Could this be the end for Andrew, the former prince? | 60 Minutes Australia

Coming up...

You met Virginia Roberts, dined with her, danced with her in Tramp.

That's how powerful men shut down vulnerable women.

The world is not amused.

Do you expect more shocking emails?

We've only got the tip of the iceberg. The end of disgraced royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's life of entitlement.

I'd like to see the police do the right thing.

That's next on 60 Minutes.

What shame Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has brought upon the royal family. His association with now dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and accomplice Glenn Maxwell was clearly beyond the pale. But even worse, blinded by his own arrogance, he thought he could lie his way out of damning accusations made by Virginia Dufresne,

that she was sex traffic to him when she was just 17. In the end, the damage Andrew was inflicting on the monarchy was so immense, King Charles had no option but to strip his brother of all his titles and honours, including Prince. Adding to Andrew's humiliation, he's being evicted from his royal mansion.

Many are demanding his next home be a prison cell.

Load!

Off!

All the signs were there. Time was up for the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. An embarrassment to be ignored by his family until they no longer could.

His Majesty the King has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.

He will only be known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The King has finally acted, throwing his brother out of his rent-free mansion, but much more significantly and painfully for the pompous royal, he has been stripped of his prized Prince title and will now be simply known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. But according to prominent biographer Andrew Lowney, the public is demanding even more.

Well, we're at a tipping point. Public opinion is rather like the death of Diana, is way ahead of the palace. And I think they want him to be investigated, to be charged, and I think they would like him to be detained at His Majesty's pleasure.

The King's extraordinary move follows damning revelations of bad behaviour which have come from Andrew himself. In his own words, in leaked emails, he has made clear his role in the Epstein sex scandal, exposing himself as a liar and a bully who was out to discredit Virginia Dufresne, the brave woman who told the world that as a 17-year old, she'd been repeatedly delivered to him for sex. Virginia took her own life in April this year. But when we met in 2019,

she was determined to reveal the ex-prince's involvement in the evil web spun by the now dead serial sex abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, and his accomplice convicted British socialite Glenn Maxwell I

you know was woken up by Glenn in the morning and told I was gonna meet a prince and we went shopping and and Prince Andrew came over and then we went to Club Tramp and he danced with me and he's a horrific dancer, by the way, and he sweats a lot and he smells funny.

And then we get in the car and Andrew's not in the car with us, he's in the car behind us with his security guards and Gielin tells me in the car that I have to do what I do for Jeffrey for Prince Andrew and that's when I learned what was going to happen.

How many times were you trafficked to him?

Three times.

Quite often, if I was in the United States-

Andrew has always denied the allegations, most spectacularly in 2019, in this interview with Emily Maitlis from the BBC's Newsnight.

She says she met you in 2001. She says she dined with you, danced with you at Tramp nightclub in London. She went on to have sex with you in a house in Belgravia belonging to Gerlen Maxwell, your friend. Your response?

I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady. None whatsoever.

You don't remember meeting her?

No.

But unfortunately for Andrew, Virginia had kept what has become one of the most recognisable and contested photos in the world. His spin was that it was a fake.

But it's possible that it was you with your arm out.

That's me, but whether that's my hand or whether that's the position, I don't, I have simply no recollection of a photograph ever being taken.

I know it's real, and he needs to stop with all these lame excuses. We're sick of hearing it. This is a real photo.

Taken by Jeffrey Epstein.

Taken by Jeffrey Epstein, and there's Ghislaine Maxwell. There's the flash. That's me at 17. And that's Prince Andrew with his chubby fingers.

And we know what happened next.

And that's right before I was abused by him.

Sensationally, what has now come to light was an attempt by the former prince to smear Virginia's credibility on the eve of that photo first being published in 2011. In a move that is potentially illegal, Andrew asked one of his personal protection officers to dig up dirt on Virginia. A recently leaked email showed he told the Queen's then Deputy

Press Secretary that he had given Virginia's date of birth and confidential social security number to the officer to investigate her. In her continued scrutiny of Andrew, journalist Emily Maitlis sees it as an intimidation tactic. What was that like to learn?

Horrifying. I mean, it's horrifying, isn't it? That's how you do it. That's how powerful men shut down vulnerable women. And it's normally rich versus poor.

And this is just another example of the sort of nastiness, I suppose, of Andrew.

How much trouble do you think he's in? Yes, I think Andrew should be in big trouble. I mean, this is. How much trouble do you think he's in?

Yes, I think Andrew should be in big trouble. I mean, this is an offence here. There's problems under the Data Protection Act, a malfeasance in a public conduct. He's placed as protection officer, paid for by the taxpayers in a difficult position.

