Detention marks unprecedented moment for senior British royal amid years of scandal.
On Thursday, the British police arrested Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles III and son of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Pressure from the Crown for Andrew to voluntarily cooperate with police over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein led to his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
On his 66th birthday, Andrew will no longer be remembered as a hero of the Falklands War, as the royal family’s “playboy,” or as the eccentric husband of Sarah Ferguson, but rather as a sinister figure whose titles and privileges had until now shielded him.
The “Epstein Papers” scandal may prove the final nail in the coffin of his career, after he became the first senior member of the modern British royal family to be arrested.
Although he has always denied involvement in Epstein’s network of sexual abuse of minors, his mother and his brother gradually moved to sideline him from public life.
In October 2025, Andrew was stripped of his princely title by Charles III, as the steps he had taken to distance himself from the royal family, including renouncing all his honors, were deemed insufficient by the monarch.
Charles III also ordered him to leave the palace he occupied in Windsor and relocate to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, where he was arrested by Thames Valley Police.
Despite rumors that circulated for years about alleged wrongdoing, the beginning of Andrew’s downfall dates to around 2015, when BBC revealed that accuser Virginia Giuffre had filed a complaint in a Florida court alleging she was forced to have sexual relations with him as a minor within a network of sex slaves.
The case returned to the spotlight in 2019 after the British newspaper Daily Mail published images from 2010 showing the prince at Epstein’s New York mansion, bidding farewell to a young woman leaving the residence. The photos surfaced around the time of Epstein’s imprisonment and his subsequent apparent suicide in the jail cell where he was awaiting trial.
The scandal prompted the prince to announce his withdrawal from public life on Nov. 20, 2019. Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against him in New York in 2021, alleging that he sexually abused her when she was a minor.
In January 2022, the situation shifted after U.S. court documents revealed a confidential 2009 agreement under which Epstein paid Giuffre US$500,000 to withdraw her allegations — a document Andrew’s lawyers believed would help dismiss the case against him.
However, on Jan. 12 the court rejected that argument, and the following day his mother stripped him of all military titles and royal patronages.
In February, his lawyers announced an out-of-court settlement with Giuffre for 14 million euros, funds reportedly provided by his mother. The New York court that was set to try Andrew closed the case.
In April 2025, Giuffre was found dead at her home in Australia, where she had lived for years, in what authorities described as an apparent suicide. A month earlier, she had posted that she had been struck by a bus and had “four days to live.”
Five months later, Andrew again made headlines in the British press following the publication of an email he sent to Epstein in 2011, revealing he had remained in contact with him longer than he had acknowledged in a prime-time interview on the BBC.
In the message, the prince told Epstein they were “in this together” and promised they would stay in touch and “play some more soon,” after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor and a day after the first photographs of Andrew with Giuffre became public.
teleSUR/ JF
Sources: EFE – BBC
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