Prince Andrew: The Bad Penny Always Turns Up

By Paul Serran

Really bad secrets have a way of chasing people down through life, reappearing when they least expect it. The bad penny always turns up, the British say, originally referring to chipped away and overused coins.

It’s the perfect metaphor for the chipped away, run down currency of the retired Prince Andrew’s reputation, as both a new documentary and newly-released documents increase the pressure on the Duke of York to testify to his alleged crimes connected to the Epstein sex-trafficking ring.

Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied the claims that he had sex three times with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave, the 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre: in London, New York, and the Little St James Island on the Caribbean.

But there is no denying the association, since Ghislaine Maxwell was once a welcome visitor to royal homes, and there’s ample documentation showing her as 1) an overnight guest at Sandringham estate; 2) attending the Dance of the Decades, one of the greatest parties at Windsor Castle, in the summer of 2000; 3) even at the costume ball for his own daughter Princess Beatrice’s 18th birthday, also at Windsor Castle; and 4) she was even at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, where admission is at “Her Majesty’s discretion”.

And on these social occasions — including his daughter Beatrice’s party — where Maxwell was a guest of Andrew, so, too, was Jeffrey Epstein.

Queen Elizabeth was in lockdown with Prince Philip at Windsor Castle when the news broke that Ghislaine Maxwell had been arrested. Her favorite son was about to be pulled back into the vortex. And the good name of the Royal Family being dragged through the mud once again.

It has been an unstoppable crisis, “with every sordid revelation lapping that bit closer to Buckingham Palace”, wrote Richard Kay on the Daily Mail.

Maxwell’s arrest changes everything. It was through her that Andrew was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s her, G-Max, on the background of the infamous photo of ‘Randy Andy’ with his arm around the bare waist of teen Virginia Roberts. A picture taken by Jeffrey Epstein in Ghislaine Maxwell’s Belgravia home. A silver bullet.

In his ‘car-crash’ BBC Newsnight interview that ended his career, Andrew outrageously suggested that the photograph was ‘doctored by specialists’.

But did Her Majesty really believe the Duke’s insinuations that the photo was manipulated?

The decision to strip Andrew of all royal duties and force him to step down — brokered by Prince Charles and Prince William — was the single moment in this crisis when the royals have been proactive.

Yet the Prince kept his friendship with Maxwell, the woman described as “Jeffrey’s pimp”, as late as July 2019!

Andrew was a regular guest at the dinner parties at the Town House of Epstein on the Upper East Side, where she would entertain the rich, the famous and the infamous.

It caused widespread outrage when the Prince appeared with Maxwell at a “pimps and prostitutes” theme party in New York.

And yet, he once dares to ask the Queen’s permission to take Maxwell on an official royal work trip. The permission was not granted.

While Andrew’s reputation may be too chipped away for recovery, Queen Elisabeth, at 94, still has to fight for the very survival of her dynasty.

Does she have blackmail material on the Prince? So, it happened on August 10th that Andrew’s Twitter account has vanished from the official Royal website after shock claims he had sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s “sex slaves”.

The links to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex social media sites also appear to have been quietly removed.

The news comes as Prince Andrew’s accuser, Virginia Roberts, spoke out in documentary series ‘Surviving Jeffrey Epstein‘ which aired in the US last night, and branded him an abuser and “not the prince from the fairytales”.

The Queen reportedly “can’t see a way back” for her favorite son and the royal family have “no plans” to review his position.

Last month, Prince Andrew’s official website was quietly taken down, and while the Duke of York’s Twitter and Instagram accounts remain active, no posts have been shared since he stepped back from his public duties in November 2019.

Royal author Robert Jobson: Andrew will now be fearful that he will be directly implicated in the sordid abuse.

“He keeps protesting his innocence, but [Maxwell’s] arrest has brought everything more sharply into focus. It is certainly a very worrying development for him.”

“She could strike a deal with prosecutors for a lesser sentence in return for implicating others. If she says anything about him – and she is bound to be asked about him – it could implicate him or cause trouble for him.”

“It is long overdue for Prince Andrew to stop making excuses and to stop playing the victim. He should contact the FBI immediately and agree to appear for an interview,” said Epstein Victims’ attorney Gloria Allred.

The new doc series ‘Surviving Jeffrey Epstein‘ features his accuser Virginia Giuffre talking at length about Andrew, who was willing to have sex with a 17-year-old girl after joking that she is just a few years younger than his own daughters.

An entitled royal, allegedly “willing to accept criminal sex with underage women proffered by Jeffrey Epstein, even if the act put him—and, by extension, the integrity of the British royal family—in an incredibly vulnerable position”.

