Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee did a huge document dump in association with their ongoing effort to release the Epstein files to the House floor. In the past 24 hours, people have been consumed with the revelations contained in this cache of emails to and from Jeffrey Epstein. Obviously, the main focus is on what Epstein was saying about Donald Trump. But there’s plenty of new emails to and about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (aka Prince Andrew). In 2011, just before the Mail published the infamous photo of Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, there was a flurry of emails between Andrew, Epstein and Ghislaine as they were all coordinating and doing damage control for one another. Years later, Epstein mentioned to a third party that the photo is real though, which blows up a years-long campaign from Andrew to throw suspicion on the pic.

New messages revealed in the Epstein Files have done something Prince Andrew has spent years trying to avoid: they casually confirm, in Jeffrey Epstein’s own words, that the infamous photograph of Andrew with Virginia Giuffre was real.

In newly published exchanges, the disgraced financier urges a journalist to dig into Giuffre’s background while coolly conceding, “Yes she was on my plane, and yes she had her picture taken with Andrew, as many of my employees have.”

For all the noise Andrew and his defenders have generated about “fakes” and “forgeries,” Epstein, when it actually mattered, treated the image as banal fact, just one more souvenir from his sordid carousel of VIPs and young women.

That blasé acknowledgment destroys Andrew’s marathon effort to discredit the picture. The photo first emerged in 2011, in a Sunday tabloid: a teenage Virginia Roberts, as she then was, bare midriff, Andrew’s arm around her waist in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London townhouse, Maxwell smirking in the background. From the moment it appeared, the image became the defining image of the scandal. However often Andrew’s camp insisted he had no recollection of ever meeting her, the photograph stared back.

By the time Epstein was rearrested in 2019, Andrew’s advisers were in full damage-limitation mode, and the photo was enemy number one. Briefings to friendly newspapers began pushing the idea that it might be a fake. Friends tried to feed me a faintly comic talking point: the duke’s fingers, they said, were far “chubbier” in real life than in the picture, where his hand on Giuffre’s waist looked oddly slim. Andrew’s sausage-like digits were presented as a kind of biometric alibi.

As Giuffre went on television to insist the photograph was real and describe the night it was taken, media organizations hired photographic experts to pore over pixels, shadows, reflections in the window and the cheap camera flash. Their conclusions were awkward for Andrew: there was no obvious sign of manipulation, no smoking-gun glitch. The more his supporters fretted about knuckles and lighting, the more the whole operation looked like a classic palace tactic; not disproving the picture, merely fogging it with doubt.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Sykes is correct, there has been a ham-fisted, years-long effort led by Andrew to try to “discredit” the photo in any way possible. It might seem obvious to us now in 2025, but Andrew sent out his allies and fixers to cast doubts on all of it, especially the photo. I also believe that Andrew’s position in the family had become untenable in recent months specifically because the Windsors (not to mention the British government) had some inkling about how many times Andrew appears in the emails and the Epstein files. Of course, I think Virginia’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, had a lot to do with it too.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.