‘I saw Woody Allen enter Epstein’s house when Andrew was there,’ says reporting legend
As prince retreats from public life, Donal Lynch talks to the journalist who broke the story of that meeting with Epstein
IT’S fair to describe Annette Witheridge as a legend of British journalism. Based in New York for two decades, she covered some of the biggest stories of our time. She was one of the first reporters to report from Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks. She was also the first journalist to track down disgraced pop star Gary Glitter in
Cuba after he was accused of possessing child porn in 1997. She covered the trial of au pair Louise Woodward who was jailed for shaking a baby to death in Boston. She has worked for nearly every UK newspaper and also co-wrote a book with Eminem’s mother, Debbie Nelson.
Despite the calibre of her career, perhaps Witheridge’s biggest scoop of all came in 2010, on a bitterly cold morning in Manhattan, when she broke the story of Prince Andrew visiting Jeffrey Epstein after the latter’s conviction on sex offences.
Witheridge had been aware of Epstein since the early 2000s when Andrew’s friendship with British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell brought the American financier to the attention of the press.
“Andrew was pictured in a restaurant with [Ghislaine] and initially we thought there might be some kind of romance. But the name Epstein kept coming up everywhere.
“The notion of a romance disappeared and the next thing we heard about Epstein was that he was being arrested in Florida. Then I got a tip-off from the News of the World that Andrew was in New York.”
Over the years the prince and the financier had remained close, but the question persisted as to whether their friendship had survived the scandal around Epstein’s arrest and conviction on sex offences. Witheridge thought that Ghislaine, Esptein’s then girlfriend, would lead her to Andrew. So Witheridge began following her.
“We went to her rather grand town house in Midtown and the lights were on — it was right next door to the house of Diandra Douglas, Michael Douglas’s ex-wife.
“I learned that night the true meaning of the word socialite because Ghislaine’s schedule was remarkable. She stepped out in a tiny skirt, a tiny jacket and boots and got into a waiting car. She went downtown to Tribeca, then up to Fifth Avenue to a charity do, then to the trendiest restaurant in Manhattan.”
Despite doggedly tailing Maxwell down Manhattan, there was no sign of Andrew.
“We knew he wasn’t staying at the Consul General, which is where he usually stays when he is on official business in New York,” Witheridge recalls.
“So we decided to try Jeffrey Epstein’s place on 71st Street, near Central Park.”
She arrived there early in the morning, accompanied by photographer Jae Donnelly.
“As we got closer I began to hear British accents on the street and saw undercover coppers in cars with ear pieces. It was so cold you could barely stand there. What was quite funny was that while we were there, we saw Woody Allen going into Epstein’s apartment. Girls were arriving, girls were leaving. One girl appeared to come from the airport and her baggage had Aeroflot tags on it. But there was still no sign of Prince Andrew.”
Witheridge says that, because of the cold weather, many of the girls were bundled up in huge jackets which made it harder to determine their age.
“Some of them looked like they could have been 15, 16, possibly 18.”
As the story with Andrew percolated over the past few years it was claimed the infamous shot may have been orchestrated by Epstein in a bid to boost his image. Witheridge says that she feels this was unlikely and felt sure that Andrew’s security detail must have been aware that she was there.
“These guys were outside, maybe four of them. Presumably there were more in the house as well. I had my car window open and I heard one of these guys outside say ‘what if they go walkabout…?’ I couldn’t hear the response, it was lost in the wind, but literally five minutes later out they all came: Andrew and Epstein, followed by a pile of bodyguards.
“Jae and I took after them on the road. They went to the top of Fifth Avenue, and turned the wrong way down a one-way street, so Jae went after them and I was stuck there in the traffic. By the time I arrived back at the house, 20 minutes later, they had already arrived, so they were very quick.
“It was weird, I assumed if they had wanted some fresh air they could have used the garden at the mansion. We saw the photos and thought bloody hell we’ve got him. Afterwards they said the photo had been taken from a height, but it wasn’t. It was taken by Jae standing on a rock in Central Park.”
An “incredibly frustrating” aspect of the whole story for Witheridge was the difficulty in getting any of the girls, who had been abused by Epstein, to talk.
“Some of them were being paid by Epstein. By the time I caught up with them, one had a mansion in New Jersey, another had one in Connecticut, others had apartments in New York. Epstein had them on the payroll.”
While that aspect of the story did not bear fruit, Witheridge and Donnelly had filed a story which would lead to nearly a decade of questions about Prince Andrew’s judgment. These questions culminated in the interview the prince gave to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis last weekend.
Witheridge watched it and couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“I heard someone describe it as a car crash but someone else said it was a plane crash into a train that in turn sets off a nuclear reactor — I thought that sort of summed it up. What a disaster for him.”
But while the interview was one of the must-see TV moments of the year, its genesis lay nearly a decade ago in what Witheridge calls “some old-fashioned shoeleather reporting”.
And if journalism can be measured in results, this story, which ended with the retirement of a royal, was undoubtedly one of the scoops of the decade.