When is a duke not a duke? When he’s Prince Andrew. Recently, the king’s brother has agreed not to use any of the titles and honors bestowed on him—except for “prince,” to which he is entitled by birth—because of the continuing fallout from his relationship with the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. No longer will he call himself the Duke of York, or be a knight of the garter (KG), a personal honor given by the monarch. He had already agreed not to be addressed as “his royal highness” or “HRH.”
This is not enough. Andrew, now 65, has spent his entire life trading on his aristocratic titles, and there is one way to stop that from happening again: Britain’s Parliament should formally remove them. There is precedent for this. In 1917, the Titles Deprivation Act was passed to deal with troublesome royal cousins who sided with Germany in the First World War. Much like Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Andrew too should lose the right to put Prince on his stationery.
In 2019, Andrew told the BBC’s Emily Maitlis that he had severed his friendship with Epstein nine years earlier, after the latter’s conviction for sex offenses, during a four-day stay at Epstein’s New York townhouse. We now know this was not true.
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Earlier this month, a leaked email revealed that Andrew had contacted Epstein in 2011, one day after the publication of a photograph of him with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused both Epstein and Andrew of having sex with her while she was a teenager. “It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,” the email read. “Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Andrew signed off the email: “A, HRH The Duke of York, KG.”
Ick. Who signs off a cheery solidarity email to a convicted sex offender by listing his aristocratic titles? Only someone who values those titles extremely highly. Hence, taking them away is an appropriate punishment. The Epstein story is all about people who are sufficiently rich or entitled escaping the full consequences of their actions, something that is still happening here. (Andrew paid Giuffre a multimillion-dollar settlement in 2022, without admitting wrongdoing.)
Prince Andrew has been nothing but a liability to Britain for decades; let’s see if plain old Andrew Windsor can behave any better.
Although the Epstein story has abated in the States—since Donald Trump told the MAGA faithful to drop it—its repercussions continue in Britain. The British media are currently full of suggestions that Prince William will ban Andrew from attending his coronation when he becomes king, and that Andrew should be evicted from living in an effectively rent-free mansion in Windsor.
Presumably the heir to the throne understands that his uncle’s behavior is an existential threat to the monarchy itself: A recent book, Entitled, lays out in excruciating detail how Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, freeloaded for years on money from honest British taxpayers and dubious wealthy friends. They abused their positions, refused to live within their means, and lacked the gumption to make large enough sums of money legitimately. In the 2000s, Andrew was repeatedly accused of misusing his position as a British trade envoy for his personal advantage. Ferguson accrued debts that she enlisted Epstein to pay off. After the disastrous BBC interview with Maitlis, Andrew withdrew from public life and dropped his HRH title, then became friendly with a Chinese businessman in the hope of reviving his fortune overseas. You can imagine where this is going: Yes, that Chinese businessman has since been accused of being a spy.
Another leaked email recently revealed that Ferguson, too, had stayed in contact with Epstein after publicly disowning him. The month after she described taking money from him as a “gigantic error of judgment,” she apologized to Epstein, saying she had distanced herself from him only to save her reputation. “I was instructed to act with the utmost speed,” she told him, “if I would have any chance of holding on to my career as a children’s book author and a children’s philanthropist.” Ferguson also wanted to reassure Epstein that she had never called him the “P word”—a pedophile. Neither half of this grotesque couple wanted to end their relationship with a man who had so generously enabled their lifestyles.
The source of these leaked emails is surprising. Unusually, two papers had the scoop the same day. Even more unusually, the stories in the Mail on Sunday and The Sun had the same lead author, Daphne Barak. She is one of the few people to interview Epstein’s surviving conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, from prison in the United States. Maxwell is currently seeking a pardon from Donald Trump, and in the summer, she had two meetings with Trump’s deputy attorney general. After that, she was moved from a prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility in Texas.
For Trump, the timing of the latest leaks was very helpful. Tuesday marked the publication of Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, which might have turned the spotlight back onto the president’s long friendship with Epstein. (The book says that Giuffre was first recruited as a “masseuse” by Maxwell when she was a teenager working in the spa at Mar-a-Lago.) Instead, the media’s focus has been entirely on Prince Andrew.
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Having read Julie K. Brown’s excellent account of the Epstein case, I approached Nobody’s Girl with trepidation. Was I ready to lose my faith in humanity even further? And sure enough, the book offers an unremittingly bleak narrative. At one point, Giuffre apologizes to readers, writing that she would understand if they needed to take a break. The only light spots in the tale are the vignettes of life with her husband, Robbie, and their three children in Australia. But earlier this year, Giuffre accused Robbie of domestic abuse, and soon after, she died by suicide at the age of 41. Her co-writer, the journalist Amy Wallace, adds a foreword to explain these events, but the text itself is unchanged—leaving intact Giuffre’s assurances that Robbie (“part guru, part goofball”) saved her life. (“Robbie’s attorney declined to comment on Virginia’s allegations, citing ongoing court proceedings,” Wallace notes.)
Wallace has also retained other discordant notes in the narrative, such as Giuffre’s acknowledgment of her own role in recruiting and grooming even younger girls to “massage” Epstein. Giuffre takes an interest in Epstein’s own self-justifying attitude toward his crimes. He tells her that he must climax three times a day as a matter of physiological necessity, and also that he takes care to have sex only with postpubescent girls. (Hence, presumably, the apology from Ferguson for calling him a pedophile.) This propensity for mental acrobatics, alongside his immense arrogance, was how Epstein rationalized his crimes to himself. He shared those two qualities with Andrew.
My starting point when assessing allegations of huge conspiracies is that secrets become exponentially harder to keep for every extra person who knows about them. Many of the accusations in Giuffre’s book would be difficult to believe if we didn’t have photographs and other evidence (such as partial flight logs for Epstein’s plane, contemporaneous corroboration, and the testimony of other victims) to support them. But no, a single depraved millionaire really did spend years loaning out trafficked teenagers to his rich and famous friends. What is even more depressing is that Giuffre’s memoir follows the “grooming gangs” story in Britain and the Pelicot trial in France, both of which involved dozens of men colluding in organized mass rapes. Yes, people can be this evil.
At the absolute minimum, Prince Andrew and others in Epstein’s orbit showed a pathological incuriosity about the young girls who surrounded him—and that is stretching good faith to its very limit. Frankly, he is lucky never to have faced a criminal trial to adjudicate Giuffre’s claims.
And that brings me back to the question of retribution. Because Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t have been friends with plain Andy Windsor, the appropriate penalty for the disgraced royal is obvious to me. De-Prince him, take away his taxpayer-funded 30-room mansion, and tell him to get by on the State Pension for retirees. It’s less punishment than he deserves, but it will have to do.
