{"id":87158,"date":"2025-10-20T18:13:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T18:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/87158\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T18:13:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T18:13:09","slug":"what-do-we-learn-from-epstein-and-andrew-theres-a-level-of-power-at-which-right-and-wrong-no-longer-exist-zoe-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/87158\/","title":{"rendered":"What do we learn from Epstein and Andrew? There\u2019s a level of power at which right and wrong no longer exist | Zoe Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre\u2019s book Nobody\u2019s Girl<\/a>, released six months after her death from despair, Buckingham Palace is apparently braced for fresh revelations. Many MPs are calling for a change in the law, to give King Charles or a parliamentary committee the power to remove royal titles, with Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, pleading with parliament to take seriously this opportunity to \u201caddress the wrongs of history and to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors are really heard and acted upon\u201d. A source at the palace told the BBC they expected \u201cmore days of pain ahead\u201d.<\/p>\n

Getting ahead of these \u201cdays of pain\u201d, Prince Andrew \u2013 he continues to hold the title he was born with \u2013 announced last Friday<\/a> that he was relinquishing his use of \u201cDuke of York\u201d and \u201cKG\u201d, knight of the garter. In a statement, he said that after discussions with the king he had decided to give up the titles \u201cto put my duty to my family and country first\u201d. He has consistently denied all of Giuffre\u2019s allegations against him.<\/p>\n

If this sounds like a relatively minor instalment in what has now been years of disgrace, starting in 2011 with the Mail on Sunday\u2019s first publication of a photo of Andrew with Giuffre, note that it was Andrew\u2019s habit to sign even his most intimate correspondence \u201cA, HRH the Duke of York, KG.\u201d That was how he signed his email to Jeffrey Epstein, anyway, the one that was sent on 28 February 2011. It was the day after that famous photo was published, and 12 weeks after Andrew claims to have cut all contact with the sex trafficker. \u201cIt would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,\u201d the email read<\/a> \u2013 the Mail on Sunday verified his email address and Epstein\u2019s \u2013 concluding, even more nauseatingly, \u201cOtherwise keep in close touch and we\u2019ll play some more soon!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

Giuffre\u2019s book is revealing more in the detail than in the allegations, many of which have been well-known since 2014, when she described Andrew\u2019s involvement while giving evidence against Epstein. (The judge at that time threw out these accusations as \u201cimmaterial and impertinent\u201d to the case. He was presumably on pretty solid legal ground, but you do have to wonder, how, if trafficking is a crime, it comes to be immaterial who the victim was trafficked to.)<\/p>\n

Nobody\u2019s Girl describes Andrew correctly guessing Giuffre\u2019s age, 17, when he first meets her in London, and recalls him observing that she was just a few years older than his daughters. Her account of the first time they have sex is painfully plausible, right down to his clipped \u201cthank you\u201d at the end. He seemed \u201centitled\u201d, she wrote, \u201cas if he believed having sex with me was his birthright\u201d.<\/p>\n

What this book describes most powerfully is the absolute despair Giuffre suffered. That feels more important than her credibility on the matter of her relationship with Andrew, which hasn\u2019t been in doubt for years. He has never accepted any \u201cwrongdoing\u201d, but who\u2019s to say what he even believes to be wrong? Whether because he lacks probity on verifiable facts such as the timeline of his \u201ccut ties\u201d with Epstein or because his assertions sound so wild (who could forget that he\u2019s unable to sweat?), he presents as fundamentally dishonest. Taking in the phenomenal forgetfulness of Sarah Ferguson, who can\u2019t recall visiting Epstein in New York after he\u2019d been convicted, biographer Andrew Lownie wrote \u201cover four years [of research] I learned not to trust a single thing the couple said\u201d.<\/p>\n

So the question on everyone\u2019s minds is not, \u201cWhat exactly happened between Andrew, Giuffre and unnumbered other girls who looked under-18 and didn\u2019t speak English<\/a>?\u201d \u2013 but rather, as the BBC puts it<\/a>, \u201cAfter all those scandals, why would he quit his titles now?\u201d The answer is that, until now, there was a collective decision to look away. You could level that charge at the royal family \u2013 particularly if it\u2019s true, as it is rumoured, that the late queen covered part of his \u00a312m payout to settle Giuffre\u2019s civil case \u2013 but you couldn\u2019t level it only at them. The tenacity of Emily Maitlis aside, there was a general sense that these scandals would be forever rumour-only, that however believable, they just had to pass into lore as things that may or may not have happened. We all pay a price for Epstein and his buddies, that of having to accept the idea, collude with it, really, that there\u2019s a level of power at which right and wrong no longer exist.<\/p>\n

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre\u2019s book Nobody\u2019s Girl, released six months after her death…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-87158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}