Fallout After Fergie-Epstein Email Leak

0:01Fergie is ditched after her Epstein email leaks, Netflix's CEO opens up about Meghan, and Prince Harry warns about an HIV crisis. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello listeners and welcome to the show. Sarah Ferguson is the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, for those who do not know her. The key thing really to know about Fergie is that unlike Prince Andrew, she still had a reputation in Britain up until a few days ago. She would go on TV networks, often defending her husband, but also talking about her career as a children's book author. and promoting some of her charities.

0:42Not anymore. She has been dumped by, I think now, seven of her charities is the latest tally. And it all comes down to a grovelling apology that she sent to Jeffrey Epstein way back in 2011. So that was shortly after Prince Andrew was photographed in Central Park with Epstein, who at the time was a convicted paedophile. He had a criminal conviction in 2008, the much-criticised plea deal for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Now, that is an interesting date. That pretty much December 2010, when he was photographed, the two of them, Andrew and Epstein, photographed walking through Central Park.

1:19That fires the starting gun on the Epstein scandal insofar as it relates to Prince Andrew, insofar as the public knew about it. Obviously, the allegations against Andrew date back longer than that, but the public didn't know about them until much later. So what basically happened was, Fergie has always been terrible with money and she racked up mega mega mega debts doing her thing wasting money going to department stores all the rest of it and she needs to do something about it if you want to know more about Fergie being terrible with money listen to the interview I did a few weeks ago with Andrew Loney she needed a bailout so Andrew asked Epstein and Fergie borrowed 15 ,000 pounds of Epstein's money and now at the time she sent him an email to thank him and And this really is where this particular story begins, as in the latest revelation.

2:11So we now have this email. We didn't even know about it before particularly. We now have this email that Fergie sent to Epstein. So she sent it on January the 22nd, 2011. So just really, you know, about a month and a half after Andrew and Epstein walked through Central Park in New York together. bear in mind that Andrew in 2019 told Emily Maitlis that he had gone to see Epstein on that occasion in order to break up the friendship. So that's a really crucial factor. And Sarah Ferguson sent Epstein this email address to my dear, dear friend, Jeffrey. She seemed to thank him for the loan. She doesn't kind of directly reference it or mention the 15 ,000 pound figure that we understand the loan to be.

2:56How can I thank you enough? You are a friend indeed, and I will one day give it to you back. But I cannot have the words to thank you now. Sometimes the heart speaks better than the words. You have my heart with lots of love, dear Jeffrey. So two months later, still in 2011, two months later, news of this loan leaked in the Evening Standard. And so obviously that was a massive scandal for Fergie. People were asking serious questions because Epstein was known at the time to be a pedophile. He had a criminal conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Now, we did not know at the time, back in 2011, that there was a specific allegation against Andrew, and we had not yet seen the photo of Andrew with his arm around Virginia Jeffrey.

3:43But it was a scandal already. So Sarah Ferguson at the time released this quite a strongly worded statement to the Evening Standard in March 2011. I personally, on behalf of myself, deeply regret that Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me. I'm going to read that again because that is actually an extraordinary response to a newspaper story. Let's think about the grammar there. Right. I personally, on behalf of myself, who else? Sarah, come on, deeply regret that Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me. So not I became involved in Jeffrey Epstein, but Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me.

4:28I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf. I am just so contrite, I cannot say. Whenever I can, I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again. What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed. So I did mock the opening salvo in that statement because of the slightly ludicrous way she phrased it. But ultimately, she actually, back in March 2011, did a much, much, much better job than Prince Andrew of just trying to draw a line under the whole thing and distancing herself from Epstein, condemning pedophilia, saying it was right that he was jailed, and committing to have nothing ever to do with him again.

5:17Even by 2019, some eight years later, when Andrew sat down with Emily Maitlis to give his car crash BBC interview, he didn't do anywhere near as good a job as Sarah Ferguson did in March 2011, of actually just denouncing Epstein and trying to squash the scandal. So she did a much better job than him, But she perhaps was so forthright, in fact, that Epstein wanted to sue her. So she behind the scenes, her spokesperson, leads us to believe, was, and I have no reason to doubt it, was getting threats of a defamation lawsuit from Epstein. He was threatening to sue her. Obviously, he's got mega amounts of money.

