Andy?! Say it ain't so...

Vanity Fair wrote: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.)

“Would you put all that in an e-mail, please?” said the unflappable Perkins. “It might take a few hours to get back to you.”

After he hung up the phone, Perkins assembled a crisis team consisting of senior Palace officials and lawyers. Many of these were old hands at dealing with Andrew’s indiscretions. Only the week before, another damaging photo had surfaced in a different British tabloid, the News of the World, showing the 51-year-old Duke of York, fourth in line of succession to the throne, strolling in New York’s Central Park with Epstein, 58, a registered sex offender.

The two photos capped months of negative press coverage of Andrew, which began when an undercover reporter, posing as a businessman, secretly videotaped an interview with Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, 51, who divorced the prince 15 years ago but still shares a home with him. The hapless Fergie was caught on tape demanding $821,000 in return for business access to her ex-husband, who is Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment. “If you want to meet him in your business, look after me, and he’ll look after you,” Fergie was heard saying on the video. “You’ll get it back tenfold That opens up everything you would ever wish for. And I can open any door you want. And I will for you.”

Under a torrent of criticism, Sarah Ferguson offered an abject public apology, returned the $40,000 down payment she had received, and offered to move out of Andrew’s home. However, her claim on the video that Andrew had advance knowledge of her attempted shakedown—an accusation categorically denied by Buckingham Palace—focused renewed attention on the long charge sheet against the prince.

Among other things, Andrew has been accused of hosting a lunch at Buckingham Palace for Mohamed Sakher El Materi, the billionaire son-in-law of the now deposed Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and of accepting a gift of a $30,000 gold necklace for his daughter Beatrice from a convicted Libyan gun smuggler. (A spokesman for the Palace says it doesn’t comment on private gifts to members of the royal family.) Andrew earned the nickname “Air-Miles Andy” after he was criticized by the National Audit Office for taking a helicopter just 50 miles to a lunch with Arab dignitaries, at a cost of almost $5,000. Then there was the story of a secret trip Andrew had made in 2008 to Libya, where he met Muammar Qaddafi and reportedly discussed the release from a Scottish prison of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (who was, in fact, released the following year). In addition, it was reported that Andrew had flown to Sharm el Sheikh with David “Spotty” Rowland, a controversial British businessman who provided $66,000 to help pay Sarah Ferguson’s staggering debts. While in Egypt, Andrew dined with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the corrupt president of Kazakhstan, whose son-in-law subsequently bought Andrew’s white-elephant mansion, Sunninghill Park, for $25 million, $4.9 million more than the asking price. (Buckingham Palace denied that there was any impropriety involved in the sale.)

Later, Andrew moved into Royal Lodge, the late Queen Mother’s residence in Windsor Great Park, where he continued to live with his former wife and their daughters, Princess Beatrice, 22, and Princess Eugenie, 21. However, this has not put a crimp into Andrew’s sybaritic style. He’s been rumored to be romantically linked to more than a dozen women, including the American actress Angie Everhart and Amanda Staveley, a successful private-equity specialist to whom he proposed marriage.

The sordid connection to Jeffrey Epstein inflicted by far the greatest damage on the prince’s reputation. According to a sworn deposition by Juan Alessi, a former employee at Epstein’s Palm Beach estate, Andrew attended naked pool parties and was treated to massages by a harem of adolescent girls. At least three of the girls were questioned under oath about whether Andrew had had sexual contact with any of the masseuses. One of them, Sarah Kellen, refused to answer, citing her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Another, Adriana Ross, was asked, “Has Prince Andrew ever been involved with underage minor females to your knowledge?” She reportedly replied, “I refuse to answer.” (Prince Andrew says he neither attended nor was aware of any naked pool parties.)

Inside the Firm

The plight of Prince Andrew, a once strikingly handsome man who has let himself go a bit to seed, made far less of an impression on audiences around the world than the royal wedding of the picture-perfect William and Kate, the future King and Queen of the United Kingdom. And yet, the story of how Andrew has managed to get away with such cringe-worthy behavior—and survive in his high-profile role as Britain’s trade ambassador—said more about the inner workings of the British monarchy than the estimated $40 million wedding extravaganza.

The story goes back to 1992, which Queen Elizabeth II called the annus horribilis, the year the marriages of Charles and Andrew broke down, Windsor Castle caught fire, and Fergie was photographed having her toes sucked. Ever since, the Queen has been at pains to ensure the survival of the monarchy in its current form. With that in mind, the then lord chamberlain, Lord Airlie, established a secretive discussion procedure called the Way Ahead Group, which is chaired by the Queen and consists of senior courtiers and senior working royals. (The working royals reportedly include the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Prince William, and Prince Harry.) The Way Ahead Group convenes twice a year, doesn’t keep minutes of its meetings, and deals only with such paramount issues as primogeniture, the feudal rule by which the Crown passes to the eldest male heir.

