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The end of a shameful friendship
Journalist Vicky Ward, who has spent years assiduously chronicling the Jeffrey Epstein saga including this stunning article for The Daily Beast, revealed in a piece for CNN that the friendship between Prince Andrew and Epstein came to a dramatic end in early 2011, when Epstein threatened legal action against Prince Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.
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Ward, citing “interviews with three people with direct knowledge of the events,” says that Epstein took exception to Ferguson’s denunciation of him as a pedophile as she scrambled to distance herself from him after it emerged she had borrowed £15,000 ($24,000) from Epstein to help pay an employee.
On the advice of her publicist, James Henderson, Ferguson gave a mea culpa interview to a London newspaper in which she said, “I abhor pedophilia,” and said she had no knowledge of Epstein’s alleged relationships with under-age girls when she took the money.
Henderson told Ward he then received a “deeply unpleasant” phone call from Epstein, who threatened a defamation lawsuit if a statement was not issued retracting the word “pedophile.”
A barrage of legal threats followed, which Fergie ignored. In a bizarre twist, one of Epstein’s lawyers was the U.K. defamation attorney Paul Tweed, who was photographed golfing with Prince Andrew in Spain recently.
“The Duchess had been so impressed by his tenacity in 2011 she wound up hiring him a few years later,” Ward said.
Royal fashion watch
Meghan and Harry flew to Rome this week to celebrate the wedding of her best friend fashion designer Misha Nonoo to entrepreneur Michael Hess.
It was quite the shindig, with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner also in town; Harry wore a tux, Meghan wore a $13,000 semi-sheer black Valentino dress with strategically applied sparkles. Ivanka wore a flowing peach-colored gown, with so many flowing strands of material on it that anyone nearby had to watch their step, for their safety and hers.
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie were there, as was Karlie Kloss with Joshua Kushner. And Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom looked like they were having the best time, too.
And they’re off
Meghan and Harry missed the after-party, dashing home on Saturday after the wedding to be reunited with their son Archie and pack for their forthcoming tour of Africa.
They’ll be leaving today as a family for a busy 10 days of engagements across the continent, where the focus will be on mental health and female empowerment.
The palace is hoping the big photo-op of the tour will be Harry walking through the former minefields that his mother helped clear in Angola. But the press pack pursuing the Sussexes around the world want one thing above all else: the first clear picture of baby Archie.
This week in royal history
Three years ago, Prince George and Princess Charlotte accompanied the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their official tour of Canada. The couple had visited the country just after their 2011 wedding, but now they had children in tow—maximizing the number of extremely cute photo opportunities.
Sorry, sir
The BBC apologized to Prince Harry this week after screening offensive far-right propaganda threatening him and calling him a “race traitor” for marrying Meghan.
The Guardian reported that one image, which was broadcast and published online in December of last year, depicted Harry with a gun pointed at his head and included blood splatter and a swastika. The image was captioned: “See ya later race traitor.”
Harry’s people said the image raised “serious security concerns” for Harry and “caused his family great distress specifically while his wife was nearly five months pregnant.”
Despite being cleared of wrongdoing by the broadcasting watchdog, the BBC apologized, saying, “Before publishing seriously offensive material we need to be vigilant in balancing the impact on individuals against the wider good which may be served by publication.”
Bang goes the knighthood
Speaking of saying sorry, here is yet another person for David Cameron, the former British prime minister who will go down in history as the idiot who called the Brexit referendum, to add to his lengthy list of those owed apologies; the Queen.
The palace reacted with cold fury this week after Cameron disclosed details of private conversations with her and revealed he urged the Queen to subtly intervene in the Scottish independence referendum.
The Queen obliged, telling a well-wisher at Balmoral who asked about the vote that she hoped “people will think very carefully about the future”. The palace has briefed newspapers of their “displeasure and annoyance” at Cameron’s revelations for which, read: forget about your nomination to the Order of the Garter, pal.
Unanswered questions
In a powerful NBC Dateline interview on Friday, Virginia Roberts Giuffre revealed more details of allegedly having sex with Prince Andrew when she was 17. The prince has said in the past the allegation were “categorically untrue,” but Giuffre’s powerful testimony again places the onus on Andrew to explain himself.
Not helping matters: a report that MI6 is concerned that a disgruntled former Palm Beach deputy sheriff, John Mark Dougan, who had access to the Epstein investigation and now lives in Moscow, may have passed compromising material on Andrew to the Russian authorities.
Dougan denied doing anything of the sort when contacted by The Sunday Times.
