King Charles Lies to Epstein Survivors After Refusing to Meet Them

King Charles III—whose brother Andrew was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein and has been accused of sexual misconduct—made no mention of the sexual predator or his victims during his joint address to Congress, even after saying that he would.

Earlier on Tuesday, HuffPost reported that Charles refused an invitation from Representative Ro Khanna to meet face to face with survivors of Epstein’s abuse, promising to instead acknowledge them during his speech. The California Democrat stated that the king “owed that to the survivors” given the mountain of controversy surrounding his brother’s actions.

“I thought it would have been an incredible moment and statement to show that it doesn’t matter how much wealth you have, how much power you have, no human being is dispensable, and that the survivors deserve justice,” Khanna said, regarding the invitation to meet with Epstein’s survivors. “He unfortunately declined that request.” A roundtable with survivors was held in Charles’s absence.

“It’s unfortunate,” Epstein survivor Sharlene Rochard told HuffPost, stating that Charles missed a real chance “to give back to just, basically, humanity, and show all the people in the U.K. and the world that he actually cares.”

Even with that rejection, Khanna still held out hope.

“I’m told he’s going to be making some statement about the survivors this afternoon in his address,” he said initially. “I hope his flunkies don’t take out the acknowledgment from his text.… I fully expect the king to be acknowledging the Epstein survivors when he speaks to our nation.”

That didn’t happen, either. Instead, Charles merely mentioned the need to “support victims of some of the ills that, so tragically, exist in both our societies today.” King Charles made time to discuss everything from the sacred U.S.-U.K. partnership to NATO, to Christianity, but he didn’t acknowledge the heinous crimes of his brother’s friend and the women who still live with the trauma of his abuse.

Epstein’s survivors have yet to comment on the king’s omission.