After its initial meeting in 1992, the group made several precedent-shattering decisions. The Queen and Prince Charles volunteered to pay taxes on the private income from their vast estates. The Queen agreed to reimburse the government for its annual Civil List grants—totaling almost $2.5 million—to five of her closest living relatives at the time: the Princess Royal (Anne), the Duke of York (Andrew), the Earl of Wessex (Edward), Princess Margaret, and Princess Alice, the Queen’s last surviving aunt. (Currently only the Queen and Prince Philip receive money from the Civil List.) Buckingham Palace was opened to visitors in order to raise money for $65.6 million in repairs to Windsor Castle. And the royal yacht Britannia, with its 19 officers and crew of 217, was later decommissioned and turned into a tourist attraction.

However, the Queen’s plans to rehabilitate the monarchy were upended by a series of events. The royal family was mortified when Major James Hewitt, a prominent polo player, spilled the beans about his long-running affair with Princess Diana. Even worse, Charles was heard in an intercepted cell-phone call telling his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, that he’d like to “live inside your trousers.” The Queen herself bungled things when she was slow to acknowledge the public grief over Princess Diana’s death—an attitude she reversed in order to appear as a more caring, in-touch monarch. As for Prince Andrew, his procession of girlfriends, starting with Koo Stark, who had appeared as an actress in a soft-porn film, further stained the family’s image. Only recently, one of his former girlfriends reportedly claimed that when she was alone with Andrew in the bedroom he liked to model her underwear as a joke.

As for the Queen’s irascible consort, Prince Philip, who turned 90 in June, he hasn’t done much to help his wife clear the way ahead. Philip’s almost irrational loathing of Sarah Ferguson led the Queen, who normally shows shrewder judgment, to cast Fergie out of the royal orbit without a penny after her divorce from Andrew, which guaranteed that Fergie would turn into a high-profile beggar and an embarrassment to the throne. What’s more, Philip tried to bully Andrew into kicking Fergie out of her residence at Royal Lodge—a demand that placed Andrew in the awkward position of having to choose between his overbearing father and his over-the-top ex-wife. He chose her. (Buckingham Palace would not comment on Prince Philip’s relationship with Andrew or his ex-wife.)

Fergie, who was not invited to the royal wedding, fled to Thailand, where, she later told Oprah, “the jungle embraced me.” She added, “I wanted to be there with my girls—to be getting them dressed and to go as a family.” She and Andrew were the last royals to have been married at Westminster Abbey, and Fergie kept in touch by telephone with her ex-husband during the ceremonies for William and Kate. “When Andrew went with the girls,” she recalled, “we were talking all morning, and he was saying, ‘It’s O.K. Just remember, we had such a good day. Our wedding was so perfect.’ … Because we’re such a unit together, he made me feel very part of the day on April the 29th.”

With a profligate former wife and two coming-of-age daughters to support, according to an insider, Andrew has complained that it’s hard to make do on a yearly stipend of $408,000. He also receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for travel expenses related to his job. His portrayal of himself as a poor relative helps explain why he and Fergie always seem to be grubbing for money, and why Fergie—with Andrew’s knowledge—recently sold her story to Oprah for a six-part reality series in which Beatrice and Eugenie join their mother in a teary airing of their woes.

“My understanding is that Prince Charles was less than happy that Andrew was given the role of trade envoy back in 2001 after he left the navy,” Robert Jobson, author of William & Kate: The Love Story and a royal commentator for NBC News, told me. “When Charles ascends the throne—which he will do despite all the talk to the contrary—he’d like the royal family to be streamlined; he wants a smaller, more cost-effective monarchy. Andrew has made a tremendous effort to keep Beatrice and Eugenie close to the Queen in order to assure their future as fully paid-up members of the Firm, as the royal family is called. In addition to their status as royal highnesses, Andrew has always wanted them to have around-the-clock security and the rank of working royals. But if Charles has his way, the girls will be thrown off the royal payroll and have to fend for themselves. Many of Andrew’s inexcusable actions—consorting with rich oligarchs in North Africa, the Mideast, and the former Soviet Union, and begging friends to bail out Fergie—have been done with his daughters’ welfare in mind.” (A Palace spokesman wouldn’t comment on Charles’s intentions with respect to the princesses.)
Should He Keep His Job?

‘The phone call from Sian James of The Mail on Sunday created a 36-hour maelstrom at Buckingham Palace,” a royal source told me. “At some point during those 36 hours, the Queen summoned the Duke of York to a meeting.”

According to several well-informed individuals, the Queen was not amused. She recognized that the Virginia Roberts story had the potential to overshadow the positive media lavished on the forthcoming wedding of William and Kate. The Queen asked Prince Andrew why he had consorted with someone like Jeffrey Epstein, whom the F.B.I. had reportedly linked to about 40 young women, most of them under-age. More to the point, the Queen demanded to know if her son had any more surprises up his sleeve.

“The duke assured his mother that he had no sexual relationship with Virginia Roberts or any of Jeffrey Epstein’s girls,” the source said. “The duke talked to the lawyers on the phone, and, with the approval of the duke and his office, the lawyers drew up a legal document that was meant as a shot across the bow of the press in Britain.” (Buckingham Palace wouldn’t comment on the meeting.)

