The youngest son of Queen Elizabeth, brother of King Charles II, was accused of sexual assault in 2019. Prince Andrew reached a financial agreement with the woman who claims to be the victim, in February 2022.
Prince Andrew, considered a military hero for his involvement in the Falklands War in 1982, will he be an outcast until the end of his days? The death of Queen Elizabeth II, beyond the emotion aroused, acts on the royal family as an indicator of popularity. Andrew, brother of King Charles III, was taken to task by a person present in Edinburgh, during the funeral procession organized in Edinburgh on September 12. During the parade, as Prince Andrew walked behind his mother’s coffin, a man yelled, “Andrew you are an old pervert.” An intervention which earned its author to be arrested by the police, but which also went around the world, on video, on social networks. This incident is a reminder that in British public opinion, Prince Andrew is stamped with the seal of infamy.
What are the charges against Prince Andrew?
The one who has long been presented as the “favorite son of the queen” found himself involved in a scandal of sexual assault due to his links with Jeffrey Epstein. One of the billionaire’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre also accused Prince Andrew of having had sex with her, for pay, when she was only 17 at the time of the incident, in 2001, on Epstein’s private Caribbean island, but also at London and in New York. Prince Andrew has always disputed the facts, but the successive revelations about the sex trafficking orchestrated and organized for years by Jeffrey Epstein have given considerable depth to these accusations.
A financial agreement with Virginia Giuffre to avoid a lawsuit
In February 2022, legal proceedings against Prince Andrew were dropped, following a financial agreement. “Virginia Giuffre and Prince Andrew have reached an amicable settlement”
, Ms. Giuffre’s lawyer had publicly announced, without the terms of the contract being revealed. The court document unveiled at the time simply stated that Prince Andrew “intends to make a significant donation to Virginia Giuffre’s organization which supports victims’ rights”. Also written in the same document: “Prince Andrew never intended to disparage Ms Giuffre, and he acknowledges that she suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unjust public attacks”. By this step, Prince Andrew then avoided the holding of a trial, which would have considerably embarrassed the royal family. There is also no mention anywhere of regrets concerning a misconduct on his part with Virginia Giuffre.
Andrew embroiled in Epstein case
If Prince Andrew is also unpopular, it is in particular for the way he defended Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. He has been widely criticized for a lack of empathy towards Epstein’s victims, after having assured no ever “suspected” sexual abuse by his friend. Faced with the media storm, the prince had chosen to withdraw from public life and no longer perform his official duties. “It has become clear to me in recent days that the circumstances of my past association with Jeffrey Epstein have become a major disruption to my family’s work and the [mien]”, he wrote in an official statement in 2019. A resignation which had led to the transfer of his office from Buckingham Palace and his team to his private home in Windsor. Lawyers for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, accused of child prostitution minor girls, had also summoned Prince Andrew to testify on the activities of the American billionaire, who committed suicide in prison in August 2019.
A failed interview with the BBC
In November 2019, Prince Andrew wanted to extinguish the fire of the Epstein affair by giving an interview to the BBC. This was deemed catastrophic by the British press. Many observers criticized him for not seeming “aware of the seriousness of the matter, laughing and smiling during the interview”, reported the British daily at the time. The Guardian. Prince Andrew’s arguments had also been widely questioned or mocked by the press, starting with the alibi invoked by the seventh heir to the Crown. The latter had indeed claimed to be in a restaurant of the Pizza Express chain, in Woking, south London, at the time of the facts of which he is accused. Prince Andrew then launched into muddled explanations of Virginia Roberts’ description of him sweating profusely on the dance floor of a London club in 2001. “Impossible”, according to Prince Charles’ brother, in due to an illness linked to an adrenaline rush during the Falklands War in 1982, where he was a helicopter pilot.