The British royal family released a statement today about Prince Andrew. I know that you don’t need me to tell you why Prince Andrew is in the news but, you know, maybe in a hundred years, if the internet is still around and someone stumbles across this site, they might need the context. And the context is this: Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the dead rapist pedophile, and has been accused by his victims of knowing about the sex trafficking and even participating in the exploitation of girls. Which wasn’t new. In fact it’s old. What’s new is that Prince Andrew was interviewed on BBC Newsnight and his performance was… “unbecoming”. So now this: 

Prince Andrew is saying that he was the one who asked Her Majesty if he could “step back” but these things usually happen by committee and, clearly, they didn’t see any other option. Andrew f-cked it up so badly on Newsnight that nothing can be salvaged at this point – which is why he was advised to NOT do the interview in the first place. 

I want to be clear here, though, because it’s important. He hasn’t been benched because of the public outcry over whatever it is that he did or didn’t do (he has always maintained his innocence) with Jeffrey Epstein, the dead rapist pedophile, and his victims. If that were enough to bench him, it would have happened years ago. It would have happened this summer, when Epstein died. It would have happened after Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s many statements. This is about Prince Andrew’s interview. If he hadn’t have done the interview, nothing would have changed. And I’m making that distinction because it’s more about embarrassment than it is about the exploitation and abuse of women. There is no victory on that front, not yet, not here. 

But there is a lot of failure. First and foremost, obviously, women have been failed. For as long as Jeffrey Epstein was enabled to commit his crimes, women were failed. In this case, specifically, with respect to Prince Andrew and these new developments, on top of failing the victims, there is of course a failure of character and a failure of counsel. We are dealing with a privileged aristocrat (is that redundant?) and an incompetent staff. 

Because now that we’ve established that this interview is what sank him, HOWWWWWWW did we get here? Jason Stein quit after less than a month working on Team York because Andrew and others persisted in wanting to do the interview. We’ve already gone over that. But after the interview went down, AFTERWARDS, after he talked about his Inactive Sweat Glands, after he walked journalist Emily Maitlis out of Buckingham Palace, after they’d spent 40 minutes talking, after she practically scolded him for calling Jeffrey Epstein’s raping and pedophile-ing “unbecoming”, after all of that…

Nobody sounded the alarms? 

They should have been damage-controlling that sh-t the minute the interview wrapped, before the cameras were turned off. He had to have had handlers present for the interview, right? They would have heard what we heard? If those handlers knew what the f-ck they were doing, they would have stepped in and negotiated more time – hey, Emily, we think the Duke might have more to say. But he has to have a quick meeting with X (make up a fake name here, whatever) and it’ll only take 15 minutes, so can you stay and we’ll come back and pick up where we left off? 

That way, they pull him into some side room, or whatever the f-ck you call a side room at Buckingham Palace (probably a ballroom) and get that fool to memorise a statement about sympathy for the victims. You encourage him to talk ad nauseam about how badly he feels for them. You throw him back out there for as long as it takes for him to express at least ONE EMPATHETIC thought about what these girls went through. AT THE VERY LEAST.

And then you put together a f-cking war room to see how you can get the jump on the BBC to at least try to have some control over the narrative. You have to at least try. 

They didn’t. Because they either sat there and held their breath, hoping that it wasn’t as bad as they thought it was and the BBC would do Prince Andrew a solid and blow gold up his ass or they actually thought, even though they were in the room, that it wasn’t that bad. And imagine that? Imagine being the person staffing Andrew that day and walking away from that mess all like, OK, that seemed to go well, we don’t have to do anything more, we’ve done our jobs today, let’s have some tea.

That’s another layer on this debacle, you know? The possibility that Andrew’s team just stood around as he talked about his Inactive Sweat Gland condition and being so honourable he had to break up with the rapist pedophile in person but still stayed at his house for four days and all the rest of it, and THEY WEREN’T CONCERNED, they were so unconcerned that they didn’t take action, is terrifying. Because, again, it’s just girls. What happens to girls at the hands of powerful men isn’t a concern. 

Prince Andrew might going away for a while but attitudes like this, they haven’t gone away. So, really, nobody wins.