In 2011, the scandal surrounding Epstein, a former hedge-fund manager, cost Andrew his job as Britain’s trade envoy, a role that involved indiscriminate schmoozing of dictators, oligarchs, and business leaders. Questions about their friendship have dogged him ever since. He presumably thought the interview would help refute the persistent allegation that he had sex with a minor—Virginia Roberts (now Virginia Giuffre), then age 17—in 2001. In a court filing, Roberts said she was essentially trafficked by Epstein, and forced to have sex with his friends, including Andrew.

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A secondary motive might have been to show remorse for the friendship, which continued long after it was clear exactly what kind of person Epstein was. On the surface, the millionaire’s lifestyle was glittering—donations to tech research, dinners with public intellectuals—but its darkness ought to have been obvious to anyone who saw it up close. Epstein attended Andrew’s daughter Beatrice’s 18th-birthday party at Windsor Castle in 2006, two months after an arrest warrant was issued for his sexual assault of a minor. (He was given a plea bargain, allowing him to serve just 13 months in prison, as well as immunity from future prosecutions not just for him, but for “any potential co-conspirators.”)

When protesting his own innocence in the BBC interview, the prince floundered. He sounded queasy and evasive. He could not have slept with Roberts on the date she alleged, he said, because he was at a pizza restaurant in a town near London. Why did he remember that so specifically? “Because going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do.” (Never mind that Woking is only 30 miles from London, putting it about an hour’s drive from Tramp Nightclub, where he is alleged to have met Roberts that evening.) Her memory of him as sweating also threw the story into doubt, he believed: “I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at.”

On the second count—expressing remorse—the prince also failed. Maitlis asked Andrew straight out whether he regretted the friendship. “Still not,” he said. “The people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful.” (No room in the picture for another set of people: Epstein’s victims.) She tried again later, and got essentially the same answer.

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As an interviewer, Maitlis was calm and forensic. The prince said he and Epstein were not “close friends.” And yet Andrew had been on his private plane? “Yes.” Had stayed on his private island? “Yes.” Had stayed at his home in Palm Beach? “Yes.” After Epstein was released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for procuring a minor for prostitution, Andrew stayed at Epstein’s house in New York, and was photographed walking through Central Park with him. “I went there with the sole purpose of saying to him that because he had been convicted, it was inappropriate for us to be seen together.” Maitlis was politely incredulous: “You went to break up the relationship and yet you stayed at that New York mansion several days?”