Poison has long dripped from the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein, polluting the reputation of anyone who’d been drawn into his orbit. And while Prince Andrew has been tainted for some years now, this latest dose could well finish his name for good.
The publication last week of toe-curling emails that Peter Mandelson had sent to Epstein pulled the rug from under Britain’s now former ambassador to Washington.
But even this could pale against the embarrassment that publication of a cache of correspondence between Epstein and Prince Andrew could unleash.
The Epstein Files have remained sealed but, step by step, emails between the convicted paedophile who killed himself in 2019 and his menagerie of high-profile friends are leaking into the public domain.
As The Mail on Sunday reveals today, credible sources say that the FBI have a bombshell haul of emails that will ‘destroy’ Andrew. Yet the Duke of York’s name is already mud.
How damaging could such emails be to him? The answer is ‘very’.
First, while the emails are unlikely to be as queasily gushing as Mandelson’s (not Andrew’s style), they might tell us more about how much money Epstein gave the Yorks and why.
In 2011, this newspaper broke the Virginia Giuffre story, alleging that the prince had had sex with her, publishing a photo of him with his arm around her when she was 17 years old.
As The Mail on Sunday reveals today, credible sources say that the FBI have a bombshell haul of emails that will ‘destroy’ Andrew
A few days later, his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson admitted that she had received £15,000 from Epstein. She said at the time: ‘This was a gigantic error of judgment… I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can, I will repay the money and will have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.’
Within four years the Yorks could afford to buy a £20million chalet in exclusive ski resort Verbier. How come? The answer might lie in these emails.
But even if Epstein and Andrew had a far greater financial relationship than previously known, it wouldn’t be the most toxic revelation the Epstein Files could hold.
Like so many victims of child sexual abuse, Virginia Giuffre was broken by her ordeal and died by her own hand in April, aged 41.
As someone who has investigated the Epstein scandal for many years, I accept there were inconsistencies in her testimony. But I believe that her story was, in essence, true, that she was recruited by Epstein’s one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to be his sex slave and that he enjoyed pimping Giuffre, and others, out to his friends, including the Duke of York.
Do the secret emails point to Andrew asking for the paedophile’s help in trying to bury Giuffre’s campaign against him? To undermine a victim of child sexual abuse for telling the truth? It’s hard to imagine the fallout to such a morally repugnant disclosure, but Andrew’s ostracism from the Royal Family would surely be complete.
The King would come under huge pressure to evict him from Royal Lodge in Windsor and withdraw all funding and security provision.
Worse still, the emails might suggest that the King’s younger brother committed a criminal offence. The prince originally avoided criminal investigation because the legal age of consent in Britain is 16 and in 2001, when the picture of him with 17-year-old Giuffre was taken, anti-trafficking laws were not in place.
But do the emails reveal other inappropriate relationships? Andrew has said he is happy to cooperate with any FBI investigation into Epstein, but that will be sorely tested were they to issue a warrant for his arrest.
In a case of this magnitude, the FBI would likely need sign-off by its director, Kash Patel, an acolyte of President Donald Trump. Given speculation about Trump’s own association with Epstein, it seems unlikely he would put a bomb under the story by sanctioning the arrest of Andrew.
Even if he were to do so, would the British state hand him over? It would put the King, who Prime Minister Keir Starmer would surely consult, in an invidious position, to choose between fraternal loyalty or public duty.
If the Epstein Files on Andrew are released while Trump is hosted by the royals on his State visit this week, the headlines will be grim.
Already on the horizon are what horrors Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, due out this autumn, might reveal. New speculation over emails Andrew sent to Epstein only proves there is plenty more poison left in this scandal.
Hunting Ghislaine by John Sweeney is published by Hodder & Stoughton
