Amid the spiralling scandal which continues to drag the House of York into the quagmire, Princess Eugenie posed for the cameras at an art show in Qatar this week, standing in front of a painting worth millions and said to represent the turmoil of the world.
If she appeared somewhat jaded then she had good reason. Up until now she and her older sister Beatrice have largely been shielded from the sins of their disgraced parents.
But the latest torturous swathe of revelations from the Epstein Files has turned an increasingly uncomfortable spotlight on the royal sisters and their own roles in this appalling saga.
Above all, as newly released documents make clear, evil Epstein enjoyed a much bigger presence in the princesses’ lives than was previously known.
Aside from the discovery of a tasteless 2010 email from Sarah Ferguson to Epstein, in which she told him her youngest daughter, then 19, was away on a ‘sha**ing weekend’, pressing new questions are being asked about how much, exactly, the York sisters knew about the twisted relationship between Mumsy and Pa and ‘Uncle Jeffrey’.
And how, in 37-year-old Beatrice’s case at least, it appears she tried to help her feckless mother shore up that sickening friendship.
‘There’s been a big campaign to portray them as innocents in all this, but they’re not just collateral,’ says royal historian Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. ‘They are very much part of the story.’
After yet another excruciating week of revelations, it is now plain that even if she and Eugenie blindly followed their parents, they were adults, not children, when they lunched with their mother and the late paedophile financier in Miami in 2009 – just days after his release from prison for prostituting minors – and must surely have been well aware of his crimes.
Princess Eugenie with her friend Caroline Daur at an art fair in Qatar this week
Other emails released by the US Justice Department suggest they were also regularly called upon by him to entertain his contacts and give tours of Buckingham Palace. In one, Epstein reassured a friend due to cross paths with Beatrice: ‘She likes me its ok [sic].’
With British police assessing Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Epstein and allegations that – as UK trade envoy – he shared confidential government information with the late billionaire sex offender, pressure is growing on the two princesses to give their own accounts about what they know.
There are concerns, too, that Beatrice and Eugenie, who are not working royals, appear to be following in their father’s footsteps by pursuing their own business interests in the Middle East and building hugely lucrative careers on the back of their royal status, not to mention the contacts they have made in the wake of their parents’ own connections to mega-wealthy autocrats in the Middle East.
As a royal source, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, puts it: ‘Andrew and Sarah always felt they were given the deference they were due when they were in the Middle East and the hospitality they received was lavish.
‘It was only natural that Beatrice and Eugenie would take to it. They started accompanying their parents on visits to the region when they were in their late teens.
‘It’s clear the sisters see the region as a place where they will aways be treated as princesses, no matter what their parents get up to.
‘But the optics aren’t good for either of them. At a time when they should be distancing themselves from their parents, these kind of trips serve as a reminder of their father’s own self-enriching links to the area.’
Eugenie’s jaunt this week to the Qatari capital, Doha, is just one of multiple visits made by both sisters to the Gulf region where their inherited royal titles continue to carry huge weight.
They are regulars at business conventions, art and luxury goods shows and the Bahrain Grand Prix, which both have attended with their husbands.
Aside from two trips Beatrice made to Saudi Arabia in November – during one she hosted a British tea party for the ‘super rich’, which might have come straight out of Andrew’s playbook – the mother of two attended the London opening last August of a branch of the First Abu Dhabi Bank.
Eugenie, meanwhile, was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in January last year as well as at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Eugenie this week in Qatar amid her father’s name being brought up often in the press
TV presenter Natalie Pinkham, Beatrice’s husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice in Bahrain at the Grand Prix last year
The sisters were just as busy in 2024. In April that year, Beatrice and Eugenie, who works for the art dealer Hauser & Wirth, were in Riyadh for an event to discuss ‘global challenges and opportunities’.
Also that month, Beatrice, who runs her own tech advisory firm, BY-EQ, travelled to Dubai for a conference to promote ‘the entrepreneurial corridor’ between the United Arab Emirates and the UK.
In October she was back in Riyadh – while Eugenie was in Qatar – for another investment conference. In November she returned to Abu Dhabi.
On that occasion, she met its ruler, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who has been a close friend of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor since they met at Gordonstoun School in Scotland.
Back in 2010, Andrew introduced MBZ, as he calls him, to Epstein, emailing the US financier to tell him: ‘You are in big time.’
It was also reportedly MBZ who gave Andrew a four-bedroom villa in Abu Dhabi, described as a ‘gilded mini palace’ in 2010, for the York family to use whenever they needed.
According to a former British diplomat who spoke to the Daily Mail this week: ‘No expense was spared in giving them the best time possible.’
The Daily Mail’s royal source believes that Andrew may also be considering a move to the region to escape the misery of life in exile in secluded Norfolk.
‘Now that Andrew is effectively under house arrest, moving to the Middle East is an increasingly attractive idea,’ says the source.
‘It might also move him far away from the grasp of law enforcement in the US and the UK and MPs who could also summon him to answer their own enquiries.’
It was perhaps no coincidence then that Sarah Ferguson, who has not been seen since Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was booted out of Royal Lodge, and is herself now officially homeless, is said to have visited the UAE in recent weeks.
There are rumours, too, of a visit to Doha where Eugenie was this week.
Beatrice and Eugenie with their mother Sarah Ferguson, centre, in April last year
Given that Ferguson may be called upon by US and UK authorities to reveal what she knew about Epstein, an overseas move may also be an attractive proposition.
