Sick question Prince Andrew asked Emily Maitlis before infamous Newsnight interview exposed in A Very Royal Scandal
THE sick question Prince Andrew allegedly asked journalist Emily Maitlis before his infamous interview on Newsnight has been revealed in a new show.
The shocking claim is made in the upcoming Prime Video series A Very Royal Scandal, which recounts the 2019 televised chat.
Emily has served as executive producer on the new TV show, and in the first episode it is revealed Prince Andrew had some terms before agreeing to the interview.
The scene shows Prince Andrew, played by Michael Sheen, meeting with the BBC before the chat, along with his daughter Princess Beatrice and his private secretary Amanda Thirsk.
Before agreeing to do the chat, the Duke of York leans forwards and asks “Have any of you ever been victims of abuse?”
In the scene, Emily’s two employees look shocked and clarify they haven’t, and Emily, played by Ruth Wilson, appears to freeze.
After a moment of silence, she replies: “No.”
Andrew then adds: “Nothing in your life?” to which Emily replies: “Nothing that bears comparison.”
Amanda then asks: “So your judgement wouldn’t be coloured by anything at all?”
Emily responds: “Not at all.”
Following the meeting, it appears the very personal question is playing on Emily’s mind, as she later tells her husband: “You know at the end of my meeting with Prince Andrew he asked me if I had ever been the victim of abuse? It felt horrible.”
Her husband Mark Gwynne replies: “What did you say?” to which Emily answers “well nothing, having a stalker is not remotely comparable and I don’t want to talk about it.”
The journalist was stalked for 27 years by Edward Vines, who she met at Cambridge University in the 1990s.
Vine was jailed for eight years after attempting to breach a restraining order for the 20th time.
He wrote eight letters addressed to the ex-Newsnight presenter and her mother declaring his “unrequited” love for her, which he attempted to send from HMP Nottingham between May 2020 and December 2021.
Vine insisted she address “her behaviour in 1990” and he claimed she “snubbed him at Cambridge University.”
Andrew's infamous Newsnight interview
PRINCE Andrew's painful Newsnight interview in November 2019 saw him grilled over his links with dead paedo Jeffrey Epstein, his pal Ghislaine Maxwell and allegations he had sex with a 17-year-old.
During the interview, Andrew said he had “no recollection” of meeting Virginia Giuffre – who he is alleged to have had sex with at Maxwell’s house in London.
He even provided an “alibi” claiming that the night the alleged encounter took place he was at a Pizza Express birthday party in Woking with his daughter Princess Beatrice.
Epstein committed suicide in a jail cell in August 2019, just a month after he was arrested for sex trafficking minors.
A flood of horrific accounts of his abuse of young girls then followed.
In 2022, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was jailed for 20 years for abusing and grooming dozens of girls for twisted Epstein.
The convicted sex trafficker and Andrew would allegedly flirt with each other when they hung out together on Epstein’s notorious Caribbean island Little St James, the former housekeeper has claimed.
After Maxwell’s sentence, the Duke of York was said to be the lawyers’ “next target” of a probe into the sex ring controlled by multimillionaire paedophile Epstein.
The Duke agreed to a £12million settlement with sex abuse accuser Virginia Giuffre in February 2022.
Amazon’s A Very Royal Scandal airs tonight after a trailer was released last Wednesday.
The Duke had sat down with Maitlis for a wide-ranging interview in 2019, and discussed his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
During the notorious “car crash” sit down, the disgraced Prince Andrew claimed he could not have had sex with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre because, on the day she alleged it happened, he was at Pizza Express in Woking for a kids’ party with daughter Beatrice.
He also insisted that he could not have “sweated profusely”, as was claimed, due to a medical condition he said he developed while serving in the Falklands War as a Navy helicopter pilot.
Andrew also defended his relationship with Epstein, saying that knowing the financier had “some seriously beneficial outcomes”, but added that his reason for meeting him in 2010 was to “put an end to the friendship”.
Despite the backlash to his “excuses”, Emily has revealed that Prince Andrew actually wanted to spend more time talking about Pizza Express and sweating.
She said: “Once we’d finished the interview, I said as a courtesy, ‘Is there anything that didn’t get included that you wanted to discuss?’ and Prince Andrew said, ‘Well actually, there were a couple of things. You didn’t include my alibi’.
“He wanted to talk about the fact that he’d been at Pizza Express on the night in question.
“And it was a very complicated moment for us because, on the one hand, I knew that if he included some of the stuff that he wanted to talk about, for example the sweating and the Pizza Express alibi, it was not going to help his case, in fact, it was actually going to make it look worse.”
Emily added: “I felt kind of a responsibility to not let him walk into that, but on the other hand, I also felt a responsibility to include the things that he had said were important to him to say.”
'There is no way back for Prince Andrew', claims PR guru
PRINCE Andrew’s reputation is damaged beyond repair and he will never be able to engineer a return to public life, according to one of Britain’s top PR gurus.
Brand and culture expert Nick Ede, who runs East of Eden PR agency, called the shamed royal “deluded” for thinking he could ever return to royal duties and urged him to give up and ‘enjoy his life’ in exile.
It follows the release of Scoop – a Netflix movie based on the 2019 interview he gave to Newsnight.
Nick said: “There is no way back for him.
“I think you know this perpetual idea that he could still be back. Nobody cares. He hasn’t got fans.
“There’s nobody out there who’s going ‘We want to see Prince Andrew’, not one single person. I think he has to realise that. But I think it’s going to take a long, long time for him to actually understand. It’s very deluded.
“In my opinion, the best thing that he could do is just enjoy his life. He’s got gorgeous daughters. He has a great relationship with Fergie, he has a lovely house.
“Just live a quiet life.”
Reflecting on the interview five years ago – the fallout of which saw Andrew step back from royal duties “for the foreseeable future” – Nick compared the fallout to Frost vs Nixon and said he would have urged him not to do it.
He said: “If I had been advising him, I would say, go quiet, be quiet, just go to ground. You know you’re a prince. Enjoy the life that you lead, but do not open this can of worms, because that’s what it is.
“There was no admission that a relationship with somebody like Epstein was terribly toxic. There was no idea that there were loads of victims of trafficking whose lives were completely ruined by Epstein. He didn’t seem to think that the association he had with that man was anything but positive.
“I think his worst gaffe was obviously being in that interview and agreeing to it in the first place, for not realising that he’s actually going to be interviewed by a very, very good journalist who is going to ask him questions which he might not like.
“But I think what this has done is really shown how archaic Prince Andrew is in his opinions and thoughts.
“Read the room. He’s never read a room at all.”