The British royal family may never escape the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein, and not just because of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Historian and royal biographer Andrew Lownie said efforts to understand Epstein’s ties to the royal orbit remain hampered by missing records and unanswered questions.
“One of the problems with researching this area is that so much of the material... once it gets into the hands of the British government, it seems to be destroyed,” Lownie told The Daily Beast Podcast host Joanna Coles.
“The logs, for example, for Buckingham Palace, which people have asked to see—first of all—were withheld on national security grounds and then it was said that they’d been destroyed."
Mountbatten-Windsor’s long association with Epstein has been one of the most damaging scandals to hit the British monarchy in decades.
But Lownie argues that the Epstein saga’s true legacy will be about far more than a royal sex scandal.
“The tentacles were spread so widely into so many different countries, my own feeling is this is a story actually about national security,” Lownie said.
“About how it’s very easy for intelligence services to penetrate Britain using the royal family because they have no oversight and some of them are very greedy.”
The slow drip of disclosures surrounding Epstein’s network has steadily expanded the scope of investigations beyond the disgraced financier and the royal most closely associated with him, according to Lownie.
“Each day brings fresh disclosures, fresh connections,” he said.
“I’m certainly getting a lot of people coming forward, particularly in the last few weeks, with stories.”
Lownie said the investigation into Epstein’s network could continue for years as authorities attempt to assemble evidence.
“There’s clearly a lot of material in the Epstein files that would seem to me pretty conclusive about what he did,” he said.
“But they may want to question a whole series of people and mounting that case will take time.”
That process means the scandal surrounding Epstein and the powerful figures connected to him, including the royal family, is unlikely to disappear any time soon.
“This is uncharted waters and it can go in so many different directions depending on who’s prepared to come forward, the evidence that’s there,” Lownie said.
As investigators and journalists continue trying to reconstruct the full scope of Epstein’s network, the saga that once appeared centered on a single disgraced royal may continue to cast a long shadow over the monarchy itself.
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