How could Buckingham Palace somehow signal to the public that the priapic dunce Prince Andrew is even more deplorable than was previously thought? That was the creative task King Charles faced last week, after the release of a mortifyingly chummy email from Prince Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein (“We’re in this together. . . . We’ll play some more soon!!!”) in 2011 that proved Andrew’s well-creased pants were on fire when he asserted in the calamitous Emily Maitlis BBC interview that he had “honorably” cut off contact with the convicted pedophile in 2010.
The release this week of a posthumous memoir by Virginia Giuffre, the former Epstein sex slave who said she was trafficked to Andrew when she was 17, promised to make this hot mess even hotter. Throw in yet another incident of bad judgment in his eager meetings with an alleged Chinese spymaster and it’s clear Andrew requires the equivalent of house arrest without the anklet.
But how do you disappear a 6-foot-tall, 190-pound, 65-year-old man in robust good health who has an ironclad contract to live in the Queen Mother’s former mansion, a short neigh from Windsor Castle and just four miles from the new “forever” home of Prince William and Kate, who can’t abide him? His mother, Queen Elizabeth, had already, in 2022, reluctantly stripped him of his military honors, his HRH title, and his royal duties. So this time, he lost the cherished title of Duke of York, plus a few remaining grand honorifics. Now, there is nothing left to deprive him of but his electric toothbrush.
The trouble is that most people think being a prince (a title Andrew retains) is a bigger deal than being a duke. While there are ships, schools, peninsulas, and even a nursery rhyme named for the Grand Old Duke of York, the title throws off neither an income nor a stately home of his own. The erstwhile Duke of Dross also relinquished the oldest chivalric medal, of Most Noble Order of the Garter, which is marked by a procession at which creaking establishment honorees wear full ceremonial rig, including huge feathery Lady Bracknell hats—an odd sight, for instance, on Tony Blair.
But that occasion has zero relevance to the British public, who mostly think of the garter ceremony, if they think about it at all, as some poncey royal excuse for dressing up. (William, who hates any kind of costume change, is looking forward, I am told, to getting rid of the garter flummery when he is calling the shots.)
So, in lieu of a Tower of London solution, unless Andrew can be persuaded to banish himself to a cottage on the Balmoral estate or a cushy villa on a Dubai golf course, his scowly, jowly visage will keep seeping back into the national consciousness. The untenable hazard of banning him from public events but allowing him to still show up at family occasions was writ large at the September funeral of the Duchess of Kent, the late queen’s cousin. As the mourning royal party paused respectfully in the door of Westminster Cathedral when the duchess’s funeral cortege passed, Andrew loomed like a great white shark at the shoulder of a stone-faced Prince William. It was impossible for William, staring implacably in the other direction, to get his uncle’s baleful mug out of the shot.
No chance of that happening again. Andrew is now not even permitted to come to Sandringham to partake of the family Christmas pudding and instead faces a Scrooge-like fate of bitter seasonal reflection. (At least, he will share it with his loyal ex-wife, the erstwhile duchess, Sarah Ferguson, who arguably took an even more bitter hit, losing all her charities and rising social acceptance. Her demotion followed the release of an email calling Epstein her “steadfast, generous and supreme friend,” after she publicly denounced him with pious protestations of abhorring pedophilia.)
On Friday, The Times reported that Andrew will not be invited to William’s coronation, whenever that occurs. The thornier question, perhaps approaching faster than anyone is indelicate enough to discuss, is whether, in the fullness of time, Andrew will be allowed to attend his brother, the king’s, funeral.
House of Shame
Virginia Giuffre’s long-awaited memoir, completed shortly before her suicide at the age of 41 in April, does not, in fact, offer anything new about Andrew’s alleged sexual predations. But just being reminded again in full, revolting detail of Giuffre’s 25 months in the clutches of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Giuffre describes as “less as boyfriend and girlfriend, and more as two halves of a wicked whole,” redoubles disgust for anyone who continued to consort with them.
I found it especially poignant that Giuffre tried to delude herself that the chillingly detached Epstein actually cared about her, a self-deception banished after he handed her over to service a “former prime minister” who raped her so brutally she was bleeding profusely when she emerged from his cabana on Epstein’s private Caribbean island. Though Epstein knew about this assault—“you’ll get that sometimes,” he told her insouciantly—he nonetheless instructed her to board a private plane a few weeks later for sex with an unnamed friend, who turned out to be that same savage former prime minister.
