Chapter 1: What led to the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor?
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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In the week since the Justice Department released millions of documents in the Epstein files, executives have lost their companies, lawyers have resigned, but it was unclear who, if anyone, would face any kind of legal consequence.
That changed on Thursday, when Andrew Mountbatten, the former Prince Andrew, Duke of York, was arrested in England. But the former prince may never face legal accountability for many of the criminal allegations that have dogged him for years.
Today, my colleagues Michael Scheer and Nicholas Confessore explain why the prince was arrested, how the blast radius for this scandal has widened, and why, to many people, consequences still feel so elusive. It's Friday, February 20th. So, Michael, we are here to talk to you today because it feels like arguably one of the biggest shoes to drop has happened in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
And specifically, we're talking about Andrew Mountbatten, formerly known as Prince Andrew of the British royal family. He was arrested. Tell us what happened and what he was arrested for.
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.
And what does that mean?
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Chapter 2: What allegations have been made against Prince Andrew?
And in it, it portrays Andrew's behavior in a much more detailed and damning way. King Charles at that point strips the prince of his title, the Duke of York, says he can't be called a prince anymore, and ultimately kicks the prince out of his home that he'd lived in on the property of Windsor Castle for about 20 years.
Obviously, nobody wants to get kicked out of their home, but this is not exactly like he's being banished to Siberia.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, he was clearly embarrassed by all of the press, but he's still, at the end of the day, eighth in line to the throne, and the consequences were mostly social consequences, not anything else.
And then, of course, in January, the United States releases this enormous trove of files, three million files. Journalists all over the world have not even finished picking through these files. But what emerges very quickly are more damning details about Prince Andrew. So walk us through what we have seen come out of those files so far.
Right. I think that, as you said, there were a lot of details about how close the two men were and the number of times that they were together, both at parties and other places. But I think the most damning thing was yet another photo. And this one was of Andrew appearing to kind of kneel over a woman who was lying on the floor. Her face is blacked out, so you can't see who it is.
And it's hard to tell whether she was conscious or not. But that photo... like the first one so many years earlier, really has crystallized the sense of outrage over this idea that he was inappropriate with young women. And it led for the first time to the king actually putting out a statement that directly commented on Andrew's behavior.
It expressed what the king said was profound concern at the allegations, which continue to come to light. And very importantly, said that if he is approached by the police, that, quote, we stand ready to support them as you would expect. It really was, I think, the first moment that the prospect of some kind of criminal punishment was
for Andrew seemed more possible given the fact that the king was sort of opening the door to that idea.
But do the police need the king to open the door for them to launch any kind of investigation?
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Chapter 3: How has the royal family reacted to Andrew's arrest?
Why haven't police in Britain, but also in the United States, why haven't they been more aggressive in looking into the allegations and ultimately taking action? And I think part of the answer might be that despite the allegations that have been out there, the thing that has become really powerful is less evidence.
the sort of raw evidence and more the publication of that evidence and the pressure that has come from that on prosecutors, on the royal family, has really sort of been the thing that has driven the case forward more than the actual investigations from the authorities.
And we should note that the arrest of a former prince, if not a current prince, is still a monumentally huge deal to the British public.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, you have to think about it this way. The last time that a sitting member of the British royal family was arrested was in 1649, almost 400 years ago. King Charles I was arrested for treason in the middle of the English Civil War at the time. That is... 150 years before the United States was even around, that was the last time a member of the royal family was arrested.
And what kind of consequences does he face if convicted?
They're pretty serious. He hasn't been charged yet, but assuming he was charged and ultimately convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Michael, I think this is only the third arrest total associated with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. There was Jeffrey Epstein. There was his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and now obviously Andrew Mountbatten. And this arrest happened in England. And meanwhile, in this country, the United States, the consequences that we have seen for people...
associated with Jeffrey Epstein who have come under suspicion have largely, if not entirely, fallen outside of the legal system. Why do you think that is?
Yeah, it's really interesting that part of what helps to explain, I think, the arrest of former Prince Andrew is that he is one of the most high-profile people in the land. And so I think, you know, the idea that he would ultimately become one of the first people to be actually prosecuted, arrested, and potentially charged is maybe on one level not that surprising.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Epstein files release?
We are looking into the investigations files of the federal government for this high-profile sex predator and all of his friends and all of his associates. And what we've seen is that as reporters and ordinary people are digging through these files, they are finding information about his friendships with other prominent, powerful, and wealthy people.
And they are beginning to face consequences for their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was long dead.
I have to say every single day it feels like there is a new law firm partner, a new CEO, a new head of something who has lost their job or position because of what has come out in these files. The New York Times has even come out with a whole tracker, basically, to help us keep track of all of these different names. I want to talk about some of the most notable people to lose their jobs.
Maybe we can start with Kathy Rumler, who was up until very recently the general counsel for Goldman Sachs.
And Kathy Rumler had always maintained that she had a strictly professional relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. She was a lawyer. And as we all know, lawyers sometimes represent unpopular or loathsome clients. Of course. But what these emails show was that she was more than a lawyer. She was a friend. She was an intimate. She was a confidant. She discussed her dating life with him.
