Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and the scandal that won’t go away

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, Prince Andrew gives up his titles. But will he ever face real punishment?

0:21We begin with the breaking news at this hour, which is that Prince Andrew has been stripped of all his royal titles by his brother the king. It was 7pm on Friday night when Buckingham Palace sent out the email. The king and his troublesome little brother had been talking and Andrew had some news. In a statement, Prince Andrew wrote, I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first. The continued accusations about me distract from the work of his majesty. I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me. Andrew remains a prince.

1:02It's his birthright as the late Queen's second son and once her favourite child. But he will stop using his titles. Not just the famous one as Duke of York, but he'll stop signing off his emails KG or Knight of the Garter, or calling himself the Earl of Inverness or the Baron Killily. The statement didn't reveal what had prompted this symbolic decision, but it had been a torrid few days for Prince Andrew, after his accuser posthumously published a horrifyingly detailed account of his alleged abuse of her and other young girls. Tonight, Prince Andrew faces fresh scrutiny. The Metropolitan Police confirm they're looking into claims who try to dig up private information about the woman who accused him of sexual assault.

1:51He denies all wrongdoing. But the allegations keep piling up. And the questions. So many questions.

2:03From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Is this the end of the Prince Andrew story? Or just the start of the next tawdry chapter?

2:18Zoe Williams, you're a feature writer for The Guardian. And you have been glued to your laptop in the past few days as revelation after revelation has come out about Prince Andrew. But let's start with the statement that Prince Andrew put out on Friday night. What has he agreed to do? Well, he's agreed to give up all his royal titles, right? But he hasn't been a working royal for some time. So the idea that this is like really seismic, maybe it feels seismic for him, but it doesn't feel seismic for the world. Secondly, you know, there's this sense that nobody can take away from him that which he was born.

3:02You know, he was born Prince Andrew. He cannot not be Prince Andrew. And so he remains a prince and he's no longer the Duke of York. He continues to vigorously deny all accusations against him. Sarah Ferguson will no longer be Duchess of York the daughters will carry on being princesses I mean as far as I'm concerned not very much has changed I don't know what do you think do you think a lot has changed? Well not really so what he has agreed to do is sort of to voluntarily stop calling himself a duke and various other titles I never knew he had he's going to give up his use of honours as a knight's grand cross of the royal Victorian order but he's not been stripped of his dukedom and as you said he's not been stripped of his birthright as a prince it seems a little bit a bit superficial what he has actually agreed to and he's still going to get to live in a massive house at Windsor Castle yeah and I mean I don't think it makes much material difference to his living because he wasn't a working he hasn't been a working role for so long anyway you know Rachel Maskell the independent MP is very exercised about the fact that he's giving this up voluntarily rather than having it taken from him.

4:13And that is about the limits of the king's power. It does make it feel like he's doing it as a favour, I guess. Yeah, that makes sense. And I guess the big question is why Prince Andrew, and we'll still call him Prince Andrew, is why he agreed to all of this. And in his statement, he insisted it was simply a case of putting the country and his family first. But I mean, there was obviously a lot more to it than that. And understandably, Buckingham Palace were clearly exasperated by a seemingly never-ending flood of damaging stories swirling around Andrew, stories that date back at least 15 years.

4:52And many listeners will remember just a few weeks ago when Trump arrived for his state visit, it was a picture of Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein that protesters projected onto the walls of Windsor Castle. So he's been a massive embarrassment to them for ages. There are so many developments in this story. It's probably worth us taking each one in turn. And can you start with the extract of a book that was published on The Guardian website last Wednesday called Nobody's Girl? I was recruited at a very young age from Mar-a-Lago and entrapped in a world that I didn't understand. And I've been fighting that very world to this day.