5:58No doubt it might. That might genuinely have been a fairly scary experience. She was obviously already financially struggling and would no doubt it's totally possible that she would not have been able to fight the case for financial reasons, even though what she said was entirely fair and accurate. The upshot was, and you know, there is a slight degree of nuance here, except I do ultimately think that what she did was pretty bonkers. but I want to absolutely give her a fair hearing and so in that respect there is kind of an explanation of what she did next. But basically she then, so Epstein was threatening to sue her so she was under pressure from, we're led to believe, from her own team, her own advisors to try to find some way to retract this statement in order to get out of being sued for defamation by Epstein.

6:51She didn't want to back down or retract the public statement So instead, she crawled grovelling to Epstein to apologise. And on April the 26th, 2011, this is another email. Both these emails were published in the mail on Sunday. They got this story, so kudos to them for getting it. And we can, as a result, see exactly what she said. She said, I know you feel hellaciously let down by me from what you were either told or read, and I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that. so you know another slightly odd kind of phrase there bit of a theme but it's basically a grovelling apology and she indicated that basically she'd had to say it in her view because otherwise she was going to have to cut ties with charities and she might lose her career as a children's author so in other words she was saying look I just had to say this public statement in order to save my own skin.

7:56You understand, don't you? So she, you know, on the one hand, we're kind of being told now that she had to send, was it being told the exact same thing? Being told she had to send this groveling apology email to Jeffrey Epstein because otherwise she would have been sued for defamation. And she was saying to Jeffrey Epstein, well, I had to send this public statement denouncing you, otherwise I would have lost my career. So again, a little bit of a theme. So, you know, up to a point, I have some sympathy with the fact that she would probably have crumbled if Epstein had sued her. But on the other hand, let's step back a minute and actually consider this.

8:29So first of all, the morality of this issue comes from the fact that she sent this email trying to placate the ego of a man who at this point was already a convicted paedophile. But also we now know, probably one of America's most notorious and prolific and perhaps even sadistic child abusers in history. I won't claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the others, and so it's difficult to weigh them all up against each other, but he must be up there as one of the worst. And so she said all of this stuff to a monster, basically, and to save her own skin. And the save your own skin bit is really important, because this is a case, and I say case because it was, by the time Virginia Jeffrey went on to sue Prince Andrew in 2021, it was a literal civil lawsuit.

9:25He was never criminally prosecuted, but as far as Prince Andrew goes, there was a real civil lawsuit in which he was accused of raping Virginia Jeffrey when she was a 17-year-old sex trafficking victim. She said that Epstein and Gnan Maxwell, his ex-girlfriend, forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew. So, you know, by that point, it is a court case, And it's, you know, he said, she said up to a point, although there was some corroborating evidence. I think I've said before on this podcast that I actually think Virginia's case was one of the stronger ones. But needless to say, you know, she says one thing and he says it's not right.

10:02And from that perspective, having a proven track record, I know Fergie is not Andrew, but also, you know, they are very close to each other. Even though they're divorced, they are still a part of each other's lives in a big way more so than divorced couples usually are. In fact, you know, she's gone on television defending him in Britain in recent months, years. So, you know, if you have a situation where you have a proven track record of just saying whatever you need to say to get yourself out of trouble, then how are people supposed to believe your denials about other things? You know, she's on record saying to Epstein, you know, that basically she didn't mean it.

10:42You know, the public denunciation, she didn't mean it. She said she was never going to have any contact with him again. And she did have contact with him again. And so, you know, they are two different people. Fergie and Andrew absolutely are two different people. They're not the same person. But needless to say, you know, Andrew's answers when he went on in 2019 and went on Newsnight on the BBC to deny all of this stuff and to deny Virginia Jeffries' allegations against him, people were really incredulous about some of his answers. Like he said, he couldn't have gone to Tramp Nightclub with Virginia because that afternoon in the daytime he had a birthday party that he took his teenage daughter to at a pizza express in Woking, which seemed like a total non-sequitur because Tramp Nightclub obviously wouldn't even have been open at that time.

11:32um he said that he her account of him sweating profusely must have been wrong because he had a medical inability to sweat arising from ptsd from his military service in the falklands and he said that he couldn't remember anything and that's completely uh impossible for or he said it's it's virtually impossible for a man to forget having sex because for a man to have sex is a positive action and it's very difficult to have to forget a positive act um now obviously need to say, I don't think very many people in Britain or America actually believed Prince Andrew at the time that he said it. So what I'm about to say next barely even needs saying.

