On 12 January 2022, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued a 46-page document in which he “denied in all respects” an application by lawyers representing Prince Andrew to dismiss a civil case of “sexual assault and battery”. Ms. Virginia Louise Giuffre, a 38-year-old mother-of-three, had brought the case under New York State’s Child Victims Act 2019, which extends the statute of limitations in cases of alleged child sex abuse, ensuring that victims are not denied access to the law because of the unduly long time that it may take for the abused to feel empowered to seek justice. The allegations related to three separate occasions of alleged improper sexual contact between the Prince and Ms. Giuffre in 2001, at Ghislaine Maxwell’s mews house in Belgravia (London) after a visit to Tramp nightclub in Mayfair, at Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan (New York City), and during an “orgy” at Epstein’s private island, Little St. James in the US Virgin Islands. Andrew’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler, had unsuccessfully chosen to get the lawsuit dismissed on a technicality, arguing that Ms. Giuffre had agreed to “release, acquit, satisfy, and forever discharge” Jeffrey Epstein and “any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant”, which presumably included Prince Andrew, as part of a $500,000-settlement agreed in 2009.
Judge Kaplan’s decision unleashed a rapid response, leading Buckingham Palace to issue a statement the very next day. After meeting up with her son, the monarch issued the following statement: “With The Queen’s approval and agreement, The Duke of York’s military affiliations and royal patronages have been returned to The Queen, and The Duke will continue to not carry out public duties”. With just one tersely worded sentence, Prince Andrew was permanently excluded from undertaking royal duties in public and lost the right to use the all-important prefix HRH (His Royal Highness) with his name. This process had been set in motion earlier by another statement, issued by the Duke himself on 20 November 2019, in which he said “I have asked Her Majesty if I may step back from public duties for the foreseeable future, and she has given her permission”.
The story begins on 19 February 1960 in Buckingham Palace , with the birth of Andrew Albert Christian Edward, third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and the first child to be born to a reigning monarch since Princess Beatrice in 1857. Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, Andrew soon came to be known as the Queen’s “favourite son”, although you would not expect the monarch to herself either confirm or deny such a description.
Andrew’ education began at home with a governess, and was topped up at Heatherdown Preparatory School in Ascot. He boarded at Gordonstoun School in northern Scotland, following in the footsteps of his father and elder brother, and obtained four A-levels in 1978. He then chose the traditional career path for second sons of the monarchy and embarked upon a military career. Following training at the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in Devon from 1979 to 1978, he served as a helicopter pilot and an instructor and saw action in the Falkland Islands campaign of 1982 before commanding a warship. He attained the rank of Commander before being “released from the active list” in 2001, with the rank of honorary Captain.
In his younger years, blessed with good looks and blue blood, he had no shortage of female attention, some intimate while others merely admired from a distance. You could not hold back an unattached ‘playboy prince’, sometimes referred to as “Randy Andy”, from partaking of the many opportunities that came his way- in the form of models, actresses, socialites, “PR girls”, and other species attracted by power and privilege. Before his marriage, he had a particularly well-reported 18-month fling with American Koo Stark during 1981 to 1982, which ended following revelations of her appearance in erotic films.
Andrew married his childhood acquaintance Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986 in a “fairytale wedding”. On his wedding day, his mother bestowed upon him a handful of titles: Duke of York (in England), Earl of Inverness (in Scotland), and Baron Killyleagh (in Northern Ireland), while keeping Wales out of the lineup. The marriage was short-lived. After producing two daughters-Princesses Beatrice (1988) and Eugenie (1990), the couple separated amicably in 1992, followed by divorce on 10 May 1996. It must be noted that, according to Debretts the marriage failed partly because “her faux pas were magnified and dissected in forensic detail”. Unlike most divorcees, they remained “best friends”, frequently stepping out in public, dining, and holidaying together. Sarah, Duchess of York, even shares the same roof with her ex, at the Grade II-listed Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, which was bequeathed to Andrew by the Queen Mother in 2003. Andrew moved in the following year, only to joined by Sarah in 2008. They also shared ownership of Chalet Helora in the skiing resort of Verbier in Switzerland, which he put up for sale late 2021, in anticipation of forthcoming legal expenses.
A newly divorced Prince was once again free to resume a succession of dalliances with members the fairer sex, whose names and pictures (sometimes provocative) graced the gossip columns and glossy magazines of the day and periodically reappear in contemporary publications. He struck up a particularly strong friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the disgraced publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and she then introduced him to her good friend Jeffrey Epstein. What are now universally considered unhealthy friendships were to lead to Andrew’s downfall. His reputation became muddied through his association with a convicted, and since deceased, paedophile (Jeffrey Epstein) and a convicted sex trafficker (Ghislaine Maxwell). His case was not helped by a clumsy interview with Emily Maitilis on BBC Newsnight in December 2019, when he denied having sweated heavily at dancing at nightclub in the run-up to sex with Ms. Giuffre in London on the grounds of an inability to sweat and of having been at Pizza Express in Woking, Surrey, on the day, rather than in London.
Prince Andrew remains ninth in line of succession to the throne, a Knight of the Garter, an honorary Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy, a rank he was promoted to on his 55th birthday in 2015, as well as an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (since 2013). All other honorary military appointments, which take in the Army, Royal Air Force, and Royal Navy, have been taken away from him. Much earlier, he had to step down from an official position as the British government’s special representative for international trade and investment in July 2011, ten years after he was appointed, due to widespread disapproval of his visit to Epstein in New York in December 2010, shortly after his friend’s release from prison.
In addition to his ceremonial roles, Andrew has lost all of his many patronages. During his heyday as a patron, he held around 230 patronages, almost one for each working day of the year. These included various charities, educational establishments, golf clubs, sailing clubs, and armed services groups. No longer will “air miles Andy” travel the country in the royal helicopter to attend social and sporting events nor fly abroad on his various overseas missions.
The story of Prince Andrew is far from over, and there are many stories yet to be told-in innumerable articles, books, documentaries, interviews, feature films, and the like. As he enters the latest, and most unpleasant, phase of his life, faced with the prospects of a civil lawsuit in an American court, his life story should serve as a cautionary tale to others. No matter how privileged or respectable your background, everything can be easily undone if you chose your friends unwisely and are then enticed down the path of temptation and malpractice.
Ashis Banerjee