The decision to end the link with the duchess follows the publication of an email from her to Epstein in 2011, which appears to have been sent after she had publicly broken off contact with him.
The email appeared to privately apologise for her public rejection of Epstein, saying: “You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.”
That seemed to contradict her earlier public denunciation of Epstein, in which she had said her involvement with him had been a “gigantic error of judgement” and that: “What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.
A spokesperson for the duchess said her subsequent email to Epstein, describing him as a friend, had been sent because she was trying to counter a threat from him to sue her for defamation – and that she still really regretted any association with him.
The duchess became patron of the charity in 2018 and had visited one of its hospices.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.bbc.co.uk ’
