Andrew
hoped to meet Jeffrey Epstein after his prison release, emails reveal
Publication
of 2010 correspondence comes two days after Mountbatten Windsor was stripped of
his titles
Sammy
Gecsoyler
Sat 1 Nov
2025 13.40 GMT
The
former Duke of York told Jeffrey Epstein “it would be good to catch up in
person” months after the convicted sex offender was released from prison, newly
released emails reveal.
The
publication of the correspondence comes two days after Andrew Mountbatten
Windsor was stripped of his titles and struck from the official roll of the
peerage in an attempt by Buckingham Palace to halt the damage caused by the
former duke’s spiralling scandals.
Epstein
was jailed for soliciting prostitution from a minor in July 2009. In email
exchanges between the pair released on Friday, the disgraced financier
suggested to Mountbatten Windsor on April 15 2010 that he meet the former JP
Morgan executive Jes Staley, who was banned from the UK banking sector for life
in June for misleading the watchdog over his relationship with Epstein.
Mountbatten
Windsor replied that he would not be in the UK but would “make sure I meet
[Staley] soon on another trip”.
“Also I
have no immediate plans to drop by New York but I think I should at some stage
soon. I’ll look and see if I can make a couple of days before the summer. It
would be good to catch up in person.”
The pair
were pictured together in Central Park in New York in December that year in a
meeting that Mountbatten Windsor later called a “wrong decision”.
During
his disastrous 2019 interview with the BBC’s Newsnight, Mountbatten Windsor
said the “sole purpose” of the visit was to halt contact with Epstein and that
he met him in person because breaking the news “over the telephone was the
chicken’s way of doing it”. He nevertheless stayed at Epstein’s New York
mansion for several days.
“I wanted
to make sure that if I was going to go and see him, I had to make sure that
there was enough time between his release because it wasn’t something that I
was going into in a hurry, but I had to go and see him. I had to go and see
him. I had to talk,” he said.
Mountbatten
Windsor said the conversation ended in a mutual agreement to cut contact, which
he claimed to have kept to. A separate cache of court documents released in
January, however, showed that a “member of the British royal family”, believed
to be the former duke, emailed Epstein saying: “Keep in close touch and we’ll
play some more soon!!!!”
The
correspondence was released on Friday in unsealed court documents from a 2023
legal case between the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan.
The
government of the territory, where Epstein owned a private island and conducted
most of his financial affairs, sued the bank over its alleged dealings with the
billionaire. JP Morgan denied the claims, saying it was not aware of Epstein’s
activities and it settled the cases without admitting liability.
The court
documents also reveal that JP Morgan warned the US government about more than
$1bn in transactions linked to Epstein that were possibly related to reports of
human trafficking.
Pressure
had mounted on Buckingham Palace to take further action against the former duke
after the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir and revelations
about the terms of his residency at Royal Lodge, where it was confirmed he
lived effectively rent-free.
Giuffre,
who died by suicide in April aged 41, repeated her allegations against the
former duke in her memoir released last month. She says she was forced to have
sex with Mountbatten Windsor on three occasions, including when she was 17 and
also during an orgy after being trafficked by Epstein. Mountbatten Windsor
vehemently denies the allegations.
It was
revealed on Friday that Mountbatten Windsor is in line to receive a large
one-off payment and an annual stipend designed to prevent him overspending in
his new life as a commoner after a back-and-forth about where he would go after
leaving Royal Lodge.
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