"Randy Andy," "Air Miles Andy," "the Party Prince," "His Royal Slyness," "the Duke of Porkies."
The U.K. press has bestowed a lot of nicknames on Prince Andrew over the years, Britain's fourth estate showing Queen Elizabeth II's second son none of the reverence it reserved for her throughout her 70-year reign.
But according to royal biographies, numerous reports going back decades and everyone who participated in the Peacock documentary Prince Andrew: Banished, premiering Oct. 5, the 62-year-old earned every headline.
"The problem is, the man's an idiot," Dickie Arbiter, the queen's press secretary from 1988 to 2000, remarked in the film.
When the documentary delved into Andrew's decision to sit down with the BBC's Newsnight in 2019, Arbiter reiterated the characterization.
Ostensibly to clear the air about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and accusations that Andrew had sexual encounters with an underage girl who alleged Epstein had trafficked her, the sit-down was received as a train wreck that effectively ended the prince's career as a working royal.
Andrew has denied any wrongdoing during his unfortunate association with Epstein and said in the Newsnight interview he had no recollection of even meeting the girl in question—despite an existing photo showing him with his arm around her waist, which he, in turn, implied was doctored.
Banished mainly re-tells the story of Andrew's downfall, within the royal family and in the court of public opinion, but as the saga unfolds, journalists, government officials and former royal staffers drop a lot of bizarre tidbits as they recount their experiences knowing, working with, working for and reporting on the Duke of York.
The film notes that Buckingham Palace did not respond to interview requests for Andrew. Moreover, a representative for the prince didn't address any specific allegations raised in the documentary, but reiterated that Andrew "previously and consistently denied all allegations against him."
Newly ascended Queen Elizabeth II was famously stretched a little thin, the 25-year-old monarch wanting to prove right out of the gate that she was committed wholeheartedly to the role—which left only so many hours in the day to tend to Prince Charles and Princess Anne (who were 3 and 17 months old when their mom became queen), according to numerous accounts of the early days of her reign.
But when Prince Andrew, her third child, was born in 1960, followed by Prince Edward in 1964, the queen was in a groove with her day job and committed herself to being a more hands-on parent, relatively speaking. Prince Philip also bonded with Andrew over sports and his lads-will-be-lads ways, which distinguished the boy in his father's eyes from the more sensitive Charles.
Retro news footage included in Peacock's Prince Andrew: Banished shows Andrew tooling around in the child-size Aston Martin—just like the one James Bond drove—his parents commissioned for his birthday one year.
"He was very spoiled," said Majesty Magazine editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward.
Andrew kept 50 or 60 stuffed teddy bears lined up just so on his bed in his apartment at Buckingham Palace, according to Paul Page, who was with the Metropolitan Police's Royal Protection Command from 1998 to 2004. The maids took a photo, so that when they cleaned the room, they'd get the order right, Page alleged, or else Andrew would "shout and scream" at them.
(Not mentioned in the documentary: In 2009, Page was sentenced to six years in jail after being found guilty of fraud for soliciting investments for what turned out to be a sham property development company, a scam authorities said he was running while he worked at the palace.)
One of the former palace maids, Charlotte Briggs, previously told The Sun about the bears—and she put their number at 72. "As soon as I got the job, I was told about the teddies and it was drilled into me how he wanted them," she said in January. "I even had a day's training. Everything had to be just right. It was so peculiar."
The Palace Papers author Tina Brown also detailed the teddy bear protocol in her book (noting that many of the bears were dressed as sailors) and recalled in Banished being surprised by how much Andrew's quarters looked like a "second-rate hotel" when she visited him at the palace.
Andrew first met Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, during her university days at Oxford in the 1980s. (After Robert died in 1991—first reported missing at sea but his body was soon recovered and his death attributed to drowning and a heart attack—British authorities found he had looted roughly $500 million from his empire's pension program to prop up his companies' finances. Government funds and investment banks helped return most of the money to the estimated 32,000 pensioners affected, according to the BBC.)
"Prince Andrew was dazzled by Ghislaine," journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor, who was friendly with the socialite, said in Banished. "She was fun."
