born in 2000, if you said to me, Playboy Prince, I think Prince Harry, talk to me about the Playboy Prince as Prince Andrew. What do you mean by that? Well, there are a lot of parallels with Harry, you know, the service career, but the playboy prince he was called his royal heartthrob he was very good looking he someone said he looked like Robert Redford he was very charming and charismatic he was a sort of poster boy of the royal family Charles was seen as someone with big ears who was a little bit sort of gauche Andrew was very flamboyant confident a sportsman a real macho man and I think he himself thought that he would make a better king than Charles so that was the image but the perception of him as a playboy prince.

6:52Anoushka:It wasn't PR created. He really was out there shaking a leg in the clubs. I mean, the reference to him in China White dancing with Paris Hilton is just, I mean, he was putting some time behind cultivating this image as well. Yeah, this was very much his midlife crisis. I mean, it's said that he slept with over a thousand women, but exactly. He was a regular at Trump and at China White. And, you know, people kind of felt this is a bit weird for a man with teenage children, age 40, to be doing this. But, you know, Lots of men have midlife crises. And photos of him sunbathing on yachts with topless models and things like that.

7:25Anoushka:I mean, this might be quite shocking to people who, 16, 17 years old, the scandals with the royals, they might think of Megxit. They wouldn't necessarily imagine that this is what had taken place beforehand. Exactly. I mean, it shows you that in some ways there are always scandals in the royal family and they weather them. So there was clearly a lot of publicity about this, about the sort of people he was mixing with. Some of them were into drugs. Certainly a lot of them were very promiscuous. some of them have been to prison. But I think the concern also was that he was mixing with a lot of very dodgy businessmen and despots, people who were putting political prisoners into prison, who didn't have free elections, not the sort of people that really sent out the right image for a member of the royal family.

8:07Anoushka:But as part of your interrogation of this image of him as a playboy prince, and like you said there, Randy Andy, and these kind of versions of him that they saw in the press, you also look at his sex life in great detail. But you look at the prince's first sexual experience, which one of your sources told you was at age 11 when he lost his virginity after a father or one of his friends arranged for an escort to come and meet the two boys in a West End hotel. Your source likens this to a form of sexual abuse. Now that is extremely serious. Did you consider whether Andrew was entitled to anonymity about this allegation?

8:41Anoushka:And did you approach him to get a waiver for this anonymity? Well, I took the view of putting everything I found in, and then I thought I would leave it to the editors or the lawyers at my publisher to cut. I didn't really want to self-censor. And for me, it seemed quite an important thing in terms of explaining his later behaviour. I think it presented him a slightly more sympathetic light. It was a reliable source, and I left it there for them to decide. And if they wanted to take it out, of course, I would have agreed. But you're right. I mean, he is entitled to a private life, and there were a lot of things that we took out, connected with his private life, that are not in the book.

9:17Anoushka:And were people very forthcoming about some of the more intimate details about his life? Yes. I mean, this is where I got the material, talking to people. I mean, there aren't documents about it. It's people talking and these are his friends, girlfriends, people like that. And we're going to get into the relationship with Epstein, but when we look at this alleged experience of losing his virginity, it paints him as sort of a tragic figure as well. Yeah, it is. And I'll begin the book by saying it is a tragic comedy, really. there is some sympathy there and some of his behaviour is so bizarre that it's not normal behaviour.

9:47Anoushka:And the relationship between Prince Andrew, Geoffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell weaves in and out of this book. You get sort of a through line of their friendship. It comes in, it comes out and you focus on it in great detail in some parts of the book. Geoffrey Epstein died in prison in 2019 as he awaited his trial on sex trafficking charges. It came more than a decade after his conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor for which he was a registered sex offender. This time, the former financier was accused of running a vast network of underage girls for sex and he pled not guilty.

10:16Anoushka:In 2022, his former partner Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping Epstein abuse young girls. Here's Prince Andrew speaking to the BBC's Newsnight programme in 2019 about his relationship with Epstein. Well, I met through his girlfriend back in 1999. And it would be to some extent a stretch to say that, as it were, we were close friends. I mean, we were friends because of other people. And I had a lot of opportunity to go to the United States, but I didn't have much time with him. I suppose I saw him once or twice a year, perhaps maybe maximum of three times a year. In your book, you tell a different story about when the pair first met.

