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The scandal-scarred brother of the King cannot escape questions about his friendship with convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Andrew Windsor\u2019s life as a royal is over. <\/p>\n
In a stunning blow that has not been seen at Buckingham Palace since 1919, when one of Queen Victoria\u2019s grandsons lost his dukedom for fighting alongside the Germans in World War I, Prince Andrew will be stripped of the \u201chonors\u201d of his former title.<\/p>\n
The 65-year-old will also be evicted from the sprawling 30-room Georgian mansion, the Royal Lodge, where he has lived for two decades with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and where they have paid no rent other than a symbolic \u201cone peppercorn\u201d per year to the Crown Estate since 2003. Palace officials say Andrew, who has no clear income, will move to the Sandringham estate, a private home owned by his brother King Charles.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private and make his own way in life,\u201d Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick told the\u00a0BBC\u00a0<\/em>Radio 4 Today program. \u201cHe has disgraced himself, he has embarrassed the royal family time and again. I don\u2019t see why the taxpayer, frankly, should continue to foot the bill at all. The public are sick of him.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In a statement on Thursday, Buckingham Palace said it had begun a formal process to remove the \u201cstyle, titles and honors of Prince Andrew.\u201d He will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the family name of members of the House of Windsor. <\/p>\n \u201cThese censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him,\u201d the palace said in the statement. \u201cTheir Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n The move is connected to the former Prince\u2019s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sexual predator who was found dead in his cell in August 2019 at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, months after his arrest on federal charges connected to the trafficking of underage girls<\/a>. Epstein\u2019s longtime cohort, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was hunted down by federal investigators to a remote hideout in Bradford, New Hampshire, in July 2020<\/a>, where, a then-FBI official said, \u201cshe slithered away to a gorgeous property and continued to live a life of privilege,\u201d while eluding capture. She was hit with a six-count indictment on federal charges related to \u201cthe sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein,\u201d federal prosecutors say.<\/p>\n Scroll to continue reading<\/p>\n One of those minor girls was Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said that she was raped by then-Prince Andrew, a charge he messily denied in a 2019 television interview with the BBC, before Maxwell\u2019s capture. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison for what prosecutors call \u201cconspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors\u201d in 2022.<\/p>\n Despite Prince Andrew\u2019s halting denials, Giuffre\u2019s accusations persisted and became increasingly charged with the publication of her harrowing tell-all book, Nobody\u2019s Girl<\/em>, <\/a>this month. In the book, ghostwritten by former Los Angeles<\/em> reporter Amy Wallace,<\/a> Giuffre describes then-Prince Andrew having sex with her three times in an \u201centitled\u201d way, \u201cas if it was his birthright,\u201d while she was being trafficked by Epstein. Giuffre claims that Andrew had sex with her three times when she was a sex trafficking victim, which he denies.<\/p>\n Those new sordid details of his sexual misconduct made his position in the royal family increasingly untenable as members of the British government began threatening to remove him using legislation, which is what took place the last time a Prince saw his dukedom revoked. Prince Charles Edward lost the title of Duke of Albany for fighting with the German side during World War I, a move that came via an act of parliament dubbed the Titles Deprivation Act.<\/p>\n When Prince Harry and his American-born wife, Meghan, announced in 2020 that they would withdraw from official duties and move to California, he remained a prince, and the couple remained the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.<\/p>\n