5:26One of the most prominent Jeffrey Epstein accusers, telling her story in her own words, months after her death, Virginia Roberts-Jufres and her memoir, Nobody's Girl. Ms. Jufres' posthumous memoir is officially released tomorrow, putting Prince Andrew under more scrutiny. He has consistently denied any wrongdoing. So, Nobody's Girl is the posthumously published memoir, I guess you'd call it, but memoir doesn't really cover how gruesome it is. Of course, Virginia Jufres took her own life six months ago. So it's extremely sad even that the book exists in the form it does, but it's also extremely grippingly written and numerous events, including the first meeting between Virginia and Andrew are told in terms that even though we knew this meeting happened, we knew what happened.

6:22We've seen the photo of him with his arm around her. We've heard the allegations that he had sex with her when she was 17, that we've heard the allegations that she was effectively trafficked to the UK. There's nothing here that we don't know. And yet the detail is extremely painful. What is new are her claims that after casting doubt on my credibility for so long, Prince Andrew's team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me. One of the details is that she asks him to guess her age and he correctly guesses 17 and then adds only a couple of years older than my daughters.

7:02And it's sort of sickening. It's really genuinely sickening. There are, of course, more problematic episodes that she describes on her life in Epstein's orbit, you know, just the abuse she suffered at his hands and the hands of so many of his clients and friends. But also, apparently, Andrew being involved in this orgy between her and I think eight other girls, who were all, she writes, visibly under 18, and very few of whom spoke English. So it's really, the devil's in the detail. Whatever you think you know about trafficking underage girls between extremely rich men you can't really see it and you can't really get a handle on the depravity of it until you know the actual granular events yeah I think you're completely right when I clicked on the extract on the Guardian website it was with a heavy heart and a sort of deep breath thinking okay I better read this but what more can they tell me that I didn't already know?

8:10And yet, I'm just going to read out a bit of the extract about when Virginia met Prince Andrew. And she said, he was friendly enough, but still entitled as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright. I drew him a bath. We disrobed and got in the tub, but we didn't stay long because the prince was eager to get into bed. This next bit's really horrible. He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches. And then he seemed in a rush to have intercourse. Afterwards, he said thank you in his clipped British accent. In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.

8:46And it's not kind of gruesome in a kind of, oh, I don't want to picture Prince Andrew having sex, although God knows I don't. It's gruesome in a kind of, imagine one human being thinking so little of another. Yeah, somebody who he's already equated with his own daughters. I think I find that particularly hard to swallow, really. And we have to say that Prince Andrew denies ever having sex with Virginia Dufresne, although he did reach an out-of-court settlement with her in a New York civil case, paying her£12 million while accepting no liability. But this extract that The Guardian published, it wasn't the only development on the Dufresne story, was it?

9:27There was also an expose in the mail on Sunday this weekend. What did that say? So in 2011, 17 hours before the first newspaper published the photograph of Andrew with his arm around Virginia, he approaches his personal bodyguard to ask them to dig up some dirt on her, giving them her name, her date of birth and her social security number. Andrew allegedly wrote, It would also seem she, Virginia Dufresne, has a criminal record in the States. I've given her date of birth and social security number for investigation with the on-duty personal protection officer. Now, he denies all this. Apparently, he flags that she's got a criminal record.

10:16So his first action is to try and get his bodyguard to dig up dirt on Virginia Dufresne. His second action is to contact Ed Perkins, then the Queen's deputy press secretary, and say that that's what he's done. And the tone is very much they've got this in hand because they're going to find something on her or they're going to find a way to silence or discredit her. There was nothing on this girl. And the Metropolitan Police, of course, we should say, they have no record of actually enacting what Andrew had asked. So I think it's perfectly likely that they said, no, this isn't our ballot work. Right.

10:54Although I think that the Met did put out a statement this weekend saying we're aware of the media reporting. We're actively looking into the claims made in the mail on Sunday. Because, of course, the bodyguard would have worked for the Met's elite SO14 royalty protection group.