British libel laws are among the most stringent in the world, so when The Mail on Sunday and other newspapers ran the story about Andrew’s rendezvous with Virginia Roberts in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home, they carried strong disclaimers saying there was no suggestion of any sexual contact between Prince Andrew and Roberts. That, however, didn’t put an end to the furor in the press and the House of Commons, where it’s highly unusual to hear M.P.’s criticize the royal family. Chris Bryant, the Labour Party’s shadow justice minister, urged Prime Minister David Cameron to “dispense with the services” of the prince. Bryant declared, “It’s just unsustainable that he should remain as the public face of British industry abroad.”

At first, the prime minister appeared reluctant to throw Andrew a lifeline. Indeed, a government source was quoted as saying, “No one will shed any tears if he resigns.” When Andrew visited 10 Downing Street, Jon Cunliffe, the prime minister’s senior adviser on Europe and business, reportedly gave him a severe dressing-down. (A Palace spokesman denies this.)

But after Buckingham Palace weighed in, the government rallied around Andrew. A spokesman said that Cameron “fully supported” the prince in his job. Several prominent businessmen publicly praised Andrew’s role in promoting British industry. “He is of huge value,” Terry Hill, a chairman of Arup, an engineering-design firm, told me. “He’s knockout attractive to overseas clients.”

Most of Andrew’s friends knew better than to get involved in the royal mess. One who didn’t was Goga Ashkenazi, an exotic, publicity-seeking beauty from Kazakhstan, who is frequently photographed in barely-there couture outfits. Britain’s press has likened Ashkenazi to a James Bond girl, and last summer she threw a lavish party in St. Tropez called “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Invitations went out on a diamond-shaped card signed “Madame Goga.” According to one party-goer, “A lot of rude Russians showed up.”

Ashkenazi, who lives in a multi-million-dollar mansion in London’s Holland Park, brokered the sale of Andrew’s Sunninghill Park home to the father of her illegitimate child. Yet, despite her controversial reputation, Goga has made an appearance in the Queen’s box at Ascot and paraded Andrew around as the guest of honor at her lavish 30th-birthday party at Tyringham Hall, the Buckinghamshire country home of real-estate heir Anton Bilton and his wife, Lisa B, a model, singer, and actress. In an interview with the London Evening Standard, Goga said that after the Jeffrey Epstein story broke Andrew sent her a BlackBerry message asking, “Have you seen the papers?” and saying that he was “very, very upset” about the way he was being portrayed, and “very, very worried” that he would lose his job as Britain’s trade envoy.

Blabbing about the private feelings of a member of the royal family is still considered bad form in Britain, and Ashkenazi’s claim to have had a BlackBerry exchange with Andrew was dismissed by Buckingham Palace. But the damage was done. When Andrew showed up at an official event, a reporter who in the past might have been deferential asked him outright if he was “an embarrassment” to the royal family.

Well, it goes on.  http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/08/prince-andrew-201108#

Cass wrote:yawn. the majority of this story is rehashed old gossip and self seeking publicists and wrong information.

this story is from 2011 and this is now 2015.

Original Quill wrote:

Cass wrote:yawn. the majority of this story is rehashed old gossip and self seeking publicists and wrong information.
this story is from 2011 and this is now 2015.

Yep, that's why I stopped after the second page.  I tried to get something more on the current allegations, but the Queen's tentacles are long.  And the newspapers are shy.

The problem is that the allegations that have been made public are made in pleadings in the Epstein lawsuit.  Statements made in pleadings are privileged, but anything else will be actionable.  So...no one is saying the something else that would shed additional light on the matter.  We will just have to watch what is filed in the lawsuit.
But, how much do you wanna bet arrangements will be made to assure that anything in the future will be filed in camera?

Cass wrote:

Original Quill wrote:
Yep, that's why I stopped after the second page.  I tried to get something more on the current allegations, but the Queen's tentacles are long.  And the newspapers are shy.

The problem is that the allegations that have been made public are made in pleadings in the Epstein lawsuit.  Statements made in pleadings are privileged, but anything else will be actionable.  So...no one is saying the something else that would shed additional light on the matter.  We will just have to watch what is filed in the lawsuit.
But, how much do you wanna bet arrangements will be made to assure that anything in the future will be filed in camera?

the Queen's tentacled are not long just that libel laws in The UK are much more strict and they have been punished too often for printing down right lies.

This woman's story is full of holes. I have no doubt Epstein is a low life scum bag but since she didn't get a big pay out from him nor was privy to the plea deal (which is what set off this new federal lawsuit) she is now going after another cash cow. I wont deny there are pictures of PA with this woman but that doesn't mean anything.

I gave no issue with future proceedings being in camera and think it should be until the courts have made a decision but kind of hard to put that cat back in the bag once hes gotten out.....

eddie wrote:I don't think the stories are that far-fetched tbh.
There's never smoke without fire.

If you look at that picture of him with his arm around that girl - and why IS his arm around that girl who is not a relative? - he looks decidedly uncomfortable.

Why is he friends with a sex offender?