In the unusually deserted and silent corporate office, a very familiar, fruity voice came over the phone speaker, loud, clear and enthusiastic.
‘Keep the pedal to the metal!’ boomed one of the Duke of York’s few remaining supporters. As investigative journalists, we already had the pedal to the metal, sure enough. But that metaphorical vehicle was now speeding in quite a different direction from the one which the Queen’s second son and his loyalists must have been hoping for.
Five years ago – in those strange months prior to and during the second Covid lockdown of 2020 – I found myself, along with my Mail colleague Stephen Wright, in close proximity to a desperate final attempt to discredit the toxic allegations concerning Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
In November of the previous year, Andrew had given a catastrophic Buckingham Palace interview to BBC Newsnight. This unprecedented exercise had been intended – by the Prince’s advisers – to clear Andrew’s name. Epstein himself had been found dead in a New York jail three months earlier.
Instead, the Duke’s blustering ‘car crash’ performance saw him further vilified and almost immediately removed from public duties by the Palace. At the heart of the furore were the allegations made by one Virginia Giuffre, nee Roberts, who killed herself in Australia, aged 41, last week.
The infamous 2001 photograph of Andrew with his arm around a teenage Virginia in the London mews home of Epstein and Andrew’s socialite friend Ghislaine Maxwell was probably a fake. We only had to dig to get to the truth
The American claimed that the then middle-aged Duke had sex with her three times in 2001 – in London, then New York and finally on Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean – after she had been trafficked for that purpose by Epstein. On the first two occasions she was aged just 17.
The Duke vehemently denied having had any sexual relations with her. Very few believed him by the summer of 2020. But, he surely hoped, that could change.
For me, the Duke’s last reputational counter-offensive began over coffee outside a Covid-distanced Mayfair restaurant. It was hosted by one of London’s foremost experts in crisis management.
Most of what had been said about the Duke was ‘bulls**t,’ we were told. Virginia Giuffre was on the make and hapless Andrew was her golden goose.
The infamous 2001 photograph of him with his arm around a teenage Virginia in the London mews home of Epstein and Andrew’s socialite friend Ghislaine Maxwell was probably a fake. We only had to dig to get to the truth.
Tacit assistance would be given along the way, in the form of access to relevant documents and people. A succession of mildly embarrassed former equerries and protection officers who had seen nothing untoward would be served up.
There would be no pressure to write anything other than what we found out. Yes, they were that confident ‘Randy Andy’ was more like an Edwardian boy scout.
And, with that belief, they were largely transparent to a self-destructive fault.
Up to that point I’d taken little or no interest in the royal soap opera. But, like the death of Diana, Andrew’s dalliance with Epstein was a story for the ages. And here was a unique opportunity to get under the hood, as the Americans put it, to see how the royal mechanism really worked.
Or at least how Andrew’s crisis team thought, hoped or had been told by the Duke it worked. The reality was somewhat different.
Thanks to the information provided by the crisis team, we found ourselves obliged to calculate how many people would fit into a particular bathtub in Ghislaine Maxwell’s home. And what, if anything, they could get up to once they were so installed.
I found myself, along with my Mail colleague Stephen Wright, in close proximity to a desperate final attempt to discredit the toxic allegations concerning Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein (both pictured)
Also, the length of time needed to get from a Home Counties lacrosse match to a performance of the Michael Frayn farce Noises Off in Woking, then to a local pizza restaurant before ending up at a Belgravia bacchanal.
In a similar vein, we estimated how long a prince of the realm would require to travel from points A to B in Manhattan, have sexual intercourse at point B then return to point A. Some of these answers favoured Andrew. The important ones did not.
Everything happened in an odd atmosphere, I recall. Whether this was due to the Covid year or Andrew’s detachment from reality is still hard to say.
The first of the three alleged sexual encounters with Andrew that Virginia was to describe in legal depositions took place in Maxwell’s London home on Saturday, March 10, 2001.
Evidence provided to us, meant to disprove her claims about that evening, came in the form of a ‘household diary’ written by the Duke’s former but still loyal wife Sarah Ferguson, with whom he continued to live in Sunningdale in Berkshire. According to the diary, she was working in New York on that day.