11:16if we look at the chronology of all this in recent days andrew puts out a statement on friday night presumably by that point the mail and sunday have got in touch with him and the palace saying heads up we're going to publish this we can only assume that this is one of the many kind of dominoes that tipped over and forced his hand and forced the palace's hand But it's not the only thing, is it? What else have we learnt in recent days, particularly about the previous answers that he's given around when he cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein? So both him and Sarah Ferguson have been incredibly unclear, let's say, about when they cut ties with Epstein.

11:52Prince Andrew always said that he cut ties with him in 2006. And then just to show leadership, visited him again in 2010 in order to say that those ties had been cut. I took the judgment call that because this was serious, 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. Now, that makes no sense at all, because you wouldn't need to visit a convicted sex offender just to tell him that you were no longer in a relationship with him. But, you know, that was always his rationale. Well, he had to explain himself, didn't he? Because there's a picture of him strolling in Central Park.

12:31Yeah. With Jeffrey Epstein in 2010 when Epstein was out on bail. Yeah, and apparently that was their difficult conversation where he says, I no longer can have any contact with you. 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. The emails that have emerged recently suggest what? that after that meeting in Central Park in 2010, that Andrew has still maintained contact, right, with Epstein. Yeah, and the day after the Mail on Sunday first published that photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Dufresne, he emailed him to say, we are in this together.

13:16He says he's concerned about the impact of the paper, but reassured him that they would rise above it. And I think that's an interesting phrase, that he just thinks that he can float above these allegations because they are coming from little people and big people can overcome them. There's a kind of horrible phrase he uses where he says, I'm just as concerned for you, don't worry about me, to Epstein, and concludes we will play some more soon, four exclamation marks. Play. Play some more soon. To use that language with a man who... I know, I know. And he signs himself. I mean, this is what I find really strange.

13:59He signs himself A, HRH, the Duke of York, KG. So he's describing himself in these terms that are kind of extremely intimate and familiar, and yet still insisting on his titles to this person. So it's really, it's really weird that he would insist on that. I guess it shows how attached he was to his royal titles. There was also a biography of Andrew that was released in the summer called The Rise and Fall of the House of York by a guy called Andrew Lowney. And in it, it became clear how at every opportunity, Andrew would remind people that he was a prince. And he used to tell these terrible jokes, apparently, when he was in the nightclubs of London.

14:38And they would always finish, ha ha, because I'm the Duke of York. It's really strange, isn't it? that often the most chance fixing details of his character are about his attachment to his royalty and his attachment to his superiority so you know do you remember that detail in the same book where he used to make his valet arrange his teddy bears as a grown man he had like 20 teddy bears and he liked them to be arranged in a certain way yeah and it's like a real portrait of a person who thinks he is superior and if you like ordained by god he's sort of arrested he's sort of trapped in this kind of infantile ego which i suppose you'd have to be to treat others like that

15:26coming up what does this tell us about what king charles and prince william will do to protect the monarchy

15:44given how serious the allegations are against him albeit allegations he denies do you think that losing what to most of us might seem a few sort of silly titles is punishment enough well no i mean there's a there's a kind of fundamental principle here isn't there that if he's done what he's accused of having done those are criminal acts virginia juffray may have been 17 when he first met her and it may have been in the uk where the age of consent is 16 but there are numerous allegations which suggest that he engaged in sex with people who plainly been trafficked now that is against the law the fbi drawing a line under this saying that they will not investigate him.

16:27They won't be investigating any of Jeffrey Epstein's inner circle as well. Welcome news, I imagine, for Prince Andrew. However, victims are rightly furious. They could bump him down to a valet in his own house and make him wait on other royals. And the disgrace would never be enough to alter the fact that he is above the law, which is, I think, quite another thing which is quite striking about the whole thing from a kind a British culture point of view is that we sort of accepted if you think these allegations are now 14 years old we sort of accepted them we took them into the our understanding of who he was and what the palace would do to protect itself we took it all in to how we perceived him and sort of allowed it to live alongside a kind of understanding that he was still even if he wasn't a working royal he was still a royal and even if he wasn't a happy man he was still a free man we just like accept that as like part of the establishment and what I can't see is the ease with which we just kind of roll it into the way we see him.

