Cawthorne Prince Andrew

Epstein, Maxwell and the Palace - 'Excruciating'
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78334-177-1
Verlag: Gibson Square
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'Excruciating.' Sunday Times The arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sparked a Prince Andrew world-media frenzy. But few know the palace intrigue behind their long-standing triangular relationship. Going behind the headlines, documentaries and mini-series, PRINCE ANDREW exposes for the first time the unknown details of the Epstein scandal behind secretive palace gates and how it impacted on the power struggle between Andrew and his older brother Prince Charles. Rife with machinations and plots, it paints a rare and riveting, insider picture of vice and rarified daily life at the royal court. It is an unbelievable story how a boy from Coney Island befriended the world's foremost royal family. PRINCE ANDREW casts a truly eye-watering light on one of the dirtiest stories of our time, giving the reader much-needed forensic insight into all the facts, allegations and counter-allegations.  

Nigel Cawthorne started his career as a journalist at the Financial Times and has since written bestselling books on Prince Philip, Princess Diana, and the history of the royal family, as well as provided royal news comment on national and international broadcasters.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cawthorne, Nigel

Leseproben

1
betting the firm







The first warning sign of a hurricane aiming for Buckingham Palace came on 6 July 2019 when billionaire businessman Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal charges related to sex trafficking. Twelve years earlier he had pleaded guilty to Florida State charges of soliciting girls as young as thirteen for prostitution and served nearly thirteen months in low-security Palm Beach County Jail. The sixty six year old now faced as much as forty-three years in a federal jail. Though guards were supposed to check on him every thirty minutes, he was found hanged in his cell on 10 August. Verdict: suicide. Most of Epstein’s influential friends, including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, distanced themselves from him after his first fall from grace. However, for another friend—Prince Andrew—it was too late. The US Appeals Court in New York City released two thousand pages of papers from a defamation suit by Virginia Roberts Giuffre that included her claim that Epstein had used her as a sex slave while underage and had forced her to have sex with Andrew on three occasions. Even before these allegations, a photograph had surfaced of the prince with his arm around the seventeen year old’s naked midriff. Also in the picture was Andrew’s close friend Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend and daughter of disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell, who died under mysterious circumstances after he went missing from his yacht Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands in 1991. In a lawsuit, Giuffre claimed Maxwell had procured her when she was fifteen for Epstein and worked at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for $9 an hour, and that Maxwell was Epstein’s accomplice in trafficking her to Andrew and others. Maxwell denied the allegations outright when she was deposed under oath and called Giuffre a liar, leading Giuffre to sue for defamation. An attempt to get the prince to testify under oath in the defamation case failed. When Giuffre’s law suit was settled in May 2017, its court papers were sealed, only to be released in part by the New York Court of Appeals the day before Epstein died.