And we need to discover whether that request was passed up, up the chain of command at the police or within the palace, whether actually he did make investigations. I suspect he did.

His character is at rock bottom.

Have you met him?

Yes.

And how did you find him?

I found him abrasive, rude and arrogant.

Dai Davies is now retired, living the quiet life in Wales. He was the former head of Scotland Yard's Royal Protection Command. As disappointing as his dealings were with Andrew, he was still shocked to learn the Royal would ask a police officer to break the law.

Do you believe that the Metropolitan Police, the authorities today, have the courage and tenacity to follow this through if in fact the allegation is proven?

Well yes, I would hope they've got no option really because the public clamour for clarification as to this is overwhelming and I don't think on this occasion the press would let it go. And if there's evidence he should be questioned as with anyone else under caution and if there's evidence then he should be prosecuted.

Could that mean jail?

Well if he was found guilty that's the end option, yes.

And another shocking detail has emerged which underlines Andrew's preparedness to lie.

I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady. None whatsoever.

You don't remember meeting her?

No.

But in Entitled, the unauthorised biography of the disgraced royal, Andrew Lowney claims to have proof that not only did he meet Virginia, he selected her. Will you reveal in your book that Andrew actually chose Virginia from a series of photos that Glenn Maxwell had sent him?

Yes, from two different sources. People have seen basically this book of photographs that would be circulated and people would choose who they wanted to meet. And it makes sense. I mean, it's not a set menu, shall we say, and it was a la carte and he was able to decide what he wanted. And I think it's pretty sorted.

I mean, this poor 17-year-old ordered, as you might order, a takeaway.

As we know, it was Andrew's decision to stay with the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in New York in 2010 that has long haunted him. The visit came after the convicted child sex offender was released from 13 months in jail in 2009. Andrew has claimed he felt it was necessary and honourable to end his friendship with the pedophile in person. In 2010, Andrew is seen peeking around the corner from the Epstein mansion here in New York.

This was a man breaking off relations with Jeffrey Epstein, apparently.

I'm sorry, I'm calling BS on that one. You don't travel halfway around the world to break up with a friend. You don't. I mean, he's an idiot for even thinking that anyone buys that story.

I don't buy it. Not for one second. He wasn't there to break up with Jeffrey Epstein.

And we had an opportunity to go for a walk in the park.

But in his bombshell interview with Emily Maitlis, Andrew was adamant the friendship ended forever, that trip, on December the 5th, 2010, after a heart to heart in Central Park.

By mutual agreement during that walk in the park, we decided that we would part company and I left, I think it was the next day. And to this day, I never had any contact with him from that day forward.

That was a lie. Leaked emails between Epstein and Andrew show contact continued between the pair until at least March the following year. The most disturbing was sent by Andrew to Epstein the day after the Virginia Dufresne

photograph was published. In it, Andrew chummily offers his support. It reads, It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise keep in close touch and we'll play some more soon.

We're in this together. Let's play some more soon. I can see there are a million different explanations for what that playing might mean if you were a sportsman. Who knows? But in the context of an email to a convicted paedophile, it makes your stomach go.

It is just a phrase that you cannot get out of your head. How do you think that has affected public opinion in terms of, well, maybe giving him the benefit of the doubt after your interview, and now being confronted with an email, which shows that he was clearly lying. But I think the response of the public was already ahead,

certainly of us at Newsnight, certainly of where the palace was, and even of our sort of parliamentarians.

I think people felt pretty shocked by what they saw.

But what they saw was only the beginning.

Coming up, how depraved can one royal be? shocked by what they saw. But what they saw was only the beginning.

Coming up, how depraved can one royal be?

Epstein described Andrew as the only person he's found that's more perverted than I am. He called him the King of Kink.

It could well be the biggest modern royal scandal yet. The former Prince Andrew caught in a lie over his continued friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his seeming attempts to smear the credibility of sex abuse victim Virginia Dufresne. Virginia took her own life in April this year, but as she wrote in her explosive,

posthumously released memoir, and as she claimed to me in 2019, as a 17-year-old, she had been trafficked to Andrew three times. The third time that you encountered Prince Andrew, were you alone with him?

Was it just you and him at that time?

No, there were a lot of younger girls with us, and it was very shocking.

On this occasion, Virginia says she was joined by Epstein and eight other girls to have sex with the royal. And when you say younger girls, what age were they?

I don't know, because beyond they couldn't speak English, we weren't really allowed to talk to each other. That was just one of Geoffrey's many rules. But they looked young, they looked between 16 to 20.

Epstein described Andrew as the only person he's found that's more perverted than I am. He called him the King of Kink.

Along with Virginia's allegation of sex trafficking, Andrew Lowney, who has written the Royal's unauthorised biography, claims to have laid bare other potential crimes, almost all driven by Andrew's hunger for cash.

