Royals await anxiously the fallout from Prince
Andrew’s disgrace
The Queen’s favourite child, under siege in the press
as he awaits a critical court ruling, is not the first obnoxious royal. But he
has damaged ‘the Firm’ – and it will have to change
Andrew Anthony
Andrew
Anthony
Sat 8 Jan
2022 13.30 GMT
Prince
Andrew, the Duke of York, KG, GCVO, CD, ADC, turns 62 next month. It is long
past the age at which a man is expected to stop being a cause of concern and
embarrassment to his parents. And yet Andrew, who is said to be the Queen’s
favourite child, has exposed his mother to the greatest threat to the royal
family’s reputation in living memory.
As he
awaits the decision of a New York judge, Lewis Kaplan, in the sex assault case
brought by Virginia Giuffre, the prince finds himself in the deeply unedifying
position of trying to evade court with a secret silencing deal struck by his
late friend and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
The
agreement, signed in 2009, stated that in exchange for being paid $500,000,
Giuffre, then using her maiden name of Roberts, would “release … and forever
discharge … second parties and any other person or entity who could have been
included as a potential defendant … from all, and all manner of, action and
actions of Virginia Roberts, including state or federal, cause and causes of
action”.
Giuffre
maintains that in 2001 when she was 17 she was trafficked by Epstein and his
sometime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with the prince on three
occasions – once in Maxwell’s house in Belgravia, where the infamous photograph
was taken of her with the then 42-year-old prince’s hand around her waist, on
the second occasion at Epstein’s mansion in New York and finally on Epstein’s
private island, Little St James in the US Virgin Islands, with a group of other
girls. The prince denies all allegations and says he has no recollection of
ever having met Giuffre.
The
prince’s lawyers have taken an aggressive approach to protecting their client.
They first argued that the court summons had not been properly served, then
attempted to get the case thrown out on the grounds that Giuffre doesn’t live
in the US.
Now they
are seeking their client’s salvation with the grim fact that he qualifies as a
potential defendant in any sex abuse case connected to Epstein. In other words,
it appears his possible culpability is being used as his defence.
Even if
this legal loophole works, and Kaplan dismisses the case, it will be an outcome
that will not clear the prince’s name, which his friends insist is his prime
aim. Instead, added to all those letters that come after his title, will be a
toxic question mark.
And that’s
the best-case scenario for the prince. If, instead, Kaplan gives the go-ahead
for the case to be heard, then the prince would be obliged to make a deposition
and then, in the autumn, appear in court. He could in theory refuse to do
either, but again the optics would be disastrous. However, if he did go to
court, the world’s media would be offered a daily diet of sordid details. And
if he were to lose the case, courtiers suggest he may no longer be able to
travel internationally, for fear of criminal extradition.
As the
royal expert and author Robert Lacey puts it: “The prospect of Virginia
Giuffre’s allegations against a senior member of the Windsors being aired in
court and reported around the world is just impossible to contemplate from the
point of view of the royal family, and I’m quite sure there would be some
settlement out of court.”
Given that
Giuffre has waited over 20 years for recognition of the damage that she says
was done to her, that settlement would presumably involve a large financial
figure – which raises the question of who will pay it. The prince has spent the
better part of his adult life cosying up to the super-rich, precisely because
he lacks that kind of money himself. So again his mother, who is thought to
have bankrolled his defence, would be his benefactor. That brings into the
spotlight the contested question of whether her wealth is private or a product
of her position as head of state, and therefore subject to some kind of
taxpayer oversight.
Monarchists
insists her private wealth and her public dispensation are completely separate
things, but any settlement paid by the Queen would provide republicans with
ballistic ammunition. What seems extraordinary is that this conclusion has been
moving steadily closer for more than a decade, and the prince, and all those he
has repeatedly reassured of his innocence, have been frozen in a state of
denial, just hoping that it will all go away.
Catherine
Mayer, the author of a biography of Prince Charles and co-founder of the
Women’s Equality party, says that Buckingham Palace did “something very stupid”
when the scandal first surfaced in 2011.
Shortly
after he was photographed with Epstein in 2010 strolling in Central Park, New
York following the American’s release from prison on charges of procuring a
minor for prostitution, Andrew was removed from his position as international
trade envoy and redeployed on other matters, including as a royal business guru
with the Pitch@Palace initiative. Mayer believes that decision was symptomatic
of a wish to sidestep the issue rather than confront it.
“The whole
story is a genuine tragedy because of all the lives it has ruined,” she says.
“But there is also a soap opera quality to it in that you see characters
ignoring things, of trying to cover them up in the belief that they will make
things better, and you, as the viewer, know that they’re going to get worse.
