Prince Andrew asked the BBC to “put extra things in” his car crash interview about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, it has been revealed.
King Charles III’s brother sat down with Emily Maitlis in an effort to clear his name, but the tell-all was disastrous to the point he had to step back from public life shortly afterwards.
Now, the one-hour meeting is being dramatized in new Amazon Prime show A Very Royal Scandal, starring Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis.
Prince Andrew attends the Easter Mattins Service at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, England, on March 31, 2024. Former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, who interviewed Andrew for Newsnight, is seen at the Cliveden Literary Festival at Cliveden House on September 30, 2023.
Antony Jones/Getty Images and David Levenson/Getty Images
Maitlis was a guest on ITV’s Good Morning Britain ahead of the show’s release on Thursday and was asked whether the prince had lied.
“I thought that he had tried very hard to remember his lines,” she told the show, adding that he had a request after the interview was wrapped up.
“He asked for certain extra bits to be recorded and one of the things that we found quite complicated was the dilemma as a journalist if somebody asks you to drop something in is that it, you know… are you tampering with it?
“Or are you, you know… you’re disturbing the chronology of the hour that you’ve just recorded.”
‘I thought that he had tried very hard to remember his lines’
Emily @maitlis recalls how Prince Andrew asked for extra bits to be recorded in his historic interview at Buckingham Palace in 2019. pic.twitter.com/o3YVsECYOc
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) September 18, 2024
Prince Andrew’s interview was widely mocked online, including over his response to accuser Virginia Giuffre‘s account of being taken by Epstein to Tramp nightclub in London.
She described dancing with Andrew while he sweated profusely but the prince said she could not be correct because “on that particular day that we now understand is the date which is the 10th of March, I was at home, I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose sort of 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon.”
Another section that was widely commented on came when Maitlis said Giuffre “was very specific about that night, she described dancing with you, you profusely sweating.”
Andrew replied: “There’s a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was it… yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenalin in the Falklands War when I was shot at and I simply… it was almost impossible for me to sweat.
“And it’s only because I have done a number of things in the recent past that I am starting to be able to do that again. So I’m afraid to say that there’s a medical condition that says that I didn’t do it so therefore…”
Maitlis told Good Morning Britain: “The team debate was how do we feel if we’re putting in these extra pieces. And on the one hand, well, he’s asked you to do that. He asked you to put in the sweating thing afterwards, you know.
“He asked to expand upon the Pizza Express alibi afterwards and so we felt we couldn’t ignore his wishes but it left us feeling slightly vulnerable I think as journalists that we’d sort of come back and put extra things in.”
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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