There was a case for his basically financial corruption, the way that he abused his position as the Special Representative for Trade and Investment between 2001 and 2011, he was helping his business chums do business, for example, in China and the Middle East,

and he was himself doing business on his own behalf. And I think there's a strong case there for him to be investigated, charged, and I believe he should be convicted.

Sarah Ferguson and the former prince may be divorced but according to Andrew Lowney they are united in their questionable grabs for money. Fergie's simpering emails asking Epstein for a loan and vowing she was on the sex offenders team exposes the depth of the royal couple's indebtedness to him and their continued and shameless contact long after they claimed to have ended the friendship.

How much do you believe she was in debt to him?

I believe it's about two million. I mean, both Epstein and Sarah Ferguson don't deal in small amounts, but I've got two very good sources separately have said the same figure of two

million. Which nickname?

Randy Andy.

The young dashing prince believed to have been the Queen's favoured child, unencumbered by boundaries or consequences, has turned a life of promise into a train wreck. This is a statement from their family, which says, today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage.

Virginia Dufresne's brother, Sky Roberts, and sister-in-law, Amanda, welcome Andrew's latest humiliation, but believe it's well overdue.

I know that he's a royal by blood, but he's not a royal by his actions. This is just the first start. This is affirmation for Virginia. This is affirmation to say she was a truth teller, but it's not necessarily justice. Justice would be taking the next step and putting him where he needs to go, which is behind bars.

So that's what you want to see, that's justice, that he goes to jail.

Anybody who is being implicated in this coverup, whether it's a royal coverup or a US coverup, needs to be put where they need to go, which is behind bars.

Andrew's public downfall started in 2019, with his pompous and at times preposterous responses to Emily Maitlis's extraordinary interview for the BBC.

She described dancing with you and you profusely sweating and that she went on to have baths possibly.

There's a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don't sweat or I didn't sweat at the time. And then there was this unlikely alibi. With the children I'd taken Beatrice to a pizza express in Woking for a party at a, I suppose, sort of four, five in the afternoon.

Why would you remember that so specifically?

Because going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do.

I do have to ask you, how did you maintain your composure? You are thinking of sweating, I'm thinking of working. How did you sit there and listen to that with

such a straight face? Yeah, sweating and working. I've never heard it put quite so concisely. But you know, I was always really aware Tara Tara, that at the heart was, like, a massively serious allegation. And so I think I had to keep my head in that sort of quite square space, what's ahead.

We were just another toy to be passed around. And that's what they did. That's what you felt from Prince Andrew, that you were a toy? I wasn't even I wasn't even in the category of being a human being. I was just a toy to be used. No one knows better how serious or dark the allegations are than Virginia herself. She shares them in her memoir, not just those against Andrew, but also her harrowing encounters with others, including one of the world's most powerful,

and as it turns out, violent men at the time.

I would be trafficked to somebody who physically, mentally, and sexually abuses you to the point where you don't think you're gonna live, and then you tell Epstein about it, and he abuses you to the point where you don't think you're gonna live and then you tell Epstein about it and he sends you back.

When are you okay to go on this show?

Yeah I'm just getting that one out.

So there was real fear for your own life?

Yeah.

Yeah there were times I didn't think I was gonna live and

there was times I didn't want to live. In 2019, Virginia also revealed her abuse started well before she met Epstein, at the hands of a family friend when she was just seven. What she did not say then was that her own father also molested her as a child. A new allegation made in her memoir and strongly denied by him.

It was very, very hurtful to read it. I believe my sister. That's the thing, I believe her, we believe her, we've always believed her. I mean, he knows what he did. This is the first time he's even hearing me

speak about this, Tara. And like, this is the first time he will even know that I'm coming up against him in some ways and saying, you know what? No, I believe her.

I can't imagine how difficult it is for you. I mean, but what do you believe should happen to your father?

For me to not come out and tell you the same thing should happen to him that should have happened to Prince Andrew would be remiss of me as a basic human being. And it's so hard to say as his son, as his child, to say, you know what? You should be publicly shamed.

You should be shameful of what you did.

How poignant is it that there does seem to be this groundswell of belief in what Virginia had to say and anger at what she had to suffer. How sad is it that that is being experienced after her death?

Part of us just wanted to call her and tell her that the truth is out for you to see, and the world believes you when they didn't believe you before. And that is just so bittersweet. And there is this chapter in the book where she says, I just want to make a small dent in this huge world.

And when all these things came to surface with Prince Andrew, I wanted to tell her, man, you broke it. You broke the system. And it's such a beautiful thing and you just made the biggest impact.

A big dent not a small dent.

A huge dent.

