EDITORIAL
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein proves costly
The phrase “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion” attributed to the Roman general Julius Caesar when he divorced his wife Pompeia after a scandal generally means that people closely associated with the public office must avoid not only actual wrongdoing but also situations that could create the appearance of impropriety.
The recent arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the third child and second son of late Queen Elizabeth II and the younger brother of King Charles III, by the British police on suspicion of misconduct in public office, has been a disgrace to the monarchy. In fact, the arrest makes him the first member of the British royal family detained by the police in hundreds of years. We need to go back to the English Civil War to find another royal who was taken into custody, before Andrew. King Charles I was accused of treason during the English Civil War, was arrested in 1649, tried and publicly executed.
Although Andrew was subsequently released under investigation by the police after spending much of his 66th birthday in custody, he did become the first senior British royal in modern history to face arrest. The former prince was questioned by the detectives from Thames Valley Police about his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He, however, consistently and strenuously denied any wrongdoing.
Andrew, who pursued a military career serving for 22 years in the Royal Navy, and even flew helicopters in combat during the 1982 Falklands War, had later spent a decade as a UK trade envoy between 2001 and 2011. It is this decade that is under renewed scrutiny due to revelations about his long-term friendship with Epstein, who was jailed in 2008 for child sex offences.
In January 2026, the US Department of Justice released more than three million Epstein-related documents, including emails from Mountbatten-Windsor to Epstein. Some material did suggest Andrew sharing official reports from a 2010 Southeast Asia trade trip with the American financier. Following the disclosure of Epstein files, King Charles asked his brother to leave the Windsor property on February 2 and had to move out to the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.
The former prince first became publicly linked to Epstein in the early 2000s. The two were even photographed together on several occasions, including in New York in 2010, after Epstein had already served a jail sentence in Florida for child sex offences. However, it is not only allegations of misconduct in public office that are hounding Andrew. In 2021, Virginia Giuffre sued Andrew in the US court alleging that she was forced to have several sexual encounters with him in the early 2000s at the age of 17, after being sex trafficked by Epstein. Finally, both parties reached an out-of-court financial settlement in February 2022, and the case was dismissed in March 2022 without going to trial. Andrew admitted no liability in the settlement.
In a bizarre turn of events, Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025, while Andrew was stripped of his royal titles by his brother, King Charles III. Giuffre’s family responding to Andrew arrest said that “he was never a prince”. A conviction for the particular offence, which is investigated by the UK police, carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Andrew in police custody is an embarrassing situation for the royal family. Sadly, it is also culmination towards slow descent into disgrace for the former prince, who was the favourite son of his late mother Queen Elizabeth II.
