This is the cover of today’s issue of the Daily Mirror. It’s a photo that places Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend and alleged madam, in the same shot. Photos taken at this event have been circulated before, but this shot, of all of them in the same frame, is apparently rare, rare enough to warrant the front page:
The alliteration was irresistible there. I wouldn’t have been able to avoid it either. But I’m not sure this is a smoking gun, or that it adds anything squicky to an already super squicky scandal involving very wealthy people, politicians, and a royal. But, as we know, images can make a big impact. Sometimes they do what a lot of words can’t. And the sight of all these players who’ve been implicated in an international sex trafficking situation with a pedophile rapist is intended to, finally, amplify a story that for years now frustratingly did not generate the outrage that it should have.
But let’s not give the British tabloids that much credit. The reason Prince Andrew’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein is blowing up now is due in large part to Prince Andrew himself. First there was that shambolic statementthat was released in his namethat he purportedly wrote himself, which was intended to defuse the speculation but, because it was so badly written and handled, only ended up putting more of a spotlight on his mess.
In response to that letter, Virginia Giuffre, who is pictured with Andrew in a photo from 2001, his arm around her waist, under the supervision of Ghislaine Maxwell, dropped a YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID on him at a press conference in New York. So then Andrew and his teamdeployed the Fat Finger Defencein the UK media in a move to discredit the photo. That strategy hasn’t played well either. In fact, it’s only made it worse. It’s turned him into more of a joke because now his new nickname is “Randy Andy with the chubby fingers”. Not exactly how you want to be referred to when you’re in the middle of a sh-t storm about a pedophile and his underage sex slaves. Nobody wants to be thinking about your goddamn fingers when you’re being accused of raping a girl, then 17, who says she was groomed to please you, OH MY GOD!
So now,according to the Daily Mail, Andrew has come home, on a private jet (!), for “crisis talks” after spending two weeks golfing in Spain. Right. How reassuring that he’s approaching this with such urgency, you know? Andrew is taking this seriously! Andrew will gather with his advisors about “how to salvage his reputation going forward”.
如果他担心reputation, why it is that he was staying with Jeffrey Epstein and playing Mr Belvedere, answering Epstein’s door at his New York mansion as girls were coming and going, and getting foot massages inside the house AFTER Epstein had served time for soliciting sex from minors???
安德鲁王子presumably felt that he was entitled to maintain that relationship, that it was within his royal f-cking rights to hang out with whoever he wanted to hang out with, and be “loyal” to the rapist who’d flown him around on private jets and thrown parties for him and invited him to exclusive gatherings in opulent settings, introducing him to powerful, sexy people – and children. That entitlement, for a long time, too long, superseded any concern about reputation. But by all means, let’s turn the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle private jet holiday into a weeklong party because of the hypocrisy of advocating for climate change awareness.
You want to talk hypocrisy? Prince Andrew’s daughter, Princess Eugenie, recently launched the Anti-Slavery Collective to end human trafficking…which includes SEX TRAFFICKING!!! She’s had topostpone the start of a podcastabout the issue because of her father’s friendship with an accused sex trafficker! Which must f-cking suck for her, and her dad is the one who has sabotaged the great work she was aiming to do for the cause.
Looking forward then to the two weeks, at least, worth of front page essays at the Daily Mail and the Sun about how Andrew failed his daughter, and his family, and his mother, the Queen. If the Sussex flight scandal took up a week of headlines, surely the prince and the pedophile can double that?