Case 18-2868 unsealed papers, US District Court, Southern District of New York

The first weeks of August 2019 dramatically changed Andrew’s life and forever changed the light in which these allegations placed the royal family. All of a sudden, the Queen’s favourite son stood at the heart of the Epstein Affair and became someone US law enforcement was interested in talking to. The sex crimes the billionaire orchestrated, involving up to a hundred victims by now, remained under FBI investigation—despite his death. Andrew became the first British royal ever whose extradition to the United States was mooted in the press. But the scandal went well beyond the fate of one man. Ex-New-York federal prosecutor and Columbia Law School professor Jennifer Rodgers said, ‘In theory, if he comes to the US, he could be arrested pursuant to a material-witness warrant’. Could Andrew ever return to America under these circumstances? Though strenuously denied, Giuffre’s accusations against Andrew now threatened Britain’s monarchy as a whole—an institution reliant on broad public support for its very existence—in an unprecedented way. Like the catholic church, Buckingham Palace found itself yet again engulfed by headlines connected to an underage-sex scandal. The renewed media scrutiny and the attendant furore that shook the royal family to its core all stemmed from the prince’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Each time the Epstein allegations bounced back into the ether as a result of new facts, the media storm gathered in potency, and the monarchy looked increasingly at risk of its half-cocked handling of the crisis. In 2011, it had first been reported that the prince had partied with Epstein at the paedophile’s New York mansion—three months after the financier had been released from Florida State custody and house arrest at his New York home. Alongside the news, the press had published hand-written telephone messages from high school girls for Epstein that had been retrieved in 2005 as material evidence from the billionaire’s Palm Beach home. It included one that said, ‘She is wondering if 2.30 ok cuz she needs to stay in school’. Another girl, ‘Colleen’, phoned to tell Epstein, ‘Going into class—will be out in 45 min’. ‘Sarah’, a further message read, ‘doesn’t know at what time she must come this night for the massage’. Epstein threw the intimate dinner party in December 2009 for fifteen at his $80 million Manhattan townhouse. Located on 71st Street, just off Central Park, it was considered the largest private residence in Manhattan. The prince was guest of honour and stayed at the mansion for a few days. Also present at the bash were Woody Allen, the subject of sexual misconduct against his seven-year-old daughter since the 1990s, and Charlie Rose, the CBS anchor who would later lose his job after numerous allegations of being a sexual predator. The prince was then photographed strolling with Epstein in Central Park during his stay. Both were deep in conversation. In 2019, Prince Andrew again strenuously denied Giuffre’s allegations and those of Johanna Sjoberg, whose unsealed evidence first became public the day before Epstein died. Sjoberg claimed that the prince had groped her at Epstein’s New York house in 2001. ‘I just remember someone suggesting a photo, and they told us to go get on the couch. And so Andrew and Virginia sat on the couch’, Sjoberg had testified. As she herself reluctantly sat on Andrew’s lap, someone touched Virginia’s breast and then Andrew groped hers, Sjoberg stated under oath. She, too, said that Andrew’s close friend Ghislaine Maxwell ‘lured her from her school to have sex with Epstein under the guise of hiring her for a job answering phones’. At Epstein’s mansion, she found out that her duties included being a masseuse. He then induced her ‘to perform demeaning sexual services,’ she said. Despite these allegations, the Queen made a show of support for Prince Andrew by sitting alongside him in a Rolls Royce as she headed for Sunday morning worship in Balmoral the day after Epstein died. The following week the Mail on Sunday released a video showing Andrew waving goodbye from the mansion’s fifteen-feet tall oak doors to a young brunette as she left Epstein’s Manhattan home. Buckingham Palace promptly issued a statement saying: ‘The Duke of York has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes. His Royal Highness deplores the exploitation of any human being and the suggestion he would condone, participate in or encourage any such behaviour is abhorrent.’



Epstein’s New York mansion, Manhattan’s largest private residence

The mystery brunette was later named as Katherine Keating, the then twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Paul Keating, former prime minister of Australia. Keating had come forward herself as she was ‘deeply upset’ about the speculation. Although Keating conceded she knew Epstein, she had only met the prince for forty five minutes ‘for a cup of tea’ that day and did not meet Epstein on this occasion. Keating had met the prince at a lavish party in Dubai celebrating the 2010 opening of the Meydan Racecourse and they were seen together several times that March weekend. Keating was a public relations guru—something much needed by Andrew and his New York host. The twenty eight year old was also a friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s. She spoke at a high-profile party in New York organised by Maxwell in 2013 and later Keating persuaded her to give a rare-as-hen’s-teeth radio interview in 2014 on her programme for Huffington Post. Giuffre repeated her claim first made in 2015 that, from the age of seventeen, she had had sex with Andrew three times—in London, at Epstein’s New York home, and at an orgy on his private island in the Caribbean. Given the popular outcry in Britain, the palace unequivocally stated the allegations were ‘false and without any foundation’, adding, ‘Any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.’
At the end of a torrid week of more battering by the media, the palace took the unprecedented step of issuing a second statement. This one—even more unique—was from the prince himself, who must have felt cornered by the negative headlines. In it Andrew expressed ‘tremendous sympathy for Epstein’s alleged victims’. The prince added: ‘I met Mr Epstein in 1999. During the time I knew him, I saw him infrequently...