Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor invited Jeffrey Epstein to dinner at Buckingham Palace days after his house arrest ended.
The former prince promised ‘lots of privacy’ to the convicted paedophile shortly after he was granted his freedom following a conviction for soliciting a minor. The astonishing email, from September 2010, was among a trove of more than 3million new documents, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, that were suddenly published by the Department of Justice last night.
Epstein requested ‘private time’ while on a visit to London, to which Andrew replied: ‘We could have dinner at Buckingham Palace and lots of privacy.’
It is not clear if the offer was taken up. But just two days later, the pair were back in email contact, with Epstein asking the then-prince ‘g [Ghislaine Maxwell] is here with me…what are you doing?’
Andrew replied to say he had a ‘lunch with a Saudi Prince and then out to secret intelligence firm’, before telling Epstein: ‘Delighted for you to come here to BP [Buckingham Palace]. Come with whomever and I’ll be here free from 1600ish.’
The exchange came during what must have been one of Epstein’s first sojourns outside the US, having served a 13-month sentence for sex crimes mostly in his Palm Beach mansion following a sweetheart plea deal with prosecutors.
The previous month, Epstein had offered to set up a dinner for Andrew with a ‘clever, beautiful and trustworthy’ 26-year-old Russian woman, saying: ‘She has your email.’
The prince, who would have been 50 at the time, replied that he would be ‘delighted to see her’. And he cheerfully asked the convicted child sex predator, whose house arrest had finished just days earlier: ‘Good to be free?’
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein in December 2010.The former prince invited the paedophile to dinner at Buckingham Palace days after his house arrest ended
Andrew promised ‘lots of privacy’ to the convicted paedophile shortly after he was granted his freedom following a conviction for soliciting a minor
Emails between Andrew and Epstein revealed in the Epstein files show the former prince inviting Epstein for dinner at Buckingham Palace
Andrew faces a fresh round of humiliation after the largest-yet Epstein document dump, containing thousands of references to him. Lord Mandelson and Bill Gates were also dragged further into the Epstein mire.
According to Epstein, the Microsoft founder caught a sexually transmitted disease from ‘Russian girls’ – then suggested secretly slipping his wife Melinda antibiotics.
There are also new emails relating to Sarah, formerly the Duchess of York, and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie – including pictures of them from Andrew’s electronic Christmas cards.
Several emails refer to the well-chronicled debts of Sarah – who took money from Epstein to help pay them off. One email sent in August 2009 shows her thanking him for being ‘the brother I have always wished for’.
In another email, Ms Ferguson calls Epstein ‘my dear spectacular and special friend’ and ‘a legend’.
Epstein’s madam – and Andrew’s long-term friend – Maxwell is also heavily referenced in the documents. In one email to Andrew, she joked that ‘five stunning redheads’ would now have to ‘play with ourselves’ because the former duke had said he should spend time with his children instead of visiting ‘the Island’, thought to be Epstein’s private property in the US Virgin Islands.
The email exchange – in which Andrew calls himself ‘The Invisible Man’ – from August 2002 reveals the prince begging Maxwell’s forgiveness if he turns down her offer and holidays with his family instead.
She replies, ‘I will not be remotely offended’, but then jokes that a woman whose name was redacted ‘who is now coming and five other stunning redheads will all just have to play with ourselves’.
Epstein had offered to set up a dinner for Andrew with a ‘clever, beautiful and trustworthy’ 26-year-old Russian woman, saying: ‘She has your email.’ The prince, who would have been 50 at the time, replied that he would be ‘delighted to see her’. And he cheerfully asked the convicted child sex predator, whose house arrest had finished just days earlier: ‘Good to be free?’
Elsewhere in the files, a 25-year-old masseuse said to have worked for Epstein in 1999 said she ‘didn’t feel good’ about being asked to massage Andrew – because she thought she was being asked ‘to do more’.
The unnamed woman submitted a statement to a private investigations team in 2021 that was sent to Maxwell’s defence team, the files show. She said: ‘I was only involved with Jeffrey for a year.
‘I never saw him like a creepy guy. There were never any young girls. I saw Prince Andrew and Donald Trump. [Epstein] wanted me to give Prince Andrew a massage, but I didn’t feel good about that. I wonder if he was offering me to him to do more.’
Andrew and President Trump have consistently denied any wrongdoing. But the former prince’s explanations in his car-crash Newsnight interview in November 2019 looked flakier than ever following the raft of new emails disclosed in the files.
He notoriously told Emily Maitlis he had gone to New York in 2010 to ‘end his friendship’ with the convicted paedophile because that was ‘the right thing to do’.
But one of the newly released emails shows Andrew telling Epstein: ‘See you tomorrow afternoon. Really looking forward to seeing you and spending some time with you after so long.’ In another email days before they met in New York, Andrew wrote to his friend, saying there were ‘some interesting things to discuss and plot’.
Far from cutting ties with Epstein, the prince later wrote a ‘Happy Christmas’ email to ‘Dear J’, adding that it had been great to spend time ‘with my US family’, the documents reveal.
But there was some potentially welcome news for Andrew regarding American prosecutors’ requests to interview him as a witness to Epstein’s child sex crimes.
Epstein was found dead inside his New York prison cell in 2019. His death was ruled suicide by hanging
After a prosecutor from the Southern District of New York complained of ‘zero cooperation’ from Andrew in 2020, a new email reveals an internal FBI memo stating: ‘He’s not a big part of our investigation.’
Elsewhere in the files, the former prince expressed ‘frustration’ at not being able to go on holiday because of the 2003 Iraq War, which cost the lives of 179 British personnel.
Less than two weeks after British troops were sent in to topple Saddam Hussein, Andrew whined he would ‘love to be able to get away’. He wrote to Maxwell on March 31 that year: ‘With this war on, the media would go bananas if I was to be known to be out of the country whilst this was on. I am becoming frustrated at this slight caging!’
Releasing the files, US deputy attorney-general Todd Blanche compared the amount of evidence reviewed to ‘two Eiffel Towers’ worth of material. He insisted the Department of Justice had not protected Mr Trump despite the ‘hunger or a thirst for information’.
