NYTimes | When members of the British royal family
consent to warts-and-all television interviews about their troubled
private lives, it generally has the effect of roiling the waters rather
than calming them.
So when Prince Andrew set out to explain his friendship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a BBC interview broadcast Saturday night, it backfired predictably.
Viewers
were left shaking their heads at the wisdom of consenting to a
polite-but-relentless grilling by the journalist Emily Maitlis in the
first place. Many said they found his statements alternately defensive,
unpersuasive or just plain strange.
Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York, repeatedly denied accusations by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
that he had sex with her when she was 17 years old and had been offered
to him by Mr. Epstein. Under insistent questioning by Ms. Maitlis, the
duke insisted he had “no recollection” of meeting Ms. Giuffre.
But he could not explain the photograph
taken in a London house that appeared to show him with his arm around
the girl’s bare waist, and with Mr. Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, smiling in the background.
He
disputed her account of an alleged meeting between him and Ms. Giuffre
in a club in London. She has claimed that he sweated profusely while
they danced, but he told the BBC that he could not have sweated while
dancing with her at the time because he had a medical condition, dating
from his combat tour in the Falklands War, that did not allow him to
perspire.
