A Prince Among Thieves

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest is a stunning development. But what if the Epstein affair was never really about sex in the first place?

HRH Anne, Princess Royal (left) with then-Prince Andrew, Duke of York, on September 19, 2022. Photo credit: Sean Aidan Calderbank/Shutterstock

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Believe me, Keir Starmer’s government did not want to be the first to arrest, and potentially imprison, a member of the British royal family. This is something that has not happened since Oliver Cromwell’s regime detained Charles I in 1647. Yet here we are.

Earlier today, in an extraordinary act of political courage by the Home Office, British police detained and searched the homes of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, Duke of York. A spokesperson from Buckingham Palace said that his elder brother, King Charles II had no knowledge of the arrest before it occurred.

English law restricts what we can know about this case in advance of a trial, and officials have 24 hours to either charge Mountbatten-Windsor or release him. But the arrest and search seem to arise from new revelations in the recently released tranche of Epstein files that the former Prince, as an official government trade envoy, may have leaked confidential documents to Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor has been in the spotlight almost continuously since his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell came to light in Epstein’s 2008 Florida trial for soliciting prostitution from a minor. One of the most prominent Epstein victims, Virginia Giuffre, sued Mountbatten-Windsor in civil court: lawyers for the former Prince settled in 2022 for around $15 million, a sum that was paid, the London Times reports, out of his parents’ estate.

“The arrest underscored a striking contrast in the official responses to the Epstein files,” Megan Specia and Michael D. Shear write for The New York Times. “The British authorities have moved aggressively to investigate the possibility of crimes emerging from the three million pages of correspondence with Mr. Epstein, while police in the United States have not.”

Striking indeed. Only two Americans have been arrested, and one successfully tried in the Epstein case: the perpetrators of the scheme. Despite the fact that Jeffrey Epstein and his compatriot Ghislaine Maxwell were arrested and jailed, evidence has implicated dozens of other wealthy people, as well as the not-so-wealthy, like Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Throughout three presidential administrations, as public demand for accountability in the United States grew, no one else—of all the high-profile figures who did business, and socialized, with Epstein, has been charged.

In addition to Great Britain, authorities in Norway, France, and Slovakia also launched investigations almost immediately after the documents became available.

For Mountbatten-Windsor, the scrutiny has been over a decade-long, and a well-deserved, drip, drip, drip that he and his former wife Sarah Ferguson might have stopped at any time by telling the truth and accepting the consequences. But they did not, presumably because they believed they would be shielded by the reluctance of other family members to expose them—and by doing that, put their own privacy and the future of the monarchy at risk.

Shockingly, this informal deal, no matter how grudging, did not reckon with a very real possibility: that the truth would come out, and no amount of hush money paid or proposed would prevent that. The Epstein conspiracy theories that helped promote Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid in 2024 made Mountbatten-Windsor collateral damage regardless of what Charles III, or his late mother, Elizabeth II, wanted. Furthermore, heir apparent Prince William (who is said to have never liked his uncle) appears to have been instrumental in persuading his father the King to act after Mountbatten-Windsor disgraced himself in a 2019 BBC television interview that he himself sought out.

Two things strike me as important about this development.

First, Mountbatten-Windsor and his former wife Sarah Ferguson have been extraordinarily, and very publicly, foolish people for decades. His sexual exploits, which before and after their marriage earned him the nickname “Randy Andy” from the tabs, resulted in her retaliating in very public, in-your-face affairs. After behaving like children, the royal couple legally separated in 1992 after six years of marriage; they were officially divorced in 1997, but neither remarried. Instead, they continue to share various homes to this day, appearing to be a couple in an open relationship of some kind.

So, Mountbatten-Windsor and Fergie, as she was affectionately known decades ago, were still very much a team when they became intimate with Epstein in 1999. They met him through Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving a well-deserved 20-year sentence in a federal prison in Texas for five criminal convictions that include trafficking a minor. The files demonstrate conclusively that, despite their subsequent denials, the Mountbatten-Windsors remained friends with Epstein and Maxwell, separately and together, well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for prostituting a minor. This is something Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently lied about: when a photograph of him strolling with Epstein in Central Park in 2010 came to light, Mountbatten-Windsor explained it away by saying he wished only to end the friendship in person.

But why? It was a transparent lie, the kind of lie only an arrogant, privileged, and not very bright person thinks anyone would accept as the truth. If you are royal, like most rich people (and plenty of commoners), you just stop answering the phone when someone becomes Kryptonite. Mountbatten-Windsor’s maternal aunt, Princess Margaret, did this all the time. She was particularly famous for cutting Princess Diana out of her life after the famous 1995 interview in which she not only threw her estranged husband Charles under the bus, but the Queen as well (it was this last that Margaret found permanently unforgivable—in anyone.)

A possible explanation for Mountbatten-Windsor’s Central Park strolling and subsequent contacts is that Epstein possessed evidence about his sexual behavior that might have launched a criminal investigation. But—and here is where the sensational dimensions of the Epstein affair may be distracting us from other crimes committed by Americans that are more easily prosecutable than old sex crimes in the United States—that is unlikely.

Instead, let’s look at an under-discussed feature of this lurid world: today’s arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was triggered by records that he had divulged valuable financial information. This is something that we should be looking for more broadly in the files. Epstein was an information broker, and a person who moved millions of dollars around in transactions that are still unclear. And that, in the eyes of governments that routinely punt on charging men with abusing women, is a far more serious crime.

I hope that news of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest will keep a lot of other powerful people up at night too.