He gave her gifts. She called him Uncle Jeffrey. She signed emails XO. And she even gave him advice on how to handle questions about his sex crimes from the past.
And Goldman Sachs, to be clear, did not push her out of the firm. Presumably, they were fine knowing that she had represented Jeffrey Epstein for the reasons that you articulated. But this idea that this would go farther sounds like that was what was untenable, unpalatable.
I think what's fascinating about this whole series of events with all these former Epstein friends is that we can never quite see inside these institutions to find out what was the breaking point. Right. And we know that, as you say, Goldman stood firm by her for many days. And it appeared that she was going to stick it out. And then one day she decided, I'm going to resign.
I can't handle all the scrutiny, the constant drumbeat of stories. And the mechanism really is something that's hidden from us as to whose patience was worn out first.
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Chapter 5: Who are the notable figures affected by the Epstein scandal?
You exhibit no judgment towards them at all in the friendship realm. Why are you friends with this guy?
Mm-hmm.
Why are you helping him figure out how to troubleshoot his legal problems that stem from soliciting a minor for prostitution? At what point, and this is just in the mind of the listener or the reader or the person, at what point did a bell go off in your head to say, perhaps I should not be so close to this guy?
That is what I think was so toxic for these two people in their positions of trust at these two big institutions, Goldman Sachs, one of the nation's leading financial institutions, and Paul Weiss, a major law firm.
Right. And just to put a finer point on it, our legal system relies on the idea that everybody deserves a criminal defense. But if you're not even his attorney, this really just seems like a favor to your friend who you know is a sexual predator. When you have no evidence, you have not reviewed the case files, you don't know whether this guy is innocent as an attorney. Right.
That's right. And if you add one more layer, part of the connection here is the relationship with Leon Black, the billionaire investor, and work that Epstein did for Leon Black. So if you're Brad Karp, a person looking at all this is wondering, are you helping this sex predator because there's money in it for your firm because of these financial and professional relationships?
Which in some ways, again, it's one thing if you're a defense lawyer.
Right. It's another thing.
But this is corporate law.
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Chapter 6: What consequences do former associates of Epstein face?
Many men and women were culpable. But the case of Casey Wasserman focuses us on this question. How do we decide when somebody is part of that system of power?
Right.
Is it anyone who had dinner with him after his first arrest? Is it anybody who ever met him ever? How about someone who spent time with him before the public even knew about his crimes? These are the questions that we're all trying to assess.
Michael Shearer made the point to us earlier that people's hunger for accountability far outstrips what they feel they are getting from the legal system. Former Prince Andrew, for instance, that's only, I think, the third arrest that we have seen related to Jeffrey Epstein. Besides Jeffrey Epstein himself, of course, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
And I wonder if that helps to explain at all the public appetite for some kind of consequence like what we are seeing now, a little bit regardless of what the people have actually done.
Look, there's a vacuum at the heart of this whole affair, which is that the principal person responsible for all of it has been dead for almost seven years. Right. He's gone. He can't explain anything. He can't connect any dots. He can't be tried. We cannot put him through the system of justice that we normally have to deal with this kind of thing.
And what we're left with is a scandal that is like light arriving from a distant star years after the fact. The after images of his life and his network and his connections in the past. And a lot of the people who are implicated in some way in his system of power and abuse are did not do anything illegal. Right. Or if they arguably did, some of those people might have been hard to prosecute.
But that's similar to me, too, we should point out, right? A lot of the people who lost their positions were never indicted on any kind of criminal behavior. So in some ways, it actually feels quite similar.
Yeah. You know, I want to separate here clearly. Like, when I'm reading these files, I see lots of evidence of Epstein's crimes, his trafficking over the years.
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Chapter 7: How does public perception influence accountability in this case?
But as you were saying, so much is opaque.
Mm-hmm.
And what is perplexing for a lot of people who are reading these documents is that this Justice Department said we found no evidence of anything that would predicate an investigation for us. I am not a prosecutor. I'm not a lawyer. And I can't see behind those redactions.
Mm-hmm.
When I read these documents, I find that puzzling and challenging. And even if they are right, even if I, as a reporter, could see behind all the redactions and come to the same conclusion they did with some legal training, you begin to understand why this hunger still exists. Right, the suspicion. Why this mystery, the suspicion, the who else is getting away with something?
Why haven't they been punished? And I think to your point earlier, it just feeds the sense that the people who did bad things are getting away with it. Even as simultaneously, we see these dominoes falling, as we discussed at the top of the program.
I want to bring this conversation back to where it began with former Prince Andrew and his arrest on Thursday, because I wondered whether, just given everything that we've discussed, the news of that arrest, regardless of what it was for, might have struck some people as a surprise, just given the fact that this is a person who had not faced any kind of legal scrutiny, legal consequences for years.
And people might have thought he never would.
I think the former Prince Andrew is in some ways the exception that proves the rule. His public association with Epstein as a figure of scandal goes back to 2010. The story of their friendship and the scandal around it has been unfolding for 16 years. And he is just now coming under criminal investigation in his home country.
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