12:10But I think, you know, a lot of people already believed that Andrew had just basically gone on television and tried to say whatever he needed to say to get himself out of trouble, i.e. the exact same approach that Fergie took back in 2011 in both her email to Epstein that we now have and also her public statement into the Evening Standard denouncing Epstein. So my point, you know, I am not claiming to be, to have a crystal ball and I'm not claiming to be some kind of soothsayer or, you know, definitive final arbiter of truth and reality, right? I was not there. I wasn't in Ghislaine Maxwell's London townhouse in Belgravia to see what happened or didn't happen between Prince Andrew and Virginia.

12:52I, you know, I wasn't there to see it. I know what everybody else knows, which is the publicly disclosed accounts that Virginia gave to the court, and plus the various denials that Prince Andrew has given. But it is absolutely a terrible look to have a situation where you are going around saying different things to different people, as Fergie was in 2011, in order to get yourself out of trouble, because that is exactly what people already think that Prince Andrew was doing. And that, for me, really is the key part of this. Now, these charities, about seven of them, including the Teenage Cancer Trust, which is a massive charity in the UK, that's probably the biggest.

13:29They didn't get the ball rolling. It was a children's hospice called Julia's House that actually was the first to cut ties with Fergie. The rest all followed. Teenage Cancer Trust, arguably maybe the biggest of them all. You know, they must have been asking themselves for years whether they should cut ties with Fergie, whether they should dump her. and you know I'm sure that there have been various points when they wanted to before because obviously she is linked to Andrew in the sense that they still have a relationship they're still very much part of each other's lives they co-parent it's very tempting to think that actually the relationship barely ended but whether that's true or not who knows either way it's not a situation where they divorced each other and it was a clean break and they went their separate ways and they now live separate lives.

14:18They don't live separate lives. Their lives overlap substantially with each other. And that means that there was always a risk that Sarah Ferguson would be a bad person. You know, from a PR perspective, not a good association, not a good mental association for people to have. But she hadn't actually been cancelled in Britain and she still went on TV stations. She's been on Good Morning Britain, she's been on other TV networks, radio stations, promoting her various things. She's released children's books. She's released a kind of romance novel about the Regency era, I believe. And she has her various projects.

14:54So she hasn't been ostracised from British society up until now. That, of course, may well all be about to change. So that has been the big line in Britain. It's been the charities cut off Fergie. And the obvious next question is, is it time for the monarchy to do the same thing and to ostracise Fergie and force her out. And that is absolutely a valid point, but I do think that for me, the actual kind of beating heart of this story is this question about what it means for Andrew and Fergie and their whole defence about the Epstein allegations, because obviously Fergie, having been lent money by Epstein, is wrapped up in them in a far less toxic way than Andrew.

15:37There's no allegation that Sarah even knew about what Andrew was accused of having done and certainly was not accused of being involved in it. But needless to say, taking money from Epstein at a point when he was a convicted pedophile is its own scandal. That is a scandal in and of itself. So they both have questions to answer and it's just a really toxic way to go about dealing with a scandal of this nature. But, you know, also the kind of big picture royal questions are valid. Like it was just last week on Tuesday that Andrew and Fergie both turned up as a couple to the Duchess of Kent's funeral.

16:20And Andrew was seen sidling up to Prince William and trying to strike up a conversation with him and trying to kind of force him into a chat. And William just looked, basically did blank Andrew, but struggled to completely. I mean, I talked about it all last week. and you just have to ask who is inviting Andrew and Fergie to these events and yeah absolutely I think King Charles is going to have to start getting tougher and kind of fully ostracizing them basically even from these kinds of family events which is a really tough thing to do to tell somebody they can't come to a funeral of their own relative like that is pretty tough but then Andrew when he gets there his behaviour is appalling, forcing the next king into a conversation he very clearly doesn't want to have is appalling.

