NPR’s Don Gonyea talks to author, Catherine Mayer, about the significance of Prince Andrew giving up his royal titles after Jeffrey Epstein allegations against him refuse to fade.
DON GONYEA, HOST:
Prince Andrew will no longer be known as the Duke of York. The British royal says he is giving up his titles. The move follows growing pressure over his links with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and comes just days before the release of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir. Giuffre claims she was trafficked by Epstein and was sexually assaulted by the prince on three occasions when she was 17. She died by suicide in April. Andrew settled a civil lawsuit with Giuffre in 2022 for an undisclosed sum without admitting wrongdoing.
Journalist Catherine Mayer is author of a best-selling biography of King Charles, and she joins us now from London. Welcome.
CATHERINE MAYER: Thank you.
GONYEA: How significant is this decision? I mean, Andrew will stop using his titles, but he’ll still be a prince.
MAYER: Yes. And what is really going on here is the royal family trying to draw a line under all of this and say, you know, finally, he is surrendering, as it were, the last vestiges of his privilege. But sentiment here certainly does not see it that way because he’s not actually having the titles removed. He’s just promising not to use them. He will still be living on the Windsor estate. And a lot of it has to do with the lack of contrition and the fact that in all of this, if it were not for Virginia Giuffre’s autobiography being about to come out, it feels like the victims are being forgotten in all of this.
GONYEA: There’s the timing with the biography, but still, I want to ask why now, and why not, say, after Andrew’s 2019 interview? – the one that went so badly and even became the subject of a Netflix movie.
MAYER: Well, there is something really key that happened, and it relates to the interview. That interview was in 2019. It was evasive and unconvincing, but there was no solid proof that he’d actually lied in it until an email emerged just very recently. It’s an email exchange between him and Epstein.
And the date is significant because it’s the point after he claimed to have broken off contact with Epstein. He explained that trip to New York where they were photographed in Central Park as being a trip that he made because he was so honorable that he had to go and break off their friendship in person. And this email exchange appears later than that. So that in concert with extracts from this memoir have really upped the pressure.
GONYEA: Is there a sense that the royal family is thinking maybe this will kind of tamp it down and we’ll have some quiet, or are they anticipating future moves?
MAYER: It isn’t just that Andrew actually still has the titles in spite of all of this talk that he’s lost them. He will not use the Duke of York. Sarah Ferguson will not use Duchess of York. He is still a prince. There would need to be an act of Parliament to remove his title. If you think about what a constitutional monarchy is for, they no longer have executive powers in the way that old monarchs did. They’re supposed to stand for an ideal, and they’re supposed to be figureheads that project this kind of ideal. And so obviously, this is very damaging just in those terms alone.
GONYEA: And they certainly can’t declare this the end of the story.
MAYER: You know how it works with information. Once one set of allegations is in the public domain, then other people are emboldened to come forward. So – and this is also not just about Virginia Giuffre. There’s a new set of allegations that have come out today about another woman that Epstein is alleged to have introduced to Andrew. She’s not named. But, you know, I’m sure that King Charles and Prince William were trying to draw a line under this, but they will know that that has not happened.
GONYEA: We’ve been talking to journalist Catherine Mayer. Ms. Mayer, thank you for explaining this.
MAYER: You’re welcome.
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