What the arrest of former Prince Andrew can teach us about power and abuse

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, younger brother of King Charles III and a former British royal prince, was arrested Thursday morning in the UK over suspicions that he shared confidential information with the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. The latest batch of Epstein files appears to show Mountbatten-Windsor, at the time serving as an official British trade envoy, forwarding confidential emails to Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last year in the midst of a mounting scandal over his association with Epstein, including accusations of sexual assault. His arrest is unprecedented in the UK, which has never before arrested the brother of a sitting monarch. In a statement, King Charles described his brother’s arrest as “the full, fair, and proper process” of the law at work, adding that law enforcement has his “full and wholehearted support and cooperation.” 

The arrest of a former prince and member of the royal family — one who has still never faced legal consequences for his alleged abuse of a teenage girl — holds enormous symbolic importance in the public’s ongoing pushback against Epstein’s cadre of wealthy, powerful men. At the same time, as someone far down the line of succession and not particularly close to the king, Mountbatten-Windsor is, as royal family members go, expendable. Tracking his downfall offers us a precise illustration of exactly how much power you need to stay immune to the criminal justice system — and what happens as your power and relevance slips away. 

The prince of scandal

In her 2022 opus The Palace Papers, royal watcher Tina Brown writes that “there is no doubting” that the late Queen Elizabeth II had an “especially soft spot for Andrew,” her third child. While Mountbatten-Windsor has always been scandal-prone, fond of shady real estate deals and palling around with many wealthy men of dubious character, Elizabeth installed him in the lavish Royal Lodge, with 99 acres of land and a swimming pool. Unlike other members of the royal family, famously including Prince Harry, Andrew paid no rent for his housing. 

As Andrew’s scandals grew more serious, Elizabeth did not waver. In a 2015 affidavit, Virginia Giuffre accused Mountbatten-Windsor of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. She provided a damning photo as proof: a picture of her at 17 with Mountbatten-Windsor’s arm around her. Reportedly, Elizabeth sent for her son and demanded he explain himself. After he assured her that the story was made up and that the photo was doctored, Elizabeth decided not only to believe him, but also to throw her full support behind him. The same year, she made him a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order — what Brown describes as “her highest gong.” The British press dropped the story for years.

Then the burgeoning Me Too movement put Epstein back in the spotlight, and brought Mountbatten-Windsor with him. In 2019, Mountbatten-Windsor stumbled through a notorious BBC interview with the journalist Emily Maitlis in an attempt to clear his name. He succeeded only in making himself look incredibly guilty. “The Duke of York claimed on Saturday night that he could not have had sex with a teenage girl in the London home of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell because he was at home after attending a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking,” the Guardian reported the next day, going on to describe the alibi as “startling.”

The public response to the interview was so negative that Mountbatten-Windsor was finally forced to step back from his duties as a public royal. Elizabeth, however, wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. “Mother and son held onto the belief that, after the passage of time, Andrew could be returned to the fold with a reduced role rather than full banishment,” Brown writes in The Palace Papers.

King Charles’s reign

As the queen faded, so did Mountbatten-Windsor’s ability to outrun his scandals. In January 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor settled a lawsuit with Giuffre out of court and, “with the Queen’s approval and agreement,” was stripped of his military titles and agreed to stop using his prestigious HRH honorific. Later that year, Elizabeth died. Charles took the throne, and he apparently did not agree with his mother about the advisability of keeping his brother around. The king has also long been vocal in his belief that the royal family should make its public image less sprawling, with fewer balcony photo ops featuring distant cousins and great-aunts, and fewer minor royals who require expensive upkeep and get involved in embarrassing peccadilloes. 

Last April, after more than a decade of publicly fighting Epstein and his associates, and with few legal victories to show for it, Virginia Giuffre died by suicide. In October, her memoir was posthumously published, featuring a detailed account of multiple alleged assaults at Andrew’s hands when Giuffre was 17 years old. Shortly afterward, Charles stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal titles and moved him from the Royal Lodge to an unnamed cottage on the king’s private estate of Sandringham. Now, as the declassified Epstein files make their way to the public eye, Charles is cooperating with law enforcement on his brother’s arrest. 

In the British royal family, all power flows from the crown itself. The closer you are to the crown, the better off you are. Mountbatten-Windsor is currently eighth in line to the throne, which is not a strong position. When his mother was queen, he benefited from her favor, but the current monarch does not appear to have any special soft spot for him. 

Last November, Brown reported that Charles was attempting to be careful with Mountbatten-Windsor’s demotion, as a matter of national security. “If Charles were not to pay his brother’s bills and ensure a certain level of comfort, Andrew would have only his secrets to sell,” Brown wrote on her Substack, Fresh Hell. It now appears that Mountbatten-Windsor sold his secrets to his pedophile friend a long time ago. He has no currency left with which to operate. In the meantime, Virginia Giuffre is dead, and a number of Epstein’s surviving victims were recently outed by the US Department of Justice, which published their unredacted names and nude photos. Of all the powerful people complicit in the abuse of these women, will any who aren’t considered expendable by their institutions ever face justice?

Correction, February 19, 2026, 4:50 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated the birth order of Elizabeth II’s children.