17:10It might appear heartless to say that a man cannot go to a funeral of his own relative, but Andrew clearly has no concept of the fact that he's ever done anything wrong. And somebody needs to impress on him the fact that he has in terms of putting William in this position. If he wants to go to these things, he has to keep a low profile, and he never does. he cannot do it he just cannot do it he he cannot turn up to one of these events and just keep him set keep his nose clean and keep out of trouble it goes back even to um you know 2022 when uh the queen held a memorial service for prince philip um and andrew turned up and had to you know walk the queen to her seat and which completely overshadowed the memorial completely overshadowed the effort to remember prince philip and all the front pages the next day were about andrew kind trying to make a comeback.

18:03So the guy has previous, you know, you've got to remember, this is a guy who at Prince Philip's funeral was threatening to, you know, he was via his position as a royal family member. He was given a kind of ceremonial honorary royal title of being a vice admiral in the Royal Navy. And had he still been a working royal at the point that he turned 60, he was due to be upgraded to be an admiral. And so at Prince Philip's funeral, he was going to wear the Admiral's uniform, despite having never actually got the promotion, because he's so entitled that he felt, you know, in his mind, he'd got it, you know, he felt he deserved it, he expected it, he was, ought to have got it, even though he was a disgrace, he was in disgrace at the time, he was viewed as shameful by the public.

18:47So this is the kind of guy we're talking about. And, you know, here we are, four, you know, some three years later, four years after Philip's funeral three years after that memorial service where he took all the front pages and he's still doing this kind of stuff so yeah like it might seem like a person you know objectively has the right to attend a funeral for their family member and a christian has the right to go to church but andrew is a serial offender when it comes to embarrassing the monarchy in completely avoidable ways. And yeah, like, I think it probably is time that Charles gets tougher with him, even if it does go against Charles's forgiving nature.

19:33But yeah, I mean, you know, for now, what does this mean for Fergie? Like, is this the end? It kind of feels like she is now going to have the same status that Andrew had. And I cannot help but go back to the timing of all of these emails. You know, this, that first email thanking Epstein sent in January 2011 is just a month and a half after Andrew claimed, in fact, I'm going to dig this out and read it. So Emily Maitlis asked Prince Andrew, why did he go to New York in 2010 in December and stay overnight at Jeffrey Jeffrey Epstein's house, right? And so this is his answer. It was a convenient place to stay.

20:16I mean, I've gone through this in my mind so many times. At the end of the day, with the benefit of all the hindsight that one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But at the time, I felt it was the honourable and right thing to do. And I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable. But that's just the way it is. And so he said, essentially what he's saying there is that he went to break up the friendship in person. So I'm going to read a little bit more of this just to explain that bit. So he said, 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.

20:53And that was the conversation coincidentally that was photographed, 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 Park 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. And yet, Fergie emailed him in the January to say, to give this groveling thank you, dear friend, for helping me out with this money. So, I mean, obviously, I don't know if it's ever been put to Prince Andrew, you know, was that December 2010 meeting your attempt?

21:37Was that when you negotiated this bailout for Fergie? Like, did it, was the whole point of you going to New York to, to secure the money to pay off your wife's debts, ex-wife's debts? Was that what it was really about? I don't know if anybody has put that to him. And if not, then that means he's never had a chance to deny it. And perhaps he would, he might well. And, but it is very, very tempting to think that that's what it was really about. Um, and then she, you know, he gets back January, She thanks him. And, you know, again, they're saying what they need to say and to try to get themselves out of trouble rather than admitting the truth.

22:12And now the money is definitely the smaller part of this. The bigger part of this is Virginia's allegations against Andrew. But how can Andrew and Fergie expect anybody to believe their denials? And I say their denials because Fergie has defended her husband publicly. who's gone on TV in Britain and said he's such a kind man, he's such a wonderful man, it's such a terrible thing. How can anybody be expected to believe them when this kind of duplicity exists on paper, on record, the difference between what she's saying to Epstein behind closed doors and what she's saying publicly in 2011? It has a tendency to shatter trust that was realistically shattered a long time ago, but it's the final nail in the coffin.

22:57So I cannot see her really making a return to public life, particularly in the context that Peter Mandelson, former British ambassador to Washington, has lost his job over his friendship with Epstein. And like I said on a previous week, you know, he's gay, so he can't have, you know, it's very difficult to believe that he was involved in, you know, the abuse of Epstein's trafficking victims for that reason. So, Charles, in summary, it's time to get tougher. It's the only way. Right, on that note, I'm going to take a quick break, but before I do, remember to rate and review The Royal Report on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your favourite shows.

