Prince Andrew’s team initially believed his ‘car crash’ interview with the BBC went well, Emily Maitlis has claimed.
The Duke of York opened up for the first time about his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a Newsnight segment described as a ‘nuclear explosion level bad’ last year.
Presenter Ms Maitlis has revealed Buckingham Palace was ‘happy’ with the interview – until they witnessed the public’s reaction.
Speaking to the Radio Times, she said: ‘We had plenty of engagement with them after it went out. I think their shock was not at the interview itself, but the reaction it caused in the days and weeks afterwards.’
The journalist added that she knew they had something ‘explosive’ after just a few minutes of talking to the royal.
She explained: ‘First, he was tackling the subject matter head on. Secondly, the lack of apology or any real expression of regret told me that the prince still believed that his actions had broadly been the right ones.
‘And thirdly, the level of detail was unlike anything I was expecting.’
However, the ‘penny dropped’ about the significance of the interview when the journalist was in the editing room with editor Esme Wren.
She said: ‘We’d assumed that he’d want to show empathy to the victims or pin the blame on Jeffrey Epstein. We couldn’t understand why he hadn’t done that. We definitely thought he’d be spikier…’
The Newsnight interview, which was in the making for a year, came after Virginia Roberts – now named Virginia Giuffre – claimed she was forced to have sex with the prince three times between 2001 and 2002 at the age of 17.
The father-of-two has ‘categorically’ denied the allegations – but was accused of showing little empathy for Epstein’s victims during the segment.
While being questioned by Ms Maitlis, he claimed he couldn’t have slept with Mrs Giuffre because he had taken daughter Princess Beatrice to a party at Pizza Express the day his accuser claimed it happened.
He also dismissed claims that he was sweating profusely during the nightclub encounter because he had a ‘peculiar medical condition’ that meant he could not sweat, caused by an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War.
The duke’s legal team recently hit back at allegations that he provided ‘zero co-operation’ to US authorities investigating Epstein after America’s Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted a mutual legal assistance (MLA) request to grill him as a witness in a criminal investigation into the paedophile’s offending.
It comes as Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell denies child sex trafficking and perjury allegations. She will go on trial in July 2021.
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