I’ve had that feeling watching this.”
One
problem, says Mayer, is that there has been no comprehensive strategy across
the royal family on what to do. Although its members talk about the family as
“the firm”, lending the idea of disciplined business entity, this, says Mayer,
is a misconception.
Prince
Andrew, Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001.
“It has
always been, and increasingly in latter years, not one institution but a series
of institutions or courts and households frequently in conflict with each
other,” she says. Royal observers note that staff working for Prince Charles
and Prince William have briefed against Andrew. A mixture of the Queen’s
protectiveness, the wary exasperation of other royal households and Andrew’s
stubborn resistance to sound advice, left him to forge his own ad hoc strategy.
It resulted in his fateful decision to put his side of the story across in the
excruciating November 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
As a
textbook example of how not to do damage limitation it is unlikely to be
surpassed any time soon. “You saw how completely untethered he is to outside
reality,” says Mayer.
Looking
back at that disastrously revealing encounter, it is notable how often the
prince used Maxwell to try to put some distance between himself and Epstein
(who hosted Andrew on many occasions and gave large sums of money to his
ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and possessed 16 separate phone numbers for the
prince). At one point he describes the financier as a “plus one”.
But now
that Maxwell herself has been convicted of sex trafficking a minor, among other
serious charges, it leaves the prince with no one to saddle with his poor
judgment of character. In among a catalogue of evasions and failing memories,
his one line of consistent defence is that he was not aware of anything
untoward going on in any of the Epstein or Maxwell households at which he stayed.
For Lacey, among many other observers, this is simply not a credible
proposition.
“He
consorted for 10 years with a couple whose lifestyle revolved around the sexual
exploitation by Epstein of vulnerable women and underage girls, a number of
them trafficked by Maxwell. The overtness of this predatory way of life was
apparently inescapable. What do you imagine when you travel in a private plane
nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express’? And then you invite these degenerates to stay
at Balmoral?”
When
challenged on his apparent blindness by Maitlis, the prince came up with an
explanation that Mayer sees as a self-indictment rather than exoneration. He
effectively said that he lived among servants all the time and was used to not
taking any notice of them – even, presumably, if they were scantily clad
teenage girls.
“It shows
his extraordinary arrogance and disconnection,” says Mayer, “and he
unintentionally spoke a truth that is deeply damaging to him and the wider
institution.” In fact his brusque manner with servants is well-documented. A
senior footman once told a reporter who worked undercover at Buckingham Palace
said that on waking the prince “the response can easily be ‘fuck off’ as good
morning”.
Of course,
Andrew would not be the first obnoxious royal, nor the first dissolute prince.
The institution’s history is full of badly behaved characters. But we are now
living in the third decade of the 21st century, in a time of transition not
just for the royal family, as they prepare for the prospect of a new monarch,
but society at large.
Ten years
ago, in the pre-#MeToo days, a movie mogul such as Harvey Weinstein could
terrorise and abuse women with impunity. His friend Epstein all but got away
with rape and sex trafficking thanks to the political influence he was able to
exert.
And back in
2011 it may well have seemed that Giuffre’s allegations against Andrew were
destined to remain the outlandish cry of an inconsequential person, an
unprovable rumour that would fade along with all the other neglected claims
made against the rich and powerful.
Even a
photograph taken inside Maxwell’s home could be dismissed as fake – although
how could a young woman get access to an image of the prince that no one else
has ever seen to put it in a mocked-up picture?
Prince
Andrew’s November 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
It never
did add up, and with the passage of time, the attempt to remove himself from
that troubling scene in his friend’s house looks more and more like a desperate
tactic. Just as the prince’s claim that he stayed with Epstein for four days to
tell him that he could no longer be his friend out of a sense of “honour” was
always far-fetched and miserably self-serving.
It seems
unlikely after all these years that the prince will change his story, and if
there is a settlement it will doubtless come with a non-acceptance of any
personal responsibility. Yet this is unquestionably a watershed case. It’s hard
to imagine that any royal will again be afforded the indulgence that has
accompanied Andrew around the globe.
Although
the monarchy will survive this current crisis, it may well do so in a more
streamlined version with fewer passengers. The days of overgrown playboys
trading on the family name in exchange for paid-for company and pay-offs to
ex-wives should be numbered. And if they are it will be in no small part due to
the efforts of a group of women from largely humble backgrounds who refused to
back down in the face of their abusers.
“I am
looking forward to vindicating my rights as an innocent victim and pursuing all
available recourse,” Giuffre said seven years ago. “I’m not going to be bullied
back into silence.”
As even Prince Andrew would have to concede, she has certainly not allowed that to happen.
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