Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are distancing themselves from their disgraced father after his arrest, saying they now wonder if they were “used.”
“They’re trying to stay away from it‚" a source told People about the two daughters of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, 66, who was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office and whose royal title has been stripped because of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The source revealed that Beatrice, 37, and Eugenie, 35, have focused on “protecting their own children” from their father’s case and have also been “putting pieces of the puzzle together... realizing they may have been used.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment.
The statement comes as British public opinion has been turning against the princesses and their mother, Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, who was also implicated in the Epstein scandal, as she called the sex offender who died in prison in 2019 her “supreme friend” and received money from him.
As the scandal implicating both their parents in the Epstein files—including photographs of their father leaning over a woman sprawled on the floor and images of him with Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide at 41 and had accused Andrew of sexual abuse—went on, the princesses maintained relationships with both parents.
According to The Daily Mail, Princess Beatrice invited her parents to her daughter, Athena’s, christening in December. The princess also joined Andrew just weeks before his arrest with her eldest daughter, Sienna, for horseback riding at Windsor Castle in January, The Sun reported.
“They’re heartbroken—but a dad is still your dad, and a mom is still your mom,” the source told People about the princesses, who, according to sources who spoke with Woman magazine, have taken “different positions” in relation to their father, with Eugenie trying to distance herself more from her parents.
Files released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) have shown that both Ferguson and the ex-prince mentioned their daughters in correspondence with Epstein, even after he was convicted in a Florida state court in 2008 on one count each of soliciting a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution.
Emails show that Andrew had sent Epstein photographs of Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie when they were in their 20s, two years after he told the BBC he ended all contact with the convicted sex offender.
Meanwhile, in another email, Epstein asked Ferguson when she was coming to New York, to which she allegedly replied: “Not sure yet. Just waiting for Eugenie to come back from a shagging weekend!!”
According to The Mirror, Eugenie was two days short of her 20th birthday when the crude email was sent.
Epstein was accused of operating a widespread network that trafficked and sexually abused underage girls in the early 2000s, with victims as young as 14 or 15.
In an interview with the BBC given in 2019, Andrew had used taking his daughter Beatrice to Pizza Express as an alibi for an accusation by Giuffre that he forced her to have sex with him when she was 17.
“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 or 5 in the afternoon,” Andrew told the BBC of the day that Giuffre said she met the ex-prince, denying the allegations.
“He believed having sex with me was his birthright,” Giuffre wrote in her posthumous memoir about Andrew.
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