Pity the people who have to be around Prince Andrew this weekend. There might be a lot of stomping and door slamming, if he’s a stomper or a door slammer. Of course he isn’t. He’s been raised well, and royal. And royals don’t stomp their feet or slam doors. Royals also “don’t guest-edit magazines”. No, proper royals are embroiled in international sex trafficking scandals involving dead rapist pedophiles.
Tonight’s episode of NBC’s Dateline will focus on Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. Six of his accusers sat down with Savannah Guthrie for NBC News, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre in “her first broadcast interview”. She speaks about being recruited and groomed by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and describes the night in London, when she was 17, when she met Prince Andrew. They went to a club and then they went back to Ghislaine Maxwell’s house. She then says that “Prince Andrew abused her two more times”. This video is six minutes. Worth your time.
As mentioned in the piece, Buckingham Palace continues to vigorously deny that Prince Andrew was aware of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and that he did not rape Virginia Roberts Giuffre. She knows he’ll continue to call her a liar. And she’s still out here with the other survivors looking for answers to figure out how Jeffrey Epstein was able to carry on with this sh-t for so long. Some of that “reckoning”, as the Dateline special is called, will be hard facts (identities and connections and deals) that they hope will be exposed in the investigation. Much of it, though, will be intangible. I go back to that piece by James Stewart in the New York Times published last month about his meeting with Jeffrey Epstein last year and this paragraph in particular:
“…[Epstein] was more at ease discussing his interest in young women. He said that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.”
He can’t have been the only person in his circle to believe that. Probably a lot of people in his circle, the ones his victims were being trafficked to, convinced themselves of the same. These are and were very wealthy, very resourceful, very powerful people who were often above the law and above social standard. Or they set their own social standard and expect everyone to follow. Which, you know, could also be another way to describe being royal. Not that Prince Andrew would ever take advantage of his privilege like that. He’s always been an excellent, upstanding representative of his family.