17:43I totally understand what you're saying but I mean it does feel like pressure is building on Andrew at the moment and it isn't just coming from the media, there are some MPs, albeit on the back benches, who are agitating for him to pay a much higher price. There was an intervention on the weekend from the MP for York Central, and her constituency is very important, given that Andrew was, of course, and I guess still is officially, the Duke of York. What did she have to say? So Rachel Maskell is an independent MP. She already brought a private member's bill forward to this effect, which was to give the monarch more power to strip a royal of his titles.

18:23Powers do exist for the king to strip royals of their titles. They were invented in 1917, or maybe not invented, but certainly modified in 1917, to strip royals who fought against England in the First World War, which is like that was a relatively simple thing for the palace to wrap its head around. Anyway, so back to Rachel Maskell. She brought a private member's bill to the effect of the king should be able to strip him of his honours some months ago, and she's retreading that ground, her point is Parliament has an opportunity here to take seriously what this kind of sexual behaviour does to people.

19:00It has a chance to flag that there are victims here. There is a real victim and he should just have all his titles taken away. He should no longer be a prince. Yeah, so she essentially wants to provide the king with the power to remove titles of his own initiative or on the recommendation of a joint Parliament committee. But she's also So repeated calls, hasn't she, for clarity on who paid for that£12 million settlement that was made to Virginia Dufresne in 2022? Because the rumours at the time were always that some of it was from his duchy holdings, whatever the hell those are, and some of it had come from the Queen.

19:39I mean, look, forgive me, I'm not sure that it's the most important question. You know, we kind of fixate on the money. Why does he still have his house? why are we still paying for this and that and the other who paid for this who paid for that I'm just not sure that the money is the issue because even if he paid for it all himself it's still an incredibly ugly horse tradie way of dealing with the central allegation definitely and and what do you think we've learned about the royal family in its current iteration from how this has all been dealt with because although Prince Andrew's statement on Friday sought to suggest that it was his own decision to step back.

20:19Most people think that he was essentially pushed. And do you think that that's coming from Charles, his big brother, or is it coming from his nephew, Prince William, or a bit of both, do you think? I mean, you could look at it in the most positive possible spin. You'd say, OK, this is a new era of accountability in which they're not above the law, in which they're not above culture, in which the behaviour that they exhibit should be as honourable as any other given person, etc, etc. And who's driving that change between William and Charles? Although William has allegedly vowed to ban Andrew from his coronation whenever that may be.

20:55So my sense would be that William, his preference probably would have been for this to go away and since it will not go away, maybe he's driving force behind getting Andrew firmly to the sidelines. But essentially, he will remain an open wound in the family, whatever his honours are. And that's what I think they're not getting, because they have to account for the fact that there were things they must have known in 2011 and they did nothing. They must have formed a view after the Newsnight interview. And if they did, they certainly never indicated it to anyone. It says numerous things about the family and what it's prepared to sit on and hide and cover up and pay for that Andrew lasted as long as he did and still arguably has a very comfortable life.

21:47so I don't respect the idea of a royal but we are all swimming in the same water so we we live in the country of which they are heads of state and it does affect us if there's a whiff that they covered up a sex abuse scandal it does affect us if they thought this was going to go away it's hard to tread that line between not taking them too seriously because you just don't take them too seriously, but then thinking actually that is serious. Absolutely. Zoe, thank you very much. Thank you. That was Zoe Williams, my thanks to her. You can read all of her latest columns at theguardian.com, along with all the latest Prince Andrew news.

22:31And that's all for today. This episode was produced by Tom Glasser and George McDonagh, and was presented by me, Helen Pidd. Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlow and the executive producer was Sammy Kent. We'll be back tomorrow.

22:50This is The Guardian.