10:56Anoushka:Now, you say that they met in the early 90s. What is your evidence for saying that? Well, two things. One is his own private Secretary Alastair Watson writing to the Times saying that they in fact he met in the early 1990s and a man called Steve Hoffenberg who was a great associate of Epstein in fact he did a Ponzi scheme with him and went to prison for 18 years and he actually actually put it down to the date of 1991. I think the other thing that's shocking is that they claim to have both of them to have cut off contact with Epstein after 2010 and yet we have legal depositions in court cases where they're in contact and meeting in 2011.

11:34Anoushka:So I've seen that letter from Alistair Watson and I've seen the flight logs and it does reflect a longer relationship between the two. You also go some way in fleshing out, you know, picking apart that idea that they didn't see each other much because you talk about them waiting to board a jet in 1999 with Epstein. You say there was a dinner party in April held in Manhattan in Jeffrey Epstein's home in the same year. In May, you say Prince Andrew went to his Caribbean residence. Yes. I mean, he had his own protection officer said that he stayed so often with Epstein in New York that his bedroom was called the Britannia suite.

12:09There's an uncle Deborah Gale, who's the housekeeper in Palm Beach, which is one of Epstein's houses, who said that Andrew was a regular visitor. So I don't think there's any doubt that Andrew saw him a lot. And as some of these legal depositions have come out, we've been more aware of just how close he was to Epstein in terms of their business arrangements.

12:28Anoushka:So he's seeing him a lot. Do you think Prince Andrew was in denial about Epstein? Well, I mean, they're all trying to distance themselves from Epstein. So Trump, as we all know, is saying that he hardly knew Epstein when they were best buddies for 10 years. Trump says that he had never met Andrew when there are countless photographs, the two of them together. And I've got accounts in the book of them talking about money and golf and women. So I'm afraid all these powerful men, when they sort of realise that they may be in trouble, they just begin to tell porky pies. Some people might say Epstein is dead, Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail, Prince Andrew's reputation is cemented, particularly after the BBC Newsnight interview he did, which lots of people said was absolutely disastrous, and pointed to him being guilty actually was worse for his public relations.

13:17Anoushka:Why write this book? Because you're not coming with, I've found something that can lead to a criminal investigation or radically change our perception of Prince Andrew. So why do this? Well, I'm a biographer. He's an interesting subject to write about. I mean, I would disagree with you. We now have the palace beginning to address questions like whether he should lose his title. So I do think I've moved the dial just in terms of book, which is rare for a biography. But, you know, you don't write biographies just to do a hatchet job. I wrote it because I was interested in a whole series of questions.

13:46But 300 people, that's new material.

13:49Anoushka:And you speak about, in the book, about perhaps more transparency being needed on the part of the royals. Is that something you're calling for with this as well, declaring their business interests and releasing information about where Andrew was at specific times? Well, I've been calling for more transparency about royal matters for a long time, particularly with archives, which they are all closed, with the fact that they're exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, that there's no parliamentary scrutiny of them. MPs 20 years ago were calling for a royal register, like a parliamentary register, to show what business activities they had going, not so much for the principal players, but for the sort of more minor players like Andrew and Fergie.

14:27But also, they were calling MPs 20 years ago for the National Crime Agency to investigate Andrew. And I have suggested that that might be something they should look at again. And I've certainly got information which I wasn't able to put in the book for legal reasons, which I would be happy to pass to the NSCA. And also, we've had MET claiming that they've looked at the case with Virginia Gifford and sex trafficking three times and there was nothing to see there. Well, people, including the former head of Royal Security, Di Davis, have been pushing to say, I think there is a case here for them to investigate.

15:02He may be completely innocent, as he says, but I think there should be an investigation. So yeah, I think there are some big questions that they need to answer.

15:10Anoushka:Are you a royalist? Yes, I am. You believe in the royal family, you like what they stand for? Absolutely. And it's because I'm a monarchist that I feel they should hold themselves to higher standards. These people are undermining the good work that's done by others, the king, the princess royal and others. And no one in this country should be above the law. He hasn't had criminal charges brought against him. In many ways, he has been pushed out of the public eye and his reputation is not very good. So what more are you calling for? You want him to be detitled? I'm not calling for him to be detitled.

