“. . . JUST ask Prince Andrew, he’ll tell you about it, the island was an absolute cesspool,” Donald Trump responded to a Bloomsberg reporter’s enquiry regarding what ‘problems’ he thought erstwhile US president Bill Clinton would face.
His reply had been a follow up to another he had offered to a Fox News host during a 2015 interview at which he had hinted that Clinton’s problems were associated with self-described ‘financial bounty hunter’ Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in the US Virgin Islands.
Prince Andrew, as Trump hinted, was au fait with ‘on goings’ which occurred at the location, for the then Duke of York had visited it on numerous occasions during which he’s alleged to had partook in shenanigans involving making out with women provided by Epstein for the enjoyment of his guests.
The prince and Epstein had initially met in the early 1990s and became friends who shared interests in money and sex (serial sex addicts, as Epstein alluded to both as being in a 2007 interview). By that moment, the prince and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson – who at some stage had also stayed on the island – had known Epstein for some while, even though the British royal claimed to have only met him in early 1999, shortly before he visited the island on February 9 of that year.
The plot around Queen Elizabeth II’s beloved child deepened, with Trump denying, during a 2019 television interview, knowing him despite photographic evidence to the contrary dating back twenty years, at the time. (Among numerous instances, Trump had played golf with the prince on his Mara-Lago estate in Palm Beach.)
Similarly, Trump had attempted to distance himself from Epstein by claiming he wasn’t close to him.
(A Palm Beach resident mentioned a party on a yacht, at which Trump and Epstein were surrounded by attractive young girls.) On the occasions Trump had socialized with Prince Andrew and Epstein separately, he had described both as “. . . a lot of fun to be with.”
A March 2001 picture – snapped by Epstein limning the prince with a young woman named Virginia Giuffre at the financier’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s London digs – which resurfaced in 2022, would lead to his downfall. Yet, when queried regarding Giuffre in a November 2019 BBC interview, the duke claimed to have “no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever”, nor of “that photograph ever being taken.”
Giuffre, who at some point had together with her father worked at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago, had been groomed, whilst a teen, by Maxwell to provide sexual services to male associates of Epstein’s. Later, as an advocate for survivors of sex trafficking, she would accuse Prince Andrew of sexual abuse and sue him in civil court in New York – resulting in him paying an undisclosed amount to her, in a 2022 suit settlement.
She would also pursue criminal and civil actions against Maxwell and Epstein. The die was cast, with Epstein dying in a Manhattan prison under questionable circumstances in August 2019 and his spectre seemingly hovering over those who had associated with him.
Prince Andrew would be stripped of his military titles and royal patronages in January 2022; Maxwell would be sentenced to 20 years, at age 63, in an American prison in 2022 for trafficking underage girls for the convicted sex offender; recently unsealed files on Epstein would cause a political ruckus around President Trump’s relationship with him; and Giuffre would die, by suicide, at age 41, on April 25, 2025.
If the Duke of Edinburgh was alleged to had slighted Prince Harry by remarking that, “One steps out with actresses, one doesn’t marry them”, in disapproval of his grandson’s relationship with Meghan Markle – ‘twas consistent with Buckingham Palace’s misgiving about his son’s romance with actress Koo Stark in the 1980s.
The Duke of York grew from being a pin-up royal hero who, as a helicopter pilot, helped rescue survivors of a sinking British warship during the Falklands War of 1982 – to quitting the Royal Navy in 1999 after twenty years, upon being informed that he had no future in it.
Opined one-time The Sun’s Page 3 model and itinerant conquest Vicki Hodge: “He needs someone with the strength and authority to prevent him from getting into escapades that embarrass him and the rest of his family.”
Enter Sarah Ferguson – the redhead described by an official close to the couple as being “. . . very manipulative and can twist him any way she wants.” The lovebirds had met at a royal house party for Ascot in 1985 and went on to marry on July 23, 1986, at a wedding attended by the father of the groom and mother of the bride – who had been lovers twenty earlier.
Her slew of scandals included her blasé flaunting of lovers who among others, numbered American acquaintances John Bryan and Steve Wyatt, whose dalliances with her enraged the Royal Family and eventually led to her divorce; and Austrian tennis player Thomas Muster, whose parents agonized about a member of the British Royal Family bewitching their son.
One of her misconducts would involve a scheme to make money from Prince Andrew’s role as the Government UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment by setting up deals with foreign businessmen – injudiciousness The News of the World exposed during a sting in which one of it reporters masqueraded as a businessman she had lured.
Her royal status would diminish to an extent of once watching from the roadside as the Queen passed her by in a horse-drawn carriage during Ascot – oblivious to the duchess’ daughter’s yelling to her grandmother, “Can we come, too?” – from having accompanied the Queen Mother during a previous iteration.
A psychiatrist deduced her knack of embroiling herself in protracted indiscretions to being ‘psychologically adrift’ – leading to her donning a devil-may-care mask which drew her to a circle of on-the-make losers, histrionic con-men, quick-fix merchants, meretricious phonies, et al.
Princess Margaret once wrote to the duchess: You have done more to bring shame on the Royal Family than could ever have been imagined. How dare you discredit us? After repeated negative publicity, pending which the Queen was reported to had “finally lost patience with the duchess“ – the duke was instructed, on March 17, 1996, to divorce her.
Despite the sequence of outrages her daughter entangled herself in, the duke’s mother-in-law, Susan Barrantes pinned the split upon him, opining: “If only he had character, perhaps his marriage would not have broken up.”
And though they have long been divorced, the couple – who once helmed the House of York and saw to its fall due to flaws of their own characters – continues to live together, with Ferguson saying in one of her memoirs: “. . . ours is the wedding of the souls, and we’ve never parted, and never shall.”
British author Andrew Lownie’s account is a gripping saga of a couple who fell from grace.
His is the disclosure of a web of death, deceit, denials, infidelity, lust, corruption, covers-up, greed, et cetera.
A trade paperback, Entitled is published by HarperCollins Publishers and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R505.
