Images that chart the downfall of a prince who willingly sold his soul

Jeffrey Epstein could scent the value of a snatched photograph as keenly as any wolfish paparazzo. Like the press pack who camped outside Mayfair nightclubs in the hope of snapping 3am trysts, the sex trafficker understood and collected the images that could upend marriages and careers and gilded lives overnight.

Epstein offered his partners in crime – that dismal procession of billionaires, grifters and creeps – the debauch of a private island, a private jet, a secure desert compound, all apparently far removed from the threat of the telephoto lenses that might threaten their disgrace. But even as he promised his guests discretion and access to his coerced “harem”, he made sure that the scenes of their casual compromise were documented and the evidence filed.

There was, the recently disclosed emails suggest, never a need for direct threats or blackmail; Epstein knew the morning-after memory of a flash bulb was probably enough to guarantee anxiety, sycophancy and one-off donations or trade secrets or whatever. Those albums of now-redacted “party snaps” – so throwaway, so playful! – were, for years no doubt, not only his insurance policy but also his quiet collateral.

Among those photographic subjects, it’s clear there was no more gullible a dupe than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the Thames Valley Police suspect formerly known as prince. Epstein was a man who appears to have taken pleasure in corrupting some of the more guarded reputations on the planet – there seemed a private determination, for example, to prove that Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky were not immune to his bestial charm. By that standard, it can’t have been much of a challenge to expose the baser instincts of a skint and jowly mid-life British royal with crippling attachment issues.

Still, the four infamous photographs that chart the demise of Mountbatten-Windsor on these pages represent a kind of case study in Epstein’s methods – that lucrative mission to prove that, eventually, every male in his orbit was, deep down, no better than him.

Viewed in succession, the pictures look like one of those evolution illustrations – Neanderthal to Homo sapiens – in reverse. The royal prince, a sometime war hero, starts off upright and stiff-backed (though his 41-year-old hand around the bare 17-year old waist of Virginia Giuffre provides a glimpse of depravities to come). His passage across the news pages in the subsequent 25 years sees him regress, however, under Epstein’s influence, to a more animal state: first on all fours above a faceless young woman, then last week desperately prone in the back of car after being released from police questioning about misconduct in public office, his attitude suggesting to the world that he could not sink any closer to earth if he tried. (One of the memes of recent days has this image on a piece of coronation-style crockery).

That fall began, in public at least, with the picture taken with Epstein in New York’s Central Park in December 2010. It seems, in retrospect, that Epstein orchestrated not only the then prince into that image but perhaps the photographer into creating it. From Emily Maitlis’s toe-curling interview for the BBC’s Newsnight, the photograph came during the fateful long weekend Andrew spent at Epstein’s home soon after the latter’s release after being convicted of charges of soliciting sex and soliciting sex from a minor.

To Maitlis, Mountbatten-Windsor insisted he was there to end the friendship with Epstein. The more plausible explanation for his home stay with the notorious pimp was that he was there to shore up their association, to protect himself against future revelations, and perhaps to secure some further “loans” to plug the black holes in his and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson’s bankrupt finances.

The visit came at a moment when the News of the World in particular was again sniffing blood around Andrew and Fergie, the two most venal royals in a contested field. Earlier that year, it had entrapped the then Duchess of York into selling access to her ex-husband for £500,000 to the paper’s “fake sheikh”, undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood (Ferguson was recorded accepting £27,600 as a down payment, saying “that [money] opens up everything you would ever wish for. I can open any door you want, and I will for you. Look after me and he'll look after you… you'll get it back tenfold.”) When, in late November, the paper received a tip-off that Andrew would be staying in New York on an unscheduled visit, it put a team of four on to his round-the-clock surveillance, led by Mahmood. A stringer, Annette Witheridge, and a photographer, Jae Donnelly, were camped in an SUV outside Epstein’s house on East 71st St (an address he shared with Woody Allen and Bill Cosby); Mahmood himself was in a hotel a few blocks away.

It is hard to imagine that Epstein and his guest’s security detail were not aware of the hacks’ presence. Each time a young woman pulling an overnight bag went in or out of the Epstein house, Witheridge told Vanity Fair magazine, she would try to accost them for questioning. Still, just after lunch on the last day of the royal visit, Epstein emerged from the house with Andrew dutifully in tow.

Had Epstein calculated that a photograph with the prince might send a powerful signal of his own return to public life? In any case, Andrew had to be brought to heel – and what clearer way for Epstein to remind his pet royal who was boss than to take him, against all his instincts to be anonymous (Mountbatten-Windsor styled himself, deludedly, in emails to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as “the Invisible Man”) for walkies in the park? The journalists on stake-out could hardly believe their luck. Donnelly quickly worked out their route, legged it along Fifth Avenue and got his big money shot – the two in businesslike conversation in their hiking boots – just as Epstein, perhaps, planned.