And anyone who supports Trump pardoning Maxwell, Epstein’s imperious, Oxford-educated adjutant, who cruised high school exits and upscale spas (she first spotted Virginia working at the Mar-a-Lago spa), looking for fresh teenage targets, should consider that Epstein could never have groomed so many hundreds of young victims without Maxwell’s reassuring, pedigreed feminine overtures.
In her book, Giuffre observes Ghislaine’s insecurity when she turns 40 and starts to resent the nubile Virginia, whom Epstein, like a perverse child, always demanded to be tucked in by at night. Maxwell “began lashing out at me during our threesomes. . .she would grab a larger-than-life dildo and use it to hurt me. If I complained, she hurt me more.” Giuffre finally resolved to escape Epstein and Maxwell’s “house of shame” when they pressured her to have Epstein’s baby and sign over all parental rights to him. “What if the baby were female?” Giuffre wonders. “Was the plan for Epstein and Maxwell to have me bring that little girl up until she reached puberty, then hand her over for them to abuse?”
Stolen Childhood
Horror. Horror. Horror. And yet it’s not the most upsetting aspect of this harrowing memoir. Until now, Giuffre had acknowledged she was abused from the age of 7 by a “family friend.” Now, we learn that the “family friend” was her own father, who today strenuously denies the claim. Giuffre says he also passed her on to his muscly, tattooed buddy “Uncle Forrest,” later convicted for molesting another young victim.
Giuffre is convinced her mother knew what was going on but, instead of intervening to stop it, began to coldly turn away from her, and beat her with a thorny switch when she acted up. No wonder Virginia was a serial runaway. Dumped into a Lord of the Flies juvie center, she was picked up at age 15 by a creepy 63-year-old predator who called himself her “new daddy,” groomed her with the purchase of G-strings and lacy lingerie, and pimped her out to others. In the scented luxury spa of Mar-a-Lago, where she thought she had at last landed a real job, it’s easy to see why Giuffre’s emotional damage made her susceptible to Maxwell’s soothing blandishments to come and give massages to a rich guy she knew in Palm Beach.
The unconvincing hero of the book is Virginia’s husband, Robbie, father of her three children, who rescued her in Thailand when she fled Epstein, and took her back with him to Australia as his wife, just 10 days after they met. In these pages, Robbie is her supportive white knight. But the sad truth, according to her brothers, is that he’d long been abusing her. To People magazine, in April of this year, Virginia finally admitted, “I was unable to escape the domestic violence in my marriage until recently.” It was a final cruel betrayal by someone she had again thought of as a protector.
In the last years of her life, as she told her traumatic story over and over in courtrooms and in interviews, Virginia’s health collapsed as if, she says, her body was “staging a revolt.” She had endured threats, harassment, and reputation-bashing from the lawyers of high-powered men who feared what she knew. (London’s Metropolitan Police are now “actively” investigating whether Prince Andrew tried to obtain damaging information about her.) Her suicide this year, alone in her bleak farmhouse in Western Australia, was evidence she believed she would never escape the pain of her past.
See No Evil
The title of Giuffre’s book is Nobody’s Girl, but perhaps a more fitting title would be Blind Eye. Her tragic story is one long indictment of people who looked the other way. Her mother, who allowed her husband to take Virginia’s innocence. The stream of affluent, powerful people who never asked why this stray teenager was part of Epstein’s depraved entourage.
Even the sainted Queen Elizabeth, who, in 2011, bestowed on Andrew her highest personal honor of the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order as a decoy strategy to protect him—and the sunny karma of the impending storybook wedding of William and Kate—from mounting threats of bad press about his disgraceful abiding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Perhaps the most telling record of collective callousness is the snap of Virginia taken at supermodel Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party in Saint-Tropez in 2001, where she had been dragged along by Epstein and Maxwell. Lost amid the sea of adult partiers, the waiflike Virginia looks even younger and more vulnerable than her age. Years later, in 2020, when she had become a vocal campaigner against sex trafficking, Giuffre posted on Twitter, “You saw me at your parties, you saw me in Epstein’s homes, you saw me on the plane. . . . You saw me on the streets, you watched me be abused. You saw me!”