Up next, with nowhere left to hide, will the disgraced royal make a run for it? Do you really think that Andrew will flee? That he'll leave the country?

He has consistently been caught lying.

The public are very, very angry.

The scandal of Prince Andrew just keeps rolling on and on.

Over the past week, the public outrage against Andrew was so intense, the Crown could no longer ignore it.

The scale of the damage, that it's hard to stop calling him Prince Andrew,

that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been inflicted...

He was finally evicted from his rent-free mansion and in the ultimate humiliation for a royal, stripped of his title as Prince. But there may yet be worse to come.

Well, I think Andrew is still in denial. I think he feels hard done by. He cannot understand, you know, why everyone's picking on him because he feels so entitled.

Entitled is the name Andrew Lowney gave to his unauthorised biography of the discredited former Prince. The writer's deep insights gleaned from 300 people prepared to blow the whistle on the disastrous royal.

No-one in the royal family likes him. He's made a lot of enemies on the way up. I don't think anyone in the palace likes him. So I can't think he's going to be left to hang out to dry.

The future for Andrew could become even more dire, with his role in the Epstein sex scandal leading to potential criminal charges. At the heart of this latest crisis are these damning emails that prove Andrew lied when he claimed he'd cut off all contact with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2010,

and that he engineered a smear campaign against Virginia Dufresne. Andrew Lowney is in no doubt who's behind the release of the explosive emails.

Andrew never really leaves the news, but there's been a sort of tsunami of coverage over the last couple of weeks, and this is largely due to leaked emails that have come, I think, from Ghislaine Maxwell.

Why do you believe Ghislaine Maxwell is leaking these emails? Aren't they great mates?

I think Ghislaine Maxwell is still keen to get her pardon or to get some sort of cushy life. I think she clearly was friends with Andrew, I mean, they're former lovers. But I think she's doing her own survival at the moment. And if that requires bringing Andrew down, then that's fine.

So by bringing Andrew down, she's protecting Donald Trump in some way? I mean, is that the motivation?

Yes, I think Donald Trump is worried about what Andrew might say. There's a lot of discrediting of Andrew in order to avoid any sort of scrutiny elsewhere. And this, I think, is very much a mark by Ghislaine to earn some brownie points with Donald Trump.

It's an intriguing and entangled web, but at its core, this latest revelation regarding the smear campaign could constitute serious criminality according to former head of Scotland Yard's Royal Protection Command, Dai Davies.

It would be a felony to obtain unlawfully those information or for somebody to pass them on would again be a breach of the law. So criminality has to be something that the Metropolitan Police, on this occasion, can't shy away from.

The stench around his character seems now finally to be unbearable to the British public. Is that a fair assessment?

I think they want answers. I think they want justice and I think they want justice, and I think they want both the government and the royal family to actually totally distance themselves from this individual along with his wife.

Potentially, this could be the most serious legal trouble the rogue royal has found himself in. So much so, Andrew Lowney believes he would now be making contingency plans to go into exile.

He may need to go somewhere where there's no extradition treaty for example with Britain.

Do you really think that Andrew will flee? That he'll leave the country?

Well I think he will go somewhere where the jurisdiction can't reach him if it gets to that stage.

Like where? Where do you think?

Well, the Middle East is the obvious place. He's been offered a palace in Abu Dhabi. He has a lot of protectors and friends there. I mean, his great play place was Thailand. That's another option. That's where he used to go and have fun.

Again, a very traditional society in many ways where he would be protected. In your book, you make the claim that in Thailand,

not only did Andrew enjoy the company of young women, but that he enjoyed the company of effeminate young men.

Yes, I mean, you know, there have been long rumours about his bisexuality. I got a huge file of these stories from various sources. The problem, I didn't put them into the book, apart from the little piece about the ladyboys in Thailand, because I didn't have double sources. I mean, there's clearly nothing wrong with bisexuality, but it's clearly another secret

that he's been hiding. Sadly, Virginia Dufresne is not here to see the momentum of support her allegations have created, the enormous change she has made. She took her own life on her property in Australia earlier this year. But it's not the end. For Andrew Lowney, the friendship between the dead financier, the former prince and Fergie is still to be fully exposed and the ultimate downfall is yet to come. Do you expect more shocking emails to emerge?

Yes, I do. I mean, you know, we've only got, I think, just the tip of the iceberg of what's available. I mean, the Epstein files are thousands and thousands of pages, but I think other people will come forward, witnesses, there'll be other sealed depositions which will be unsealed.

So this is only the beginning of the end for this couple. Thanks for watching 60 Minutes Australia. Subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week. And don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 Minutes on 9now.com.au And don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 Minutes on 9now.com.au and the 9Now app.