Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased Wall Street financier and indicted-but-unconvicted sex trafficker, has ended the royal’s career of doing nothing in public.
Now, as the joke goes, he’ll spend his days doing nothing in private.
The Duke of York’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, has forced the prince to end his public appearances on behalf of the Royal Family and cut off his £249,000 annual “salary.” That’s about $319,940.
The proximate cause of Andrew’s punishment was his disastrous interview with the BBC, during which he denied having sex with Epstein’s former sex slave, Virginia Giuffre, whom Epstein “loaned” to his rich, powerful friends.
But ultimately, it was the connection to Epstein itself that ruined 59-year-old royal.
Charles Pushed Him Out
Andrew’s troubles began when Giuffre swore an affidavit in 2015 that she had sex with Andrew at least three times in the early 2000s. On one of those occasions, at the apartment of Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman suspected of being Epstein’s procurer, Andrew posed for a photo with Giuffre. Maxwell, also accused of sexually abusing Epstein’s sex slaves, appeared the background.
Flight logs unearthed by the Daily Mail showed that Andrew was at the right places, at the right times, where Giuffre claimed the two had sex.
Giuffre’s affidavit, related to her lawsuit against Maxwell, was released the day before Epstein was found dead in his jail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10. Epstein, the coroner ruled, hanged himself, but his family and celebrity pathologist Michael Baden dispute that finding. The FBI is probing the death as a possible murder conspiracy.
Andrew has been denying Giuffre’s claims ever since, and sat for an interview with the BBC that turned into a disaster.
The prince again claimed he never had sex with Giuffre, and couldn’t have because of the way she described him when they were dancing at a nightclub in London. Giuffre said he was sweating, and Andrew claimed he couldn’t sweat at the time.
“There’s a slight problem with the sweating, because I have a peculiar medical condition, which is that I don’t sweat, or I didn’t sweat at the time, and that was — was it — yes, I didn’t sweat at the time,” the prince said.
Why was that? Because Andrew suffered “an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at, and I simply — it was almost impossible for me to sweat.”
That ridiculous claim of anhidrosis was too much for the Queen and her eldest boy, Prince Charles, who is next in line for the throne.
A source told London’s Evening Standard that the Queen acted after Charles told her she had to protect the monarchy.
One well-placed senior royal source said: “Both Her Majesty and the Prince of Wales, despite being on the other side of the world, have been monitoring developments with increasing alarm”
They added: “This is not about personalities but about safeguarding the future of the institution of the monarchy itself. There could be only one conclusion…. The Duke of York had to withdraw from the fray and from public life.
“It is very sad. Obviously, both the Queen and the prince love Andrew … but the health of the monarchy is too important to risk.”
Andrew’s mistake wasn’t just hanging with Epstein to begin with. He didn’t give up his friendship with Epstein after the Deep State Wall-Streeter registered as a sex offender after his conviction in Florida.
Indeed, such was their friendship that Epstein gave Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s wife at the time, $24,000 to pay a debt. When that became public in 2011, she called Epstein a pedophile.
That’s when Andrew ended his friendship with the sex pervert.
Suicide or Hanging?
Andrew, whom the New York Post dubbed “His Royal Dryness” after the anhidrosis claim, is just one of the rich, powerful men with whom Epstein has been linked. Among them are Bill Clinton and President Trump.
Those connections are the reason skeptics wonder whether Epstein hanged himself, or whether he was the victim of a Deep State hit to shut him up, given, as Giuffre says, he had collected compromising information on the men to whom to he “loaned” his sex slaves.
Andrew is eighth in the line of succession behind Charles and his children and grandchildren.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
