President Donald Trump has spoken out after former Prince Andrew lost his royal titles over ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
The president commiserated with the British royal family on Sunday just days after King Charles stripped Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of his titles in a stunning fallout over his years-long friendship with the convicted sex offender.
“I mean, it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to the family,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “That’s been a tragic situation and it’s too bad. I mean I feel badly for the family.”
Last week, Buckingham Palace announced that Andrew would lose his titles and get kicked out of the Royal Lodge over his controversial friendship with the disgraced financier and his legal settlement with Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, who accused him of sexual abuse.
“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him,” the palace said.
Andrew, 65, has long been haunted by the specter of Epstein. The scandal reached a fever pitch in November 2019, when Andrew told the BBC in a disastrous interview that knowing Epstein had “some seriously beneficial outcomes” as he denied ever meeting Giuffre, who took her own life in April.
The controversy generated renewed outrage after The Mail on Sunday and The Sun on Sunday in the U.K. revealed a damning email that Andrew sent Epstein just one day after his infamous photo with Giuffre was published in 2011.
“It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,” Andrew allegedly wrote on Feb. 28, 2011, despite earlier claiming to have ended his friendship with Epstein in 2010.
Giuffre’s family hailed the King’s move a “victory” for her.
“Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family, brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage,” her siblings said in a statement last week. “Virginia Roberts Giuffre, our sister, a child when she was sexually assaulted by Andrew, never stopped fighting for accountability for what had happened to her and to countless other survivors like her.”
Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s brother, urged Trump to follow in the King’s footsteps by releasing the long-awaited legal files related to Epstein.
“President Trump needs to put his big boy pants on and follow suit,” Roberts told CNN. “We need to back our government in a corner where their hands are tied to this, and they have to come forward and do the right thing.”
Trump had a years-long friendship with Epstein.
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002, according to New York Magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Epstein, for his part, said in tapes first obtained by the Daily Beast: “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”
But the two men had a falling out after Epstein allegedly “stole” Trump’s staff—including Giuffre, who worked at Mar-a-Lago when she was 17.
The fervor for the release of the Epstein files has yet to die down, but Trump’s interest in discussing the topic has already worn thin.
“This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” he said in September. “Thousands of pages of documents have been given, but it is really a Democrat hoax because they are trying to get people to talk about something that is totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” he said.
