Thursday, March 28

Royals anxiously await the consequences of Prince Andrew’s misfortune | Prince Andrew


Prince Andrew, Duke of York, KG, GCVO, CD, ADC, will turn 62 next month. The age when a man is expected to cease to be a cause for concern and shame to his parents is past. And yet Andrew, who is said to be the queen’s favorite son, has exposed his mother to the greatest threat to the reputation of the royal family in memory.

While awaiting the decision of a New York judge, Lewis Kaplan, in the sexual assault case brought by Virginia Giuffre, the prince finds himself in the deeply unedifying position of trying to evade court with a secret silencing agreement reached by his deceased friend and condemned. sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

The agreement, signed in 2009, stated that in exchange for being paid $ 500,000, Giuffre, later using her Roberts maiden name, would “release … and fire forever … the second parties and anyone else or entity that could have been included as a potential defendant … of any and all actions and actions of Virginia Roberts, including state or federal causes and causes of action ”.

Giuffre maintains that in 2001, when she was 17, she was trafficked by Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell into having sex with the prince on three occasions, one at Maxwell’s home in Belgravia, where the infamous photograph of her was taken with him. then 42. The one-year-old prince’s hand around his waist, on the second occasion at Epstein’s mansion in New York and finally on Epstein’s private island, Little St James in the United States Virgin Islands, with a group of other girls. The prince denies all the accusations and says that he does not remember meeting Giuffre.

The prince’s lawyers have taken an aggressive approach to protecting their client. They first argued that the subpoena had not been properly served, then tried to dismiss the case on the grounds that Giuffre does not live in the US.

They now seek their client’s salvation with the sad fact that he qualifies as a potential defendant in any Epstein-related sexual abuse case. In other words, it appears that his possible guilt is being used as a defense.

Even if this loophole works and Kaplan dismisses the case, it will be a result that will not erase the prince’s name, which his friends insist is his main target. Instead, added to all those letters that come after your title, there will be a toxic question mark.

And that’s the best scenario for the prince. If, instead, Kaplan gives the go-ahead for the case to be heard, then the prince would be forced to make a statement and then appear in court in the fall. In theory, you could refuse to do either, but again the optics would be disastrous. However, if he went to court, a daily diet of sordid details would be offered to the world’s media. And should he lose the case, courtiers suggest he may no longer be able to travel internationally for fear of criminal extradition.

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As royal expert and author Robert Lacey puts it: “The prospect of Virginia Giuffre’s allegations against a high-ranking member of the Windsors being aired in court and made known around the world is simply impossible to see from the point of view of the royal family, and I’m pretty sure there would be some settlement. “

Given that Giuffre has waited more than 20 years for the damage he says he was done to be recognized, such a deal would presumably involve a large financial figure, raising the question of who will pay for it. The prince has spent most of his adult life flirting with the super-rich, precisely because he himself lacks that much money. So again his mother, who is believed to have financed his defense, would be his benefactress. That brings to light the controversial question of whether her estate is private or a product of her position as head of state and therefore subject to some form of taxpayer oversight.

The royalists insist that their private wealth and their public administration are completely separate things, but any settlement paid for by the Queen would provide ballistic ammunition for the Republicans. What seems extraordinary is that this conclusion has grown ever closer for more than a decade, and the prince, and all those to whom he has repeatedly assured his innocence, have been frozen in a state of denial, only hoping to that everything disappears. .

Catherine Mayer, author of a biography of Prince Charles and co-founder of the Women’s Equality party, says Buckingham Palace did “a very stupid thing” when the scandal first surfaced in 2011.

Shortly after he was photographed with Epstein in 2010 walking through Central Park, New York, after the American was released from prison on charges of obtaining a minor for prostitution, Andrew was removed from his post as an international trade envoy and reassigned to others. affairs, including as a royal business guru with the Pitch @ Palace initiative. Mayer believes the decision was symptomatic of a desire to sidestep the problem rather than confront it.

“The whole story is a real tragedy for all the lives it has ruined,” he says. “But it also has a soap opera quality where you see characters ignoring things, trying to cover them up with the belief that things will get better, and you, as a viewer, know that they are going to get worse. I’ve had that feeling watching this. “

One problem, Mayer says, is that there hasn’t been a comprehensive strategy across the royal family on what to do. Although its members speak of the family as “the company,” giving the idea of ​​a disciplined business entity, this, says Mayer, is a misconception.