That morning, the diary suggested, their daughter Beatrice took part in a ‘lacrosse match vs St Swithun’s (away)’ Their other child, Eugenie, was also in action, playing netball.
In the Newsnight interview the Duke had volunteered what he claimed to have been one of his domestic tasks during the late afternoon of March 10.
‘I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party, at I suppose sort of four or five in the afternoon,’ he said.
This recollection was undoubtedly sparked by the same diary entries we had been given privileged access to. One of these suggested that, after her lacrosse match, Beatrice attended the birthday party of a school friend, seeing a matinee performance of Noises Off. Saturday matinees at Woking’s New Victoria Theatre usually begin at 2.30pm.
This is where the complications began. Because another diary entry suggested that a family member was having a manicure at home at exactly the same time as the play. That someone was ‘A’ – in other words, Andrew.
Such a schedule clash would have made dropping his daughter at the theatre ten miles from his home a problem if he wanted his fingernails to be attended to simultaneously. So how much of a hands-on dad was he that day?
On Newsnight, the Duke had claimed to remember his visit to Woking that afternoon ‘weirdly distinctly’.
The third and final entry in the diary provided an explanation, if not the salvation he had hoped for. It read: ‘Pizza Express.’
As the play lasted little more than two hours, the schoolgirl party might have been expected to arrive at the restaurant for a birthday supper a little after 5pm.
But where was Andrew?
Beatrice, we were told in an admirable example of transparency, had no recollection of what happened that day. Nor did the parents throwing the party.
What’s more, Beatrice, then 12 years old, had her own security, able to take her where she wished to go. She had no logistical need of her father.
If the Duke had, in fact, either played a brief or non-existent part in her day, and been occupied with duties no more onerous than a manicure, then he had all the time in the world after the procedure to be driven up to central London.
But if the Duke had indeed been present to pick up his daughter at the end of the birthday meal, then taken her back to their home, Sunninghill Park, he could not have been in central London that night much before 8pm.
This last scenario was the only one whose timing was incompatible with Virginia Giuffre’s account of what happened that late afternoon and early evening.
For the record, Andrew claimed on Newsnight: ‘I was at home with the children.’
Virginia once wrote a 140-page autobiographical manuscript with the working title ‘Billionaire Boys Club’. In this memoir and other accounts, she claimed the Duke arrived at Maxwell’s home ‘just after six o’clock in the evening’.
Their party had later gone to the Jermyn Street nightclub Tramp, where she claims she and the sweating Duke had danced. They then returned to the Maxwell home roughly a mile away.
Which brings us to the much-disputed bathtub.
In her memoir, Virginia claimed that the bath was a Victorian standalone in the middle of the room. ‘We kissed and touched each other before submersing into the hot water, where we both continued to re-enact foreplay,’ she wrote.
Andrew’s team was hot on this detail. The bath in question was modern and cramped. They’d even put two members of their legal team into the tub to prove it wasn’t Kama Sutra-friendly, they told us.
Our own investigations – involving building plans and other witnesses – suggested that Andrew’s version was more likely.
Virginia’s purple prose had undermined her account. But this was in no way conclusive.
The second disputed sexual encounter which Andrew’s team wanted to disprove allegedly took place in New York in April 2001. Such efforts were undermined by two words in the Duke’s confidential itinerary which they had provided to us: ‘Private time’.
This innocuous phrase related to the Duke’s intentions for the five hours between 1.45pm, when his plane touched down at JFK, and 6.45pm, when he was to leave the Consul General’s Residence – where he was staying – to go to a formal dinner.
Epstein owned the largest townhouse in Manhattan, which was close to the residence.
On the day in question, flight logs suggest that Virginia was flown into the New York area on an Epstein plane.
On Newsnight, Emily Maitlis asked the Duke: ‘There was a witness there… who says you did visit the house in that month.’ Andrew replied: ‘I probably did… because of what I was doing. I was staying with the Consul General which is further down the street on Fifth so I wasn’t… I wasn’t staying there. I may have visited but definitely didn’t, definitely, definitely no, no, no activity.’