15:42I think there's a feeling that something needs to be done. The public anger, if you look at the comments at the moment, suggests that they feel that he's got away with a lot. I mean, there's no hatchet job here. I started off wanting to cooperate with him, wanting to write a biography which could be as fair and balanced as possible. But it's difficult if they say to all their friends not to talk to me. Clearly, the material I'm gathering will not necessarily be from people who are positive. There is some positive stuff in here. I think I'm pretty fair to him over his time in the Falklands. I concede that he did some good work.

16:16So I think in any democracy, we should be able to criticise the rich and powerful and they shouldn't just be protected just because they're rich and powerful.

16:25Anoushka:And like I said earlier, we asked the palace and Andrew's team about the book. Buckingham Palace sent us this response. The Duke of York is not a working member of the royal family. We would not speak for him and we would not comment on this matter. You went to him originally. What was the response that you got from him? Well, I had a meeting with Sarah Ferguson, who was sort of representing the two of them, saying I would like to work with them. My initial impression after the end of the meeting, and we had another meeting with her PR people, who I think also acted for Andrew, was that they were prepared to discuss this and then they decided at that point that they didn't want to do it.

16:57So I tried as hard as I could to give them an opportunity to put their perspective.

17:03Anoushka:Throughout this book, there is a repeated idea from some of your sources that Prince Andrew was manipulated by Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell, used for his access to high society. One person saying, you know, he's so innocent and naive that he doesn't realise that they have ulterior motives. But you have Epstein's housekeeper, who you've spoken about, Deborah Gale, describing paying girls that left the prince's bedroom with wads of cash left by Jeffrey Epstein. One perception he's an easily led fool, essentially. Others he's actively engaged in a seedy lifestyle where his sexual appetite is being served by Jeffrey Epstein.

17:33Anoushka:That's two very different views of him. You've spent four years writing this and researching this. What perception do you have of him? Well, people are very complex and they present themselves in different ways to different people. People talk about Andrew being incredibly well-mannered and yet the book has lots and lots of stories of him being rude and abusive to staff and to all sorts of people he comes into contact with. So what I try to do is present a mosaic of impressions to leave people to make up their own mind. And another person you speak about who you've touched on is President Donald Trump.

18:04Anoushka:First of all, the book is called entitled The Rise and Fall of the House of York, not the House of York and Trump. So why focus on him? Well, people are interested in the relationship with Trump. It is part of the story. In some ways, I'm not writing in a vacuum. I'm writing for a market. And if people want to know more about the relationship with Trump, then I should provide that. And his relationship with Epstein as well. You touch on that Trump and Epstein. Trump and Epstein is very well documented, not just in my book, but in lots of books. And people like Michael Wolff have written extensively about it and talked about it.

18:34So I'm not saying anything new. But clearly, I had there were slightly different perspectives I got through my sources. Yes.

18:41Anoushka:Andrew, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been a pleasure.

18:49Anoushka:Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. Well, this Jeffrey Epstein story isn't going anywhere for Trump. It just seems to be building and getting bigger and bigger. On Tuesday, it was announced that a judge has ruled that the grand jury transcripts relating to Ghislaine Maxwell won't be released after the Department of Justice asked for them to be made public.

19:35Anoushka:Hearing that, I have a lot of questions. Joining me now with the answers is our resident criminal defense attorney, Sean Kent, joining from South Carolina. Hi, Sean. Hey, Nushka. How are you? I'm good, thank you. I've got questions about this. First of all, what exactly would the grand jury transcript be? If you remember back with the Diddy case, our grand jury is basically like an investigative body. So what ends up happening, our prosecutors go in front of this grand jury, these group of individuals just from the community, and they bring facts to them. They help them make a decision whether or not a case should be indicted or if a case should be brought forth or should somebody have to stand trial.

20:14Anoushka:Now, grand jury information is notoriously private. The Department of Justice went to a judge and they said, we want this grand jury information released. And their logic was they said, this is an exceptional circumstance that we want this information released that could also help us lead to more crimes or things of that nature that help us further go with the case. The judge then went and re-listened to the grand jury testimony. He said, nah, y 'all are full of it. What was actually very wild is he said, I've looked at all of this stuff. There's nothing in here. There weren't really any witnesses, no really eyewitnesses, nothing that's going to trigger some new crimes.