Andrew would not have known of the existence of that picture when, a couple of weeks after that visit, he allegedly forwarded to Epstein the series of emails that led to his arrest last week. Among other things, those confidential briefing notes for his role as British trade envoy allegedly gave the disgraced financier an assessment of the business opportunities in Helmand province, Afghanistan, where 103 British soldiers serving queen and country had died that year. The notes alerted Epstein to “significant high value mineral deposits” in the province and the “potential for low cost extraction: this includes valuable natural resources such as marble, gold, iridium, uranium and thorium and also possible deposits of oil and gas”. The information, in the emails released last month by the US Department of Justice, was prepared by UK government officials, working for the Helmand reconstruction team.

Two months after that exchange on 20 February 2011, the News of the World finally ran the photograph it had taken in Central Park under the headline Prince Andy & the paedo. It was, later that same year, one of the front pages that the doomed tabloid could point at to try to justify its methods in the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking and press standards. As the paper’s former lead reporter Paul McMullan famously declared in his evidence to that enquiry: “In 21 years of invading people's privacy, I've never found anybody doing any good… Privacy is for paedos.”

That single picture alone did not guarantee Mountbatten-Windsor’s disgrace, but it opened the space for the images that did. In March 2011, in the course of an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Virginia Giuffre produced a photograph taken at Maxwell’s house in Belgravia to support her allegation that she had been trafficked to London by Epstein and Maxwell to meet the prince (she later alleged that Mountbatten-Windsor had raped her on at least two occasions, allegations he continues to strongly deny). The Mail on Sunday paid Giuffre $140,000 for the use of the picture and $20,000 for two interviews that accompanied it.

As soon as the photograph imprinted itself on to the world’s retina, Mountbatten-Windsor started a PR offensive to try to suggest it was faked and he had never met Giuffre, while at the same time allegedly instructing his security detail to dig up dirt on her. Despite his puerile suggested alibi (no picture has ever emerged of him having pizza in Woking), there could never be an innocent explanation for the existence of that photograph (Epstein and Maxwell both appeared to confirm its veracity in the emails).

A couple of months before his mother’s jubilee celebrations in 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor tried to shut down the matter by paying Giuffre – who took her own life in 2025 – a reported £12m out-of-court settlement, while accepting no guilt or liability to her civil suit accusing him of several sexual crimes.

In that first photograph and, with hindsight, in nearly every photograph, Mountbatten-Windsor wears the startled look of a man who lives in perpetual fear of being found out. His portrait face is that of the eternal imposter, never quite present or correct, even when decked up in dress uniform. Perhaps that is the perpetual royal mask – the creeping knowledge that people only look or listen or care because of what you were born to rather than who you are.

Watching again his unfathomable stream of nonsense to Maitlis, you sense a man who knows somewhere deep down that one day his secrets will out. Certainly, if you asked AI for an image of a man who had sold his soul, one quick answer would be the picture of the former prince on his hands and knees in a sex-trafficker’s mansion above an apparently comatose young woman with her face blacked out for legal reasons. In the background of that picture – a nice touch – you see a man (probably Epstein) with his bare feet up on a massage table beside a pile of towels, that first gateway temptation that apparently led to all the rest.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s demon red-eye, just hinted at in the first picture with Giuffre has, by the time this picture emerged last month, become a kind of personal signature, a window to his inner self. He looks up to the waist-high camera with flashlit eyes boiling as if sensing his fate.

By the time of the fourth picture, the immediately indelible image captured by the Reuters photographer Phil Noble outside Aylsham police station last Thursday afternoon (Noble waited for hours following a tip off and took six pictures, with only this one in focus) that red eye has taken on the full exploding migraine-quality of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. It comes at the end of perhaps the longest and most inevitable day in the life of the queen’s much indulged second son, that on which he became the first person of British royal birth to be arrested since Charles I was captured by Roundheads 350 years ago (it is hard to imagine that the bewigged martyr-king, Cromwell’s “man of blood”, could have looked any more stricken).

Reports suggest that Andrew had been planning to spend the day –his 66th birthday – alone in his muddy exile at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate with his seven dogs (two of them corgis inherited from his mother). He was woken instead at 8am by 15 officers from two police forces. Six of them were stationed at the rear of the property to prevent any attempt at escape.

An (inevitable) source told the Sun that the team from Thames Valley, supported by Norfolk Police, arrived with “stealth, speed and surprise… Andrew was expecting to spend the day with seven dogs. Instead he had 15 coppers at his door”.

You suspect, in that moment, that the Invisible Man had never felt more seen.

Photograph by Daniel Leal / AFP via Getty Images, Jae Donnelly/ The Sun/News Syndication, UK, PLFImage supplied by Capital Pictures, Phil Noble/Reuters