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.”

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.”