23:40And when I'm back, what Ted Sarandos, Netflix's boss, has said about Meghan Markle.

23:51Hello and welcome back to the show. So, Meghan Markle got a ringing endorsement from Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos during an appearance on Emma Greed's podcast. So, Sarandos basically repeated something he'd said previously. So, he said that Meghan has a significant amount of cultural influence. He said, one thing we learned early with Meghan, she has remarkable influence. Remarkable. So when we did the documentary on her and Harry, the trait, so this is the original Harry and Meghan biopic from December 2022, the one with all the royal bombshells and so on that was on Netflix. He said, when we ran the trailer announcing it, people, hundreds of people broke down every frame of the trailer.

24:36The$20 shoes that she got from a village that was making these shoes sold out all over the world. And the$1 ,500 blanket that was on the chair sold out all over the world. She has incredible power and influence. So that for me, it's like, okay, well, how can we enable this to be a more holistic thing? So that's what that relationship is about. So it's a bit vague there at the end, but what he means is Netflix is an equity partner in Megan's online lifestyle shop, which is called As Ever. Megan has her cooking show on Netflix, which is called With Love Megan. As Ever is kind of tied to it, paired with it, partnered with it.

25:12The two are supposed to kind of feed into each other. So people watch the show and they go online to buy the products from as ever. Netflix is an equity partner, which means they get a slice of the actual profits from the online shop. So when she makes a profit, they make a profit. The two are tied together. Now, this might all sound like Groundhog Day to some listeners, partly actually because Megan was on the Emma Greed podcast herself just the other day. It's called Aspire. But that is the internet sign nature of the entertainment business, I guess. Emma Greed is actually an East Londoner. People who have heard her podcast will know she has an English accent, but she actually lives, as I understand it, out in L.A.

25:54But also, probably more to the point, it was only just in March that Ted Sarandos made very similar comments about Megan in an interview with, I think it was Variety. So I hear you ask, why am I bothering to go through all of this again now? If he's just said the same thing twice, and that's a fair question. But there is a good reason, which is namely that so much has happened since March that it is generally interesting to know that he still hasn't changed his mind. So crucially, Sarandos made his original comments just after With Love, Megan season one dropped. It got shockingly bad reviews, including from liberal highbrow media, you know like New York Magazine and so on but this is what he said in March kind of when she was in the thick of all of that backlash and Ted Sarandos said Megan and Harry are overly dismissed he said we're a passive partner in Megan's company and it's a big discovery model for us right now so that's what I was talking about about Netflix investing in as ever that's what he means by a passive partner they're not really doing anything they just own equity they own a stake, a share of the business, and they're using it to try and work out how they can roll out other merchandising in other parts of Netflix's business.

27:13He said, I think Megan is underestimated in terms of her influence on culture. When we drop the trailer for Harry and Megan, I'm not going to inflict on you them telling literally the same story again. But he does literally tell exactly the same story in March that he told just this September to Emma Greed. so that is that's what he said back then but but so much happened since then so the first thing happened was in april megan launched as ever she did her first product drop and it sold out in minutes um so that was kind of at first that seemed like maybe it was a good thing and i was expecting her to come out with more stock and she just wasn't and she just wasn't and she just wasn't for ages and ages and then it became clear that there wasn't a kind of artificial kind of curated sellout run by withholding stock that was available.

28:01She genuinely didn't have very much stock. So it isn't a good thing to just instantly sell out and then have literally nothing on sale. A big major consumer brand like Nike might launch a special limited edition trainer and sell out instantly that trainer, but it doesn't matter for Nike because they have loads of other trainers that are in stock. But no day of the year passes when you can't buy a Nike trainer anywhere in the world. That was the situation for Megan. You literally couldn't buy anything from her shop for months. So she also had the same thing when she launched her first wine in July.

28:41It just all sold out in minutes. And so it was only actually when she launched her second wine over the summer that the supply side of the business kind of leveled out. and then accompanying the second series of With Love, she did another drop of her kind of food edible products. And that is also like, there's a couple of things that are sold out, which is obviously fine, as long as there's stuff you can still buy. And there is. So the supply side appears to have leveled out now and she's got it in place and she's got some of that consistency. Also in August, however, Megan dropped season two of With Love, Megan, and it fell kind of completely flat.