By Nancy Dillon
New York Daily News
Heir today, gone tomorrow.
The final straw came last week, but a British royal’s journey from Randy Andy to pariah prince was decades in the making.
Prince Andrew’s dating deeds made him a British tabloid darling in the ’70s and ’80s, but it took a disastrous BBC interview on Nov. 16 defending his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to get him bounced from Buckingham Palace.
Within four days, Andrew issued a statement that said he was going to “step back from public duties for the foreseeable future.”
“It has become clear to me over the last few days that the circumstances relating to my former association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption to my family’s work and the valuable work going on in the many organizations and charities that I am proud to support,” read the official palace message.
Reports say his monarch mom fired him, yanking his $320,000 annual palace salary.
The duke became prince non grata after he not only failed to express any compassion for Epstein’s victims in the TV sit-down but also managed to confirm that his 2010 stay at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion — after the predator served 13 months for procuring a minor for prostitution — included a dinner party.
Confronted with photographic evidence he at least met a teen Epstein “sex slave” who says she was coerced into sleeping with him, the 59-year-old told the BBC he believes the image was “faked.”
The vice admiral then bizarrely boasted that an “overdose of adrenalin” suffered in the Falklands War left him unable to perspire, so the woman’s claim he that he was sweating like a pig actually exonerated him.
The interview was widely panned in the British media, with Royal Central editor Charlie Proctor calling it a “plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion.”
Here’s a look back at some of the antics and damaging claims behind Andrew’s downfall:
The young party prince
As a burgeoning bachelor in the early 1980s, Andrew frequently squired models and actresses around town.
Catherine Oxenberg says he proposed marriage when she was only 18 years old. She declined and later landed a role on “Dynasty.”
Andrew subsequently dated Koo Stark, an American actress who appeared in multiple movies with explicit sexual content. After the couple took a high-profile trip to Mustique, the relationship fizzled.
The prince moved on to Vicki Hodge, an actress who previously dated Ringo Starr and appeared in the 1974 comedy flick “Confessions of a Sex Maniac.” He also was linked to Catherine Rabett, who later played a Bond girl in the 1987 movie “The Living Daylights.”
Marriage to Fergie
Andrew seemed to settle down in 1986 when he married Sarah Ferguson in an elaborate royal wedding at Westminster Abbey. The young couple went on to have two daughters — Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie — but the union ended in 1992 with an amicable announcement the couple were separating. They divorced four years later. Ferguson went on to joke with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in 1996 that the marriage floundered as she watched videos while Andrew “had 27 concubines.”
In 2010, when Ferguson was caught on tape by the News of the World taking $40,000 as a down payment for access to her ex, Andrew denied knowledge of the scheme.
A year later, Ferguson admitted to the Evening Standard that she accepted $19,000 from Epstein to pay a debt as she struggled to control her lavish spending.
The financier offered the bail out after speaking to Andrew about his ex-wife’s money woes. In the same interview with newspaper, Ferguson called the transaction a “terrible, terrible error of judgement.”
Ferguson expressed her support for Andrew earlier this week.
“It is time for Andrew to stand firm now, and that he has, and I am with him every step of the way and that is my honor. We have always walked tall and strong, he for me and me for him,” the duchess wrote on Instagram.
Jeffrey Epstein Era
Andrew told the BBC he first met Epstein in 1999 through his friendship with British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father, newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, owned The New York Daily News for less than a year in 1991.
The randy royal hosted Epstein at the Queen’s private Scottish retreat in Aberdeenshire that year and joined him at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida in 2000, the Daily Mail reported.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre claims that in 2001, when she was 17 years old, she was coerced into sleeping with Andrew after Epstein groomed her to be a “sex slave.” Giuffre, now 35, says she had sex with the prince three times — at Maxwell’s London home, at Epstein’s New York townhouse and at the financier’s private compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The prince “categorically” denied the allegations in his interview with the BBC. He said Giuffre’s account of him “pouring with perspiration” when they allegedly danced at a club in 2001 proved she was mistaken because his strange medical condition prevented him from sweating. He also dismissed the photo showing his arm around Giuffre’s waist as possibly forged because “public displays of affection are not something that I do.”
Public PDA
After telling the British Broadcasting Company he strenuously avoids hugging or touching women in public, Prince Andrew became the subject of a worldwide search for photos proving that false. The hunt ended quickly. Images splashed across a bevy of British papers last week showed Andrew playfully embracing women at parties on the French Riviera.
One photo from 2007 showed him getting handsy with American socialite Chris Von Aspen. “He followed her everywhere she went, even to the bathroom, and at one point he gave her a head massage,” artist Jeffery Dread told the Evening Standard. Another photo from 2008 showed Andrew with his hand on the backside Canadian socialite Pascale Bourbeau.
“He was clearly having a full-blown midlife crisis. He would have been 47 or 48 at the time, divorced from Sarah Ferguson and basking in the attention he got from young women,” a source with knowledge of the parties told the Daily Mail.
While the prince attempted to exit his royal duties gracefully, his spiral continued.
Buckingham Palace booted him from his private office space, and sources told the Telegraph his hope of finding refuge at his privately run Pitch@Palace initiative was no more.
Andrew stepped down from the start-up competition for entrepreneurs Friday amid an exodus of sponsors including KPMG and Bosch, sources told the newspaper.
Chris Jackson/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II, center, and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, right, during Trooping The Colour, the Queen’s annual birthday parade on June 8 in London.
Emily Michot/Miami Herald Attorney David Boies walks with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleges that in 2001, when she was 17 years old, she was coerced into sleeping with Andrew after Jeffrey Epstein groomed her to be a “sex slave.”