This leads to my second point. I realize that what animates populist rage is the abuse of little—and can we point out, White?—girls, something that is historically real and, when revealed, usually a placeholder for something else that the political and economic establishment cares about far more. Yet, what gave the Epstein network purpose was not the traffic in women, but the sale of knowledge—within which young women and girls circulated as currency and party favors. In other words, the grisly details of how women were recruited into, and trafficked within, Epstein’s network may be an ugly diversion from what the real point of all this was: insider trading, confidential political information that might move markets, and create openings for Epstein to make investments for himself and others.

It certainly seems far more likely that sex was a detail for Mountbatten-Windsor (hence, his inability to take it seriously as a problem) and satisfying his debts was primary. Epstein was one of numerous people from whom he was frantically trying to generate income, a pattern that extends over decades. We have known for some time that Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife were constantly broke, and that Epstein supplied them with much-needed cash in the form of loans. As Kristen Contino reported last week for Marie Claire,

“Sarah Ferguson has been public with her financial struggles over the years after her massive debts and reckless spending as a member of the Royal Family repeatedly made headlines.

The former Duchess of York borrowed money from Epstein for years, with Entitled author Andrew Lownie writing, “A mutual friend of Andrew and Epstein has claimed, ‘I think that Sarah has actually received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ from Epstein.” Ferguson has previously admitted to borrowing £15,000 from the late sex offender, admitting it was “a gigantic error of judgement,” but the total amount is unknown.

Last year, Mountbatten-Windsor was said to be worth £3.7 million, with substantial liabilities and little prospect for addressing them now that he is no longer a working royal and has no title that generates income from Crown properties. Almost £4 million (close to $10 million U.S.dollars) sounds like a lot of money, but it isn’t, if you are responsible for the upkeep of manors and enjoy international travel and lavish entertaining. By contrast, siblings Ann and Edward are said to be worth more than twice that—and they have never asked their mother to bail them out, taken payments from fraudulent wealth management companies, or sold a property for £3 million above asking price to a Kazakh oligarch.

Among other things.

Circling back to Charles I (who was ultimately beheaded, the first European monarch to meet that fate), let’s point out that this political crisis also had its roots in the monarch’s louche sex life, but that was really just a symptom of his habit of spending money he did not have and berating Parliament to pay his debts. I will be surprised if more dominoes do not fall in London as a result of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest; or revelations that the English authorities and intelligence apparatus have been aware of him as a vulnerability for some time.

And this, in turn, could easily result in a new move to once again reform, or even eliminate, the monarchy. One can only hope.

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Earlier this week:

Stephen Colbert told his late-night audience that CBS had directed him, at the last minute, not to show an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat who is running for the United States Senate in Texas, a seat currently held by John Cornyn.

The network also ordered Colbert not to discuss it. Instead, he not only discussed it, he posted the interview to his YouTube channel, where it was watched by millions of people more than would have ever seen it on Late Night.

In case you are unaware of this, there is a concerted effort on the right to promote the candidacy of Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) for the Democratic nomination. Crockett is widely reviled on the right; she is also Black, and has been an outspoken opponent of MAGA (you can see her mixing it up with Marjorie Taylor Greene in a House Oversight Committee meeting here.) Thus, she is seen as the weaker, and more desirable, Democratic candidate in a statewide race.

Republicans have a highly contentious primary of their own: the three-way race pits extremist Attorney General Ken Paxton against incumbent Senator John Cornyn (who looks like a New Deal liberal by comparison) and Representative Wesley Hunt (TX-39), also Black.

Any Republican who comes out of that primary will be weakened considerably and vulnerable to Talarico, a centrist Democrat and evangelical Christian who is currently a member of the Texas House of Representatives.

Early voting is already underway in Texas and will conclude on March 4.

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Short takes:

• In January of this year, federal workers took down placards at a Philadelphia historic site that identified President George Washington as a slaveholder. They have been restored, by judicial order, but by an ironic twist, Donald Trump’s racism has restored the original radicalism of Black History Month. “The majority of Americans experience Black History Month as a formula,” podcaster Adam Harris writes at The Atlantic. “That is not how Black History Month began, though. Its precursor was established by Carter G. Woodson, the historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, at a time when eugenics—race science and the idea that white people were genetically superior to Black people—was finally being challenged as the pseudoscience it is.” (February 19, 2026)

• Why is Cory Mills (R, FL-07), who appears to be nothing short of a bag of dicks, still in Congress? An allegedly violent misogynist, liar, and blackmailer, Mills has engaged in shady arms deals and is widely believed by members of his own party to be untrustworthy and dishonest. “Given his behavior and record, there is bipartisan concern in Washington that Mills could pose a national security threat,” Noah Lanard writes at Mother Jones. “The information reported about Mills, they said, makes him vulnerable to malign actors and honeytraps.” Mills also claims to be “a veteran of US special operations forces. But there is nothing in his military record to support that claim in any meaningful way. An Army official told me in response to a request for comment that Mills’ personnel files show him only attending—but not completing—a special forces qualification course.” (February 19, 2026)

• On Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s watch, the Department of Health and Human Services has taken down a webpage that warned desperate parents about fake autism cures. “Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed,” Megan O’Matz reports at ProPublica. Yet, a quack doctor endorsed by a quack Senator endorses it as universal cure for multiple diseases, including autism. “The FDA, dating back to at least 2010, has urged consumers not to purchase or drink chlorine dioxide, frequently marketed as a Miracle Mineral Solution, because ‘the solution, when mixed, develops into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.’” (February 18, 2026)

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