The Duke of York had security just wave Ghislaine through when she'd come visit him at Buckingham Palace, according to Page, whose unit was charged with protecting the queen and her family when they were in residence at the palace. "She was in and out all the time," the former cop alleged.
Andrew met American financier Jeffrey Epstein in 1999 through Maxwell—and their transactional friendship ran both ways.
On Andrew's side, hanging out with Maxwell and Epstein—who owned the biggest private residence in Manhattan, had his own island and traveled by private jet—made the Duke of York feel like the big shot he thought he was, according to Brown, Kirwan-Taylor and Majesty editor Seward. Maxwell and Epstein (a onetime couple turned partners in crime) offered Andrew access to celebrities, glitzy parties and five-star accommodations, while he, in turn, invited them into his royal world.
In 1999 and 2000, Epstein and Maxwell were guests at a Balmoral getaway, Andrew's 40th birthday party at Windsor Castle and a shooting weekend at Sandringham—"prime invitations," Brown said—plus they attended Royal Ascot.
Though a "valuable relationship" for Epstein, Brown said, it "wasn't so much about money. The royal connection was really about status."
As for Andrew, the author said, socializing with Epstein made him feel "like he was part of the big-time at last, which he never felt when he was in England."
The prince told Newsnight's Emily Maitlis in 2019 that it would be "a considerable stretch" to call Epstein "a very, very close friend. But he had the most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together, and that's the bit that I remember as going to the dinner parties where you would meet academics, politicians, people from the United Nations. I mean it was a cosmopolitan group of what I would describe as U.S. eminence."
Tipped off in December 2010 that Andrew was in New York, journalist Annette Witheridge recalled first checking at the consul general's residence, then Maxwell's townhouse. Not finding the royal in either spot, she wondered about Epstein's 21,000-square-foot mansion on the Upper East Side.
"Seemed very unlikely he would want to stay with someone like that," she remembered thinking.
But when she showed up outside the residence at 8 a.m., out came Andrew and Epstein—who by then was a convicted sex offender, having pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges in Florida of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. He served 13 months in a work-release program.
Andrew was photographed with Epstein in Central Park. He'd later tell Maitlis on Newsnight that he "probably did" trust Epstein at one point, but "I don't go into a friendship looking for the wrong thing."
Unrelated to his Epstein association, Andrew was already known for allegedly milking his cushy role as Britain's "special envoy for trade" for all it was worth. He acquired the unpaid position in 2001 after leaving the Royal Navy (his distinguished service during the Falklands War did make him a national hero for a time) and for the next decade he traveled around the world in style and had access to people in very high places.
Allegations of dodgy dealings trailed Andrew for years after a Kazakh oligarch bought the royal's Sunninghill Park estate (a wedding present from the queen) for $3.4 million more than the asking price in 2007, after it had been sitting on the market for five years. The palace maintained that Andrew had nothing to do with the sale. A rep for the prince said then, "Any suggestion that he has abused his public position is completely untrue. The sale was a straight commercial transaction."
But as shown in Banished, reporters who caught up with him at the time shouted questions like, "Are you going to resign?" and "Are you an embarrassment, sir?"
Andrew did resign from his trade ambassadorship in July 2011 after it came to light that his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, had accepted a roughly $17,000 loan from Epstein some years beforehand to help pay off debts.
"I personally, on behalf of myself, deeply regret that Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me," the Duchess of York said in a statement in 2011, calling it "a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf. I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again."
All told, Sarah didn't get an invitation to Prince William and Kate Middleton's April 2011 wedding—though Andrew was there with daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.
Banished points out that, after the various embarrassments of 2010 and 2011, Andrew pressed on, no longer working for the government but attending events on behalf of the Crown and otherwise fulfilling duties as a senior royal.
He and Sarah, divorced since 1996, continued (and continue) to live together at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, though she has shot down rumors of romantic reconciliation. The duchess' invitation to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's 2018 nuptials was not lost in the mail. And later that year, the entire royal family watched Eugenie marry Jack Brooksbank.
When Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and indicted on federal sex trafficking charges, all the bold-faced names he associated with were in the news again, including Andrew. And people still had many questions.
"The Duke of York has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein's alleged crimes," the palace said in a statement in response to the new charges. "His Royal Highness deplores the exploitation of any human being and the suggestion he would condone, participate in or encourage any such behavior is abhorrent."
