Thank goodness for Will and Kate!

ROYALS
The Trouble with Andrew

In the royal-wedding afterglow, Buckingham Palace still has a major P.R. problem: how to handle Prince Andrew, Britain’s trade ambassador and fourth in line to the throne. The prince’s dissolute lifestyle, links to unsavory foreign potentates, and friendship with the American registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are undercutting the Queen’s efforts to rehabilitate the monarchy. And while many blame Andrew’s problems on his perennially broke ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, Edward Klein discovers some insiders pointing to another woman—his mother herself.

By Edward Klein
August 2011

On a snowy Friday afternoon last February, Ed Perkins received an urgent phone call in his ground-floor office at Buckingham Palace. Perkins has the thankless task of serving as press secretary to the Queen’s wayward second son, His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York. The female voice on the other end of the phone line belonged to Sian James, an assistant editor at The Mail on Sunday, a tabloid that’s been unsparing in its coverage of Andrew’s dissolute private life and dodgy friends.

“We’re planning to publish a story about the Duke of York,” James told Perkins, “and we’d like a comment from the Palace.”

Perkins listened in stunned silence as James unfolded a shocking tale. Her newspaper had obtained an interview with a young woman named Virginia Roberts, who claimed that the billionaire American money manager Jeffrey Epstein had trained her as an under-age prostitute and flown her to London in 2001, when she was just 17 years old, for the express purpose of spending time with Prince Andrew. Virginia, now a mother of three living in Australia, had waited a decade to break her silence, but the newspaper had evidence to support her story—flight logs from Epstein’s Boeing 727 and Gulfstream jet, and a photo showing Prince Andrew with his arm around Virginia’s bare midriff. Standing off to one side in the photo was Ghislaine Maxwell, 49, the stylish and well-connected daughter of the late, disgraced British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell. According to Virginia, Ghislaine recruited her as Epstein’s “sex slave” when she was 15 years old and arranged for her to see Andrew three times, in London and New York and on Epstein’s private Caribbean island, Little Saint James. She said she’d been “sexually exploited by Epstein’s adult male peers, including royalty.” (Prince Andrew denied that he had had sexual contact with Roberts or any other of Epstein’s girls. Ghislaine Maxwell also denies the allegations and says that she plans to take legal action against a number of British newspapers.)

Read the full article in the August 2011 issue.