The former Prince Andrew at Sandringham lying across the laps of five elegantly dressed women as Ghislaine Maxwell looks on; Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein on a shoot near Balmoral; the three of them peering down from the royal box at Ascot.
The images are just some of the “Epstein files” released by the US Department of Justice on Friday.
The snapshots taken at the most exclusive VIP locations provide further proof, if it were needed, that King Charles had little choice but to strip his controversial sibling of his titles and honours.
For they appear to show the platinum access pass to the highest echelons of British society that the then Duke of York provided for this toxic couple. Each time such images surface is a reminder to the public, and, surely, a source of great discomfort to the royal family.
They suggest the late convicted sex offender Epstein and his then girlfriend, Maxwell – now serving 20 years in a US prison for sex trafficking offences – paid numerous visits to the UK to see their once-royal friend.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now styled, is pictured in bow tie and dinner jacket lying across the laps of five women, their faces redacted, in the saloon room of the royal residence in Sandringham, reportedly to mark Maxwell’s 39th birthday in December 2000.
In another photo, Epstein and Maxwell peer out of the royal box at Ascot with Mountbatten-Windsor, who invited them as personal guests on Ladies’ Day in June 2000 – an event attended by both the queen and the queen mother. The former prince reportedly invited the couple to stay at the Balmoral estate in 1999, and they are pictured on the moorland, dressed for the part.
These are not the first images to emerge of the couple at royal locations. A photograph of them in a Balmoral cabin was released by the court during Maxwell’s trial in the US, while one of Maxwell and the actor Kevin Spacey sitting on thrones in Buckingham Palace, reportedly taken in 2002, had previously found its way into the public domain.
Released together, however, the latest pictures reinforce the incredible access Epstein and Maxwell enjoyed through this friendship.
According to the royal biographer Tina Brown, the late financier considered the former duke to be an “idiot”, but a “useful” one. In her 2022 book, The Palace Papers, she wrote that Epstein confided to a friend that he used to fly Mountbatten-Windsor to obscure foreign markets, where governments were obliged to receive him, with Epstein going along as his investment adviser. “With Andrew as frontman, Epstein could negotiate deals with these (often) shady players,” she wrote.
Brown argued that Epstein “deftly exploited” Mountbatten-Windsor’s “sense of grievance” at being Charles’s spare. Epstein, she wrote, “made Andrew feel he had joined the big time – the deals, the girls, the plane, the glittering New York world, where he wasn’t seen as a full-grown man still dependent on his mother’s privy purse strings or on the harsh pecking order of the palace”.
This year, in Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, the biographer Andrew Lownie described Mountbatten-Windsor as “easy prey for a rattlesnake like Epstein”. He wrote: “Epstein played Andrew. The prince was a useful idiot who gave him respectability, access to political leaders and business opportunities. He found him easy to exploit.”
Lownie also quoted the US businessman Steven Hoffenberg, a convicted fraudster said to be Epstein’s “mentor”, as saying Andrew was Epstein’s “Super Bowl trophy”.
As the latest tranche of “Epstein files” was released, Mountbatten-Windsor was photographed out riding at Royal Lodge, Windsor. Soon to be evicted from this home, he is due to move to a private house on the Sandringham estate next year – another privilege lost as a result of his ultimately destructive friendship with Epstein and Maxwell.
The former duke has always denied allegations he had sex with Epstein’s employee Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April. He has since faced calls from Democrats in the US Congress to give evidence to a committee investigating Epstein’s activities, but had not replied to the request by the end of their deadline last month.