Epstein died by suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was awaiting trial, on Aug. 10, 2019.
The questions about his association with Epstein—and renewed allegations made by Virginia Giuffre that she was forced by Epstein to have sexual relations with the Duke of York in three different locations when she was still a minor, with Maxwell serving as a sort of madam—were not going away. (She first named Andrew as someone who took part in Epstein's "sexual abuse ring" in a 2014 lawsuit she filed against the financier as Jane Doe.)
So Andrew agreed to an interview with the BBC's Newsnight, during which he posited aloud that his tendency to be "too honorable" was the reason he still stayed with Epstein in New York in 2010 despite knowing he was a sex criminal.
He never threw a birthday party for Maxwell, he said, countering that it was a "straightforward shooting weekend." And he denied ever meeting Giuffre, let alone having sex with her, despite the existence of a widely circulated photograph showing him with his arm around the girl's waist, with Maxwell standing in the background and smiling at the camera. He implied the photo was somehow faked.
"That's a picture of me. It's not—I don't believe it's a picture of me in London," he said, explaining that whenever he went out in London, he wore a suit and tie (as opposed to the button-down he has on in the photo). And, Andrew also noted, he'd never seen Epstein with a camera.
Asked about Giuffre's memories of him "profusely sweating" while they danced, he insisted that couldn't be true because of his "peculiar medical condition" that prevented him from sweating.
It didn't take long for the press to find pictures of Andrew sweating and wearing a button-down shirt similar to the one in the photograph in question.
"He didn't justify his friendship and he certainly didn't clear his name," concluded Dickie Arbiter, the queen's former press secretary, who called Andrew an "idiot" for agreeing to the interview in the first place. "I would have put my foot firmly down and said, 'Don't do it. You're not allowed to do it.'"
Less than a week after the interview aired, Andrew resigned from the Firm.
"It has become clear to me over the last few days that the circumstances relating to my former association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption to my family's work and the valuable work going on in the many organizations and charities that I am proud to support," he said in a Nov. 22, 2019, statement. "Therefore, I have asked Her Majesty if I may step back from public duties for the foreseeable future, and she has given her permission."
Days later, the queen went riding with Andrew on the grounds of Windsor Castle in what was widely seen as a show of support. At the time, the monarch was also dealing with an increasingly unhappy Harry and Meghan (who less than two months later would announce that they were stepping back as well).
In January 2020, Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference held outside Epstein's Manhattan home that his office and the FBI had tried to schedule interviews with the prince. "To date Prince Andrew has provided zero cooperation," he said.
Maxwell, 60, managed to evade authorities until July 2020, when she was ultimately arrested in New Hampshire. She was found guilty in December 2021 of charges including conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and perjury.
In June, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She has appealed both her conviction and sentence.
Giuffre tweeted in response to Maxwell's guilty verdict that she hoped her conviction was "not the end but rather another step in justice being served. Maxwell did not act alone. Others must be held accountable. I have faith that they will be."
The 39-year-old filed a lawsuit against Andrew in August 2021, alleging that he both sexually abused her when she was only 17 and knew full well that she was being trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell. "Twenty years ago Prince Andrew's wealth, power, position, and connections enabled him to abuse a frightened, vulnerable child with no one there to protect her," the suit stated. "It is long past the time for him to be held to account."
While he didn't comment publicly on the filing, in addition to his previous denials of wrongful sexual activity, Andrew had stated in the summer of 2019, "At no stage during the limited time I spent with [Epstein] did I see, witness or suspect any behavior of the sort that subsequently led to his arrest and conviction."
An attempt on Andrew's part to have the suit dismissed was rejected by a judge in January, and the following month the Duke of York settled with his accuser for an undisclosed amount.
But only a day after the judge refused to scrap the lawsuit, the queen stripped Andrew of his military affiliations and royal patronages, the palace noting that he was mounting his defense as "a private citizen." A royal source also told NBC News at the time that Andrew would cease going by "His Royal Highness" on any occasion.
Andrew notably did not wear a military uniform at the queen's Sept. 19 funeral.
Prince Andrew: Banished is streaming on Peacock.
(E! and Peacock are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)