Michael D. Shear

You're right.

It was really an explosive moment here in Britain where the public has been following Andrew's travails for a long time.

Now, at eight o'clock in the morning, police arrived at the Sandringham estate, which is a country estate favored by the king and many members of his family.

And they arrested Andrew.

They arrested the former prince, took him into custody under suspicion of what they called misconduct in public office.

What that basically means is that when you were serving in public office, you did something wrong.

You broke the law as part of your duties, your official duties.

Now, the police did not provide any details of the investigation, but the arrest came after reports suggested that Andrew may have shared confidential information with Mr. Epstein while serving as the British trade envoy, which he held from 2001 to 2011.

You're totally right.

It is pretty remarkable.

And the allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior have been in the ether in the public consciousness for more than a decade.

I mean, it dates back to when Virginia Giuffre accused Prince Andrew at the time in 2015 of having been forced to have sex with him on three separate occasions in London, New York, and on Jeffrey Epstein's private island in the Caribbean between 2001 and 2002.

That was when she was just 17 years old.

So that's literally how long the public has been aware of the serious sexual allegations against him.

It was four years later in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein was finally arrested in New York on sex trafficking charges that involved both the accusations by Virginia Giuffre, but of course other women who then came forward.

That case, as everyone knows now, didn't go forward because Jeffrey Epstein died in jail.

Right.

That same year that Jeffrey Epstein dies, Andrew decides that it's time to try to rehabilitate his image.

There had been this photo, very famous photo, that had been seen all over the world of him with his arm around Virginia Giuffre, his accuser.

You know, he decides to sit down with an interviewer from the BBC to try to clear his name and sort of once and for all end all of this endless speculation about what he had or had not done.