We started the week with a post about Prince Andrew’s sketchy financial dealings so why not end the week with a post about a new docuseries that he and the British royal family might be worried about. The four-part Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich series drops on Netflix on May 27 and a trailer was released this week giving us an idea of what to expect. Probably if you’ve been following the story, some or most of the details won’t be new to you. The difference here though is that all of it has been gathered in one place, to be consumed all at once, as we do when we turn on Netflix, with archive video of Epstein himself, including footage of him being deposed, and most importantly, commentary from many of his victims.
And while there have certainly been newspaper features and magazine articles and television interviews covering the Jeffrey Epstein case, by now we all know that when something shows up on Netflix, it blows up on a whole new level. It also reaches people beyond the internet bubble. On top of that, we know the power of the visual medium. It’s one thing to process a story in black and white, on a screen or on the page. It’s another to mainline four hours of television, hearing people’s voices, watching their body language, observing them refuse to answer questions.
So this could be a problem for Prince Andrew, who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the dead rapist pedophile. Not that Andrew hasn’t been a major problem for the last year or so and a constant problem for his family for decades. Royal aides already tried to ignore the situation for far too long but the victims kept pushing and then Epstein was arrested and then he died and now every time the royal family thinks that maybe people will stop talking about it, there’s an update, a new angle, a Netflix docuseries, and all the sh-t comes back to the forefront.
As you can see from the trailer, Prince Andrew makes an appearance – in the form of the now infamous photo of him with his arm around one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, when she was just 17 years old; it was taken on the night she alleges that she was ordered to have sex with Andrew, which he has repeatedly denied, his defence has been his fat fingers and his defective sweat glands. If they’re showing that photo, for sure Andrew will be discussed … which means that either he or someone from his team will have to watch the whole thing. Because that’s part of the job. If, that is, they’re good at their jobs. Because this is a professional necessity. They have to know what’s in there so that they’re prepared to handle whatever fallout might ensue.
Who’s the lucky person who gets the awesome assignment to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich on Netflix and report back to the Queen? And, um, what does that even look like? Do they put it in writing? Like point form? Or is the update delivered in person? Over the phone? Do they take out the bad words like “pedophile”, “rape”, “pornography” and replace them with gentler euphemisms so as to not offend her noble ears? First of all, what a f-cking insult that what was done to those girls has to be sanitised for the sake of propriety, like there was any propriety being observed in these privileged circles catering to people who thought they could operate beyond the rules. Second, how much longer can they keep protecting him?
