Newly released photos appearing to show Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with women classified by US investigators as Epstein victims inside the paedophile’s Manhattan mansion

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with women classed as Epstein victims

 

The release of two newly surfaced photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion should revive a deeply uncomfortable question that has never truly gone away: what on earth was Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor doing in the world of a convicted paedophile?


The images, disclosed by the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) as part of the vast release of material under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, appear to show a man resembling the former Duke of York inside the sex offender’s New York townhouse.


In the first photograph, a man wearing a blue shirt and a grey hooded jacket sits with a blonde woman perched across his lap. In the second, the same smiling guy sits in what appears to be the same room, while another young woman stands behind him, her arms draped around his neck.


Image of Andrew

The man in the photographs appears to resemble Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The images are small, grainy, and low-resolution, and the identity of the individual pictured has not been formally confirmed.


But that does not make them any less disturbing. What makes the photographs especially troubling is not simply where they appear to have been taken, but the detail that US officials have redacted the women’s faces.

That detail matters enormously.

In the huge cache of Epstein-related material now released by American authorities, officials only redact the identities of women they believe were victims of Jeffrey Epstein. In other words, the women in these photographs are regarded by investigators as those abused by the disgraced financier.


The pictures appear to have been taken in the dining room of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse – the very property the FBI says functioned for years as the centre of a sex-trafficking operation involving young women and girls. It is also the very house where Mountbatten-Windsor chose to stay.

The newly surfaced images are now among roughly 180,000 photographs released by the US Government. And once again, they revive the same unavoidable question that has hovered over the disgraced former royal for years: why was he there at all?


Mountbatten-Windsor, now 66, has never denied visiting Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. How could he? In fact, he openly acknowledged spending a week there in December 2010. It was that trip he attempted to explain during his catastrophic BBC Newsnight interview nine years later.

According to the ex-prince, he travelled to New York because he felt he was “too honourable” not to say goodbye to Epstein after the financier had served time in prison for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Even at the time, the explanation sounded farcical. A week-long farewell visit to a convicted sex offender is a strange way of demonstrating honour. The documents released by the DoJ make the explanation even harder to defend.


Correspondence indicates the pair spent time socialising during the visit and remained in contact afterwards. Emails also appear to show Epstein continuing to introduce the prince to women even after his 2008 conviction.

In one message sent in August 2010, the sex offender appears to offer to introduce the then-prince to a “beautiful” 26-year-old Russian woman.

In a later email, the woman told Epstein she had an “amazing night”. Another message suggests Epstein planned to bring several women to a dinner at Buckingham Palace, including one he described as “Romanian, very cute”. Taken together, such details paint a picture that becomes more troubling with every new document connected to Mountbatten-Windsor that emerges.

Epstein's mugshot

It was not a fleeting encounter with a disgraced acquaintance. It was an ongoing social relationship with a man whose criminal behaviour was already a matter of public record.

Every new photograph, email or file that emerges from the evidence archive adds another piece to that picture. And the latest images appear to show, once again, despite years of protestations, that Mountbatten-Windsor was not merely a distant acquaintance orbiting Epstein’s world.

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