On July 2, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire and charged with perjury and crimes connected to her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The next day, The Telegraph resurfaced a 2002 photo that illustrated exactly why Prince Andrew is reportedly feeling “nervous” in the wake of her capture. In the photo, Maxwell sits on Queen Elizabeth’s throne in Buckingham Palace, next to Kevin Spacey. Both visitors are ruddy and laughing. Spacey, who in 2018 was accused of multiple sexual assaults (he pleaded not guilty and all charges against him were dropped), joined Maxwell and Andrew at the palace for a 2002 trip, where the prince arranged a behind-the-scenes tour.
The unsanctioned throne sitting might be an apt metaphor for the type of access Maxwell had to the royal family in the years she was friendly with Andrew. In the early 2000s, Andrew invited her and Epstein to plenty of exclusive royal events. According to the Daily Mail, they spent a weekend at Balmoral, the queen’s holiday estate in Scotland, in 1999, and the BBC noted that both were invited to a June 2000 Buckingham Palace ball with the queen. Eight days before Epstein’s initial arrest in 2006, he was photographed with Maxwell and Harvey Weinstein at the 18th birthday party for Andrew’s daughter Beatrice.
When the BBC’s Emily Maitlis quizzed Andrew on his frequent appearances with the financier and convicted pedophile last November, Andrew responded that Maxwell was the “key element” in his friendship with Epstein in the first place. Maxwell’s arrest could be a sign that his Epstein ties will receive even more scrutiny in the future.
The earliest evidence of a connection between Andrew and Epstein comes through his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. After Andrew and Ferguson’s 1996 divorce, Ferguson squandered her divorce settlement and it led her to strike up financial dealings with a variety of people outside the traditional royal orbit. According to flight logs first obtained by the Daily Mirror, Ferguson visited Epstein’s Caribbean island in April 1998, and by February 1999, Andrew went for a multiple-day visit.
In the BBC interview that led to his retirement, Andrew said he knew Maxwell when she was an undergraduate in the U.K. She attended Oxford in the 1980s, before she eventually became a constant presence at London parties and social events. It’s not clear when Epstein and Maxwell met, though in 1995, the Mail on Sunday reported that she turned to him for comfort after the 1991 death of her father, British press baron Robert Maxwell. Andrew was first spotted with the pair at a Mar-a-Lago tennis tournament in February 2000, an event that also saw Donald Trump in attendance. Later that year, a friend told the Daily Mail that Ferguson had actually only recently introduced Andrew to Maxwell.
According to the Evening Standard, Andrew and Maxwell traveled together eight times over the rest of 2000 and were photographed at various London nightspots. Friends who spoke to the newspaper in 2001 said that his connection to Maxwell had sparked a change in his lifestyle. “Andrew’s a very poor judge of character, easily impressed,” one friend said. “He’s gone from this couch potato to man about town, with nothing better to do than go from one holiday to the next.”
In the BBC interview, Andrew said that he ended his friendship with Epstein on a 2010 trip to Manhattan, though continued to be friendly with Maxwell in the years that followed, adding the pair had last talked last year before Epstein’s July 2019 arrest.