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Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001.
Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001. Photograph: Rex / Shutterstock

“It has always been, and increasingly in recent years, not an institution, but a series of institutions or courts and households that are frequently in conflict with each other,” he says. Royal observers note that staff working for Prince Charles and Prince William have reported against Andrew. A mixture of the queen’s protective demeanor, the wary exasperation of other royal families, and Andrew’s stubborn resistance to good advice, they left him to forge his own ad hoc strategy. It resulted in his fateful decision to expose his version of events in excruciating November 2019. News night interview with Emily Maitlis.

As a textbook example of how not to do damage limitation, it is unlikely to be exceeded any time soon. “You saw how completely free he is from outside reality,” says Mayer.

Looking back on that disastrously revealing encounter, it is remarkable how often the prince used Maxwell to try to put some distance between himself and Epstein (who welcomed Andrew on many occasions and gave large sums of money to his ex-wife. , Sarah Ferguson, and owned 16 separate phone numbers for the prince). At one point, he describes the financier as a “plus one.”

But now that Maxwell herself has been convicted of sex trafficking of a minor, among other serious charges, the prince has no one to bear with his poor judgment of character. Amid a catalog of escapes and failed recollections, his only consistent line of defense is that he was unaware of anything untoward happening in any of the Epstein or Maxwell homes he stayed in. For Lacey, among many other observers, this is simply not a credible proposition.

“She was associated for 10 years with a couple whose lifestyle revolved around Epstein’s sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and underage girls, some of them trafficked by Maxwell. The frankness of this predatory way of life was seemingly inescapable. What do you imagine when you travel on a private plane nicknamed ‘Lolita Express’? And then you invite these degenerates to stay at Balmoral?

When Maitlis challenged him for his apparent blindness, the prince gave an explanation that Mayer sees as self-accusation rather than exoneration. Sure enough, he said that he lived among servants all the time and that he was used to not paying attention to them, even, presumably, if they were scantily clad teenagers.

“He shows his extraordinary arrogance and disconnection,” says Mayer, “and inadvertently spoke a truth that is deeply damaging to him and to the institution as a whole.” In fact, his brusque manner with the servants is well documented. A high-ranking lackey once told a reporter working undercover at Buckingham Palace that upon waking the prince “the answer can easily be ‘fuck you’ like good morning.”

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Of course, Andrew would not be the first obnoxious royal, nor the first dissolute prince. The history of the institution is full of rude characters. But now we are living in the third decade of the 21st century, in a time of transition not only for the royal family, as it prepares for the prospect of a new monarch, but for society at large.

Ten years ago, in the days before # MeToo, a movie mogul like Harvey Weinstein could terrorize and abuse women with impunity. His friend Epstein practically got away with rape and sex trafficking thanks to the political influence he was able to wield.

And in 2011 it may well have seemed that Giuffre’s allegations against Andrew were destined to remain the outlandish cry of an inconsequential person, an unprovable rumor that would fade along with all the other neglected claims against the rich and powerful.

Even a photograph taken inside Maxwell’s home could be dismissed as fake, although how could a young girl gain access to a picture of the prince that no one else has seen to put in a mock photo?

Prince Andrew's November 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
Prince Andrew’s November 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis. Photograph: BBC

It never squared, and as time goes by, trying to get away from that eerie scene at your friend’s house seems more and more like a desperate tactic. Just as the prince’s claim that he stayed with Epstein for four days to tell him that he could no longer be his friend out of a sense of “honor” was always implausible and miserably selfish.

It seems unlikely after all these years that the prince will change his story, and if there is an agreement, it will certainly come with the non-acceptance of any personal responsibility. However, this is undoubtedly a decisive case. It’s hard to imagine that any member of royalty will once again enjoy the indulgence that has accompanied Andrew around the world.

Although the monarchy will survive this current crisis, it is very possible that it will do so in a more aerodynamic version with fewer passengers. The days when grown-up playboys traded in the family name in exchange for paid company and rewards to ex-wives should be numbered. And if they are, it will be largely due to the efforts of a group of women of largely humble origins who refused to back down from their abusers.

“I hope to vindicate my rights as an innocent victim and seek all available remedies,” Giuffre said seven years ago. “I’m not going to be intimidated into being silent again.”

As even Prince Andrew would have to admit, he certainly hasn’t allowed that to happen.


www.theguardian.com

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