As more gushing emails emerge, Sarah Ferguson is once again rethinking her ‘supreme’ friendship with the super-rich sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
Last night I found an incredible archive interview with Jeffrey Epstein, conducted by the New York Times on the eve of his surrendering himself to his 2008 prison sentence. “He said he has taken steps to make sure the same thing never happens again,” the NYT relates. (Spoiler: it happened again.) “For starters, Mr Epstein has hired a full-time male masseur (the man happens to be a former Ultimate Fighting champion). He has also organised what he calls a board of directors of friends to counsel him on his behaviour.”
Dearie me. Maybe that’s what his friend Prince Andrew was doing in the famous photo of them walking in Central Park two years later, bundled up against the New York cold and an approaching tornado of sex-abuse allegations? Although, hang on, because that was the four-day house visit that Andrew said he’d made to break off contact for ever with Epstein. “I took the decision that I had to show leadership,” he boasted to Emily Maitlis, “and I had to go and tell him: that’s it.” As most people wondered of the dim-witted old sleazebucket when that Newsnight interview came out: could you not have done it on the phone instead? But then, of course he couldn’t, because this was not actually the end of contact at all. An email from a few months later has already surfaced, sent from Epstein to what the UK Financial Conduct Authority redact as a “member of the British royal family”, looking to set up a meeting between said royal and the since-disgraced former Barclays boss Jes Staley. The response from the “member of the British royal family” was: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!” Look, maybe it was Princess Anne.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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