Another Epstein accuser, Lisa Phillips, adds: “I had one very good friend who confided in me about her experience with him,” says Phillips in the series. “She told me that Jeffrey kind of instructed her to go into a room and have sex with Prince Andrew. She told me, ‘Jeffrey isn’t really who he says he is.’”

When Lisa Phillips asked Epstein point-blank about his relationship with Andrew, “He didn’t want to talk about it a lot,” Phillips says, “He just mentioned that he needs to have something on people.”

YES – WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT BLACKMAIL.

According to Epstein ‘lore’, he was careful to collect evidence of his friends’ behind-closed-door sexcapades.

“The stories I kept on hearing were that in every guest bedroom in Jeffrey Epstein’s house, there were hidden cameras,” says journalist Christopher Mason, a longtime friend of Maxwell’s.

“Part of Jeffrey’s ability to manipulate was that he had this video of powerful men having sex with underage girls. And these recordings were held in a safe that Jeffrey was using as a power tool to manipulate wealthy guys to make them do whatever he wanted.”

A honey-trap, collecting Kompromat on people.

“Andrew deserves to be outed. He deserves to be held accountable.” Giuffre adds in the documentary series. “He participated in a sex trafficking operation with one of the most prolific sex trafficking operators in the world in modern time.”

Now, remember how Virginia Giuffre alleges she was trafficked 3 times to the Prince? One was in London, in Maxwell’s apartment – the night of the infamous photo.

Another one, in Epstein’s Manhattan Town House. One of the recently unsealed docs is an unpublished manuscript written by Virginia Giuffre called “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club’”.

In it, Giuffre writes: “He looked me up and down like a shiny new car on display and he was about to take it for a test drive.”

“When Andrew cupped my breast with a doll made in his image, I only giggled away,” she continued.

“Ghislaine wanted to take a picture of the bizarre scene and even got Johanna [Sjoberg] to come sit on his other knee for the snapshot.”

After “many crude jokes,” Giuffre then claims that she was ordered to take the prince to the “dungeon” for an erotic massage.

Sjoberg previously testified to the veracity of this incident in a 2016 deposition.

Virginia Giuffre went on to claim that sex with “foot-licking fetishist” Prince Andrew was “the longest 10 minutes of my life,” according to a new report.

Then, she alleged, “It wasn’t hard to get him wound-up to the point where he just wanted to have the rest of me so we dried off from the cold and retired to my bedchambers for the longest 10 minutes of my life.”

“Moments later and without any real emotional attachment, he burst in ecstasy, leaving me to my own feelings of dismay,” she wrote. “As relieved as I was to see the experience come to pass with him, it was finally sinking in that I would never be anything more than but a muse.”

At the press conference in New York in which the DOJ NYSD prosecutors detailed the allegations Maxwell was facing, they urged the Prince Andrew to come forward.

“We would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk with us, we would like to have the benefit of his statement,” said Audrey Strauss, acting US attorney for the southern district of New York.

Later Strauss repeated: “Our doors remain open, as we previously said, and we would welcome him coming in and giving us an opportunity to hear his statement.”

The key is Federal Attorney Strauss’ use of that innocuous but very special participle phrase: “coming in.” It implies a personal appearance by Andrew, an appearance and an interrogatory bind that the prince and his best advisors will be certain to want to avoid.

Prince Andrew’s “working group” – his senior courtiers charged with crisis management, public relations, and legal counsel – will be burning the midnight oil, in London, to hash out the prince’s “options”.

“The duke’s team remains bewildered given that we have twice communicated with the DOJ in the last month and to date we have had no response,” a source said.

So far, Roberts Giuffre is not part of the new Maxwell case in the NYSD. But superseding indictments are expected, and this may change at any moment.

There are many ways in which Prince Andrew is no longer insulated from the situation, and is probably going to deeply hurt the Windsor’s shaken image.

“Buckingham Palace survives as a sort of formalized über-charity and international better-business-bureau that floats on a delicate matrix of grandfathered-in legal and political structures and, not least, on the grace and favor of public opinion. Not to be crude about it, but the British taxpayer, through the prime minister, has and will have a say on how the monarchy goes about business. It’s this last element, that of public support for the Crown, that has been and will continue to bird-dog Andrew in this matter“. – Guy Martin wrote for Forbes.

The Queen’s and Charles’ swift frog-march of Andrew offstage before Christmas last year was, in hindsight now, a “move that saved the monarchy from greater embarrassment and opprobrium now”.