With their parents apparently hiding themselves away from public and legal scrutiny, the path Beatrice and Eugenie now take is crucial.
Ever since the House of York began to self-destruct last October, the sisters have been battling to safeguard their own reputations and hang on to their titles while watching their parents being reduced to mere commoners.
A royal source has told the Daily Mail that ever-dutiful Beatrice, in particular, has found herself walking a tightrope, torn between filial loyalty and a desire to preserve her own status within the Royal Family as ninth in line to the throne.
Feisty Eugenie, meanwhile, is said to have taken a harder line against her beleaguered father.
Another source, who is close to the princesses, described relations between the four as ‘complicated’.
‘They are in a difficult spot because they have their duties and their royal positions and then they have these personal relationships with their mother and father.
‘It will never be as simple as a right or a wrong for them. It makes it worse that everyone is watching.’
The royal source who spoke to the Daily Mail this week says: ‘It seems that the girls are taking two very different approaches to their father. Beatrice is much more a daddy’s girl and aware of dynasty and her blue blood far more than Eugenie.’
In public, and in private with his two daughters, Andrew has always denied the allegations of Virginia Giuffre, who alleged she was forced to have sex with the former prince as a 17-year-old after being trafficked by Epstein and his then girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
The family in a selfie posted on Instagram, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
Back in 2015, not long after these damaging sexual allegations first emerged in US court documents, Sarah Ferguson gathered the York family together for a crisis summit at Royal Lodge.
Beatrice and Eugenie, at that time in their mid-20s, were well aware of their father’s colourful past, but the damning claims were significantly worse than the ‘Randy Andy’ tales that had previously reached their ears.
That ‘clear-the-air meeting’, says the royal source, was, in effect, a rehearsal for Andrew’s now infamous BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
‘He protested, as he still does, that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s lewd behaviour and that he’d enjoyed his company because it opened important doors for him when he was working as the UK trade envoy,’ says the source.
‘His clincher was that if Epstein really was dodgy then he would certainly not have invited him to Royal Lodge, introduced him to their granny, the late Queen, or invited him to Bea’s 18th birthday party.
‘Unlike Maitlis, the girls accepted their father’s explanations and the assurance that Giuffre was just someone else trying to make money out of royalty.’
It was Beatrice, as we now know, who encouraged her father to take part in that misguided attempt to clear his name with a TV interview. By the time it took place, says the source, Eugenie had already begun to turn against her father.
But, the source adds, Beatrice was blind-sided when her father ‘used the Pizza Express alibi’ during the car-crash interview to explain that he could not have been with Giuffre that night because he had taken his then six-year-old eldest daughter to a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking.
According to the source: ‘Bea baulked at being used as an unwitting alibi and at the nonsense of it. Being in Woking for a children’s party doesn’t stop you being at a Mayfair nightclub later that same night.
‘Father and daughter had quite a heated discussion about it once the Newsnight team were on their way with their scoop in the can.’
The fresh batch of Epstein documents released in the US this week suggest Beatrice had previously advised her mother when the former Duchess of York upset Epstein in a 2011 media interview in which she publicly disowned him.
But while she told the Evening Standard in March that year that her involvement with Epstein had been a ‘gigantic error judgment’, behind the scenes, she was desperate to remain close to the wealthy sex offender who had bailed her out financially time and time again.
In an email Ferguson sent to her ‘supreme friend’ she said that her then 22-year-old daughter agreed with her that it was ‘important’ to brief the press that Epstein had ‘done his penance’ in prison for soliciting sex.
She wrote that Beatrice was present when she called a journalist in April 2011 to say it was ‘wrong’ to call Epstein a sex offender because he was now ‘moving on with his life’. She added that ‘Beatrice and I had a discussion and we agreed that it was important.’
While Beatrice has stuck close to her parents amid their downfall, attending various summits at Royal Lodge while it was still their home, Eugenie has kept more distance, aided by the fact that she lives most of her time with husband Jack Brooksbank and their two sons in Portugal.
She co-founded of The Anti-Slavery Collective in 2017 to raise awareness of labour exploitation, including sex trafficking.
Its first set of accounts, from 2023, reveal that its income that year of £47,890 included a £10,000 donation from her mother’s charity, Sarah’s Trust, which has since shut down. Its income from donations and legacies has fallen sharply in recent years with just £31,000 raised last year.
Royal biographer Andrew Lownie believes that if the princesses want to send out the right signal, they should give up their titles.
‘They do not represent this country, but they are trading on their royal names the whole time,’ he says. ‘They don’t seem to have learnt any lessons from this.’
This ongoing debacle is no doubt detracting from official work being done by the King and the Prince of Wales.
It sucked the oxygen from coverage of William’s visit to Saudi Arabia on Monday. Later that day, the King was heckled about his younger brother while visiting a Lancashire railway station. Soon after he released an extraordinary statement expressing his ‘profound concern’ over allegations about Mountbatten-Windsor and said he was ‘ready to support’ the police.
He is said to be furious, too, that the latest batch of Epstein Files has overshadowed the release of a new Amazon documentary about his lifelong dedication to environmental sustainability and efforts to reconnect humanity with nature.
Given the torrid events that continue to batter the monarchy, its title – Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision – seems a tad optimistic.