Maitlis didn’t press the point further. Which may have been fortunate for the Duke. But thanks to the official itinerary, we could calculate that there was enough time on that first day for the Duke to visit Epstein’s home and return to his formal duties.
Giuffre later claimed: ‘I was told to go upstairs with Andy… I had sex with Andy there. I was only paid $400 from Epstein for servicing Andy that time.’ Her account was not incompatible with the formal itinerary we had been given sight of.
Despite his denial during the Newsnight interview, we found we could now prove that Andrew did spend the night of April 11/12 at the Epstein mansion.
In a fax sent from London shortly before his trip – and shown to us – a royal aide stated only that: ‘His Royal Highness will return to New York on the evening of 11th April after his visit to Boston. He will spend that evening at a private address in New York and will depart for Miami the following day.’
That ‘private address’ was Epstein’s mansion, a ‘source close to the Duke’ conceded, once we pressed the matter. The Duke recalled he stayed there to ‘save taxpayers’ money’. We drew our own conclusions.
Then came what was, for me, a turning point in the investigation, when new evidence of the Duke’s idiotic behaviour began to dominate the picture. We were provided with previously unseen photographs of the Duke in a swimming pool in the Bahamas, with his wife and daughters, in that Easter 2001 period.
They were meant to convey togetherness and loyalty. We were also given sight of official documents related to the Duke’s complex travel plans for the period.
Again, the integrity and transparency of those trying to help him prove his innocence only served to reveal how he had fallen under Epstein’s malign spell.
Documents confirmed that, after New York, Andrew was indeed supposed to join his family in the Bahamas on April 12. But he didn’t arrive until days later. And it became clear to us that the Duke had torn up his plans in order to follow Epstein to Little St James, the tycoon’s Caribbean private island.
Andrew and his bodyguard were supposed to have travelled to the Bahamas via a connecting flight from Miami. Instead they went to Little St James.
What’s more, the Duke ‘probably’ stayed one night on his own at Epstein’s Miami mansion, it was admitted to us after we pointed out a further dislocation in the original schedule. His bodyguard had gone ahead to ‘recce’ LSJ.
Once on the island, the Duke and his protection officer were to spend 48 hours amid what one witness described as a ‘weekend-long party’. We were able to confirm that the Duke finally embarked for the Bahamas on Easter Sunday, April 15, almost three full days after he was supposed to arrive there.
In this context, the family photos of the Yorks at play had quite a different impact. Where did this supposedly doting daddy’s priorities really lie?
Our investigations left me with no doubt that Virginia Giuffre was an unreliable witness.
In her memoir manuscript she gave an account of an orgy involving Epstein and a number of underage girls. This had allegedly taken place on the tycoon’s private Caribbean island in the summer of 2001, when she was 18.
Critically, in her memoir, she did not place the Duke at this extraordinary event or any other like it. Yet, in her 2015 legal deposition, and in various media interviews, she accused the Duke of having been a central participant in an orgy which appears identical in almost every respect – date, location, dialogue, ethnicity and number of girls, language barriers, aftermath – to the one she described in the manuscript.
But despite discrepancies in her account, our enquiries, far from exonerating him, had only revealed the Duke’s discreditable behaviour in more forensic detail. And where there wasn’t detail provided, there were glaring holes that could be filled credibly by Virginia Giuffre’s allegations.
The faith put in the Duke by his crisis team, their admirable dedication to transparency, had backfired. When we went to print, I recall there was little or no pushback from either side.
That was the last twitch of public resistance from the Yorkists, the very last drop of PR sweat expounded in the Prince’s defence.
The following year Virginia Giuffre sued the Duke for ‘sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress’. In February 2022 it was announced he had reached a multi-million-pound out-of-court settlement with her, while still refusing to admit any wrongdoing.
And now she’s dead.
What was I left believing at the end of our investigation? That, on balance, the Duke may indeed have had some kind of Epstein-arranged sexual or sexualised contact with a teenage Virginia.
Her suicide has not silenced her so much as made her allegations indelible. The Prince will have to live with that until his own dying day.