It was the courtiers’ and the Queen’s only choice. The prince famously claimed in that interview that he would cooperate with U.S. legal authorities “if asked.”

Ghislaine Maxwell will use her wealth to hire excellent lawyers, and she will use her prodigious negotiator’s skills in her dealings with her apparently very well-armed prosecutors.

The case against her is formidable and has clearly taken time to assemble. As in anything that is related to Epstein, there is very little sympathy on the ground.

Maxwell can play hardball and try her luck in court, but the array of charges and the disposition of the situation points to a deal.

More precisely, it points to the exploration of the possibility of a deal. What that possible deal would look like is anybody’s guess at this point.

As a close friend of the accused for many years, and as a man who emailed Maxwell in 2015 for information about his accuser Virginia Roberts, Prince Andrew’s solicitors may want to reconsider the prince’s legal and public relations liabilities, should his old friend Ghislaine find that it is in her interests to talk.

As it turns out, the underage sex with trafficked girls is not the entire sum of his troubles. Whether he was coerced by blackmail or acted in his own volition, seems like the Duke made an effort to help Epstein get a plea deal with the US authorities in the late 2000s.

Two of Epstein’s victims, known only as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, have alleged the convicted pedophile depended on his high-profile friends, including Andrew, to help him secure a reduced sentence from the US attorney in south Florida.

“[They are] seeking documents regarding Epstein’s lobbying efforts to persuade the government to give him a favorable plea arrangement, including efforts on his behalf by Andrew and former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz,” claimed the victims.

“After Epstein signed the non-prosecution agreement, his performance was delayed while he used his significant social and political ‘connections’ to lobby the justice department to obtain a more favorable plea deal.”

Now, with all that on the table, the big question on everybody’s mind is whether Ghislaine Maxwell will collaborate with prosecutors to reduce her sentence that stands up to 35 years of jail, if convicted of all counts.

More specifically, to the subject or this article: will she flip on Prince Andrew?

A woman called Laura Goldman was featured in many vehicles as a GM confidant. She was later shown to be a confidence artist, and an untrustworthy source.

“The only way [Maxwell] can walk is if she gives someone up, but that definitely won’t be Andrew,” Goldman told the UK press. “She is so appreciative that when she first came to New York, the Duke helped to launch her into high society. She always talks about what a true friend he is. She doesn’t see any reason to speak about him to the authorities.”

Many people have since described Goldman as a “charlatan.” “Most of us will not go near her. She’s a complete fantasist,” says one journalist.

Goldman even intimated that she knew Maxwell’s location prior to the arrest. “I wound up with the impression that she wasn’t the real thing,” said knowledgeable reporter Christopher Mason.

A former stockbroker and self-described journalist, Goldman has a checkered and bizarre past, having been criminally charged for harassing and stalking several people.

Goldman fled the US for several years after the feds alleged she attempted to extort millions from a businessman and threaten his children. In court documents from the 1990s, the businessman declared that Goldman was the “most unbelievable pathological liar on the face of the earth.”

A group of Epstein victims, “The Supporters of the Children, Now Adults, who Survived Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell”, released a letter dismissing all the declarations of Goldman regarding the case.

“We cannot allow a person such as Laura Goldman, who has a verifiable history of harassment, to continue to intentionally inflict emotional duress on Epstein and Maxwell’s countless victims. Anything said by Ms. Goldman, as can be seen by the information presented here, is not trustworthy.”

There has surfaced, though, a more knowledgeable perspective on whether Ghislaine Maxwell would turn on her “friend” Andrew.

“Maxwell will talk to keep herself out of jail, and may throw Prince Andrew under the bus by handing over ‘secret video footage'”, prince Andrew’s cousin claims.

Christina Oxenberg told The Sun that Ghislaine once ‘boasted’ to her about procuring women for the monster and also of their habit of recording their famous pals – and Oxenberg says she is willing to testify in court.

“I think she thinks she can get out, obviously she’s planning on trading [information]. [Andrew] is one of many Johns, all of whom were video-taped by Ghislaine,” said Christina Oxenberg, who feels those videos who could be Maxwell’s “get-out-of-jail-free-cards.”

“He is not a victim here, but Ghislaine was never his friend, she was taping him,” Christina said. “Friends don’t tape friends.

“He may be thick as a plank, but she’s a depraved predatory child sex abuser – big difference.”

The bad penny always turns up.

It’s high time for Randy Andy to face the music for his alleged criminal choices. The world is changing, and the Windsor dynasty is not sheltered from the consequences of this change, anymore.

 

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