As Sussexes sign ‘$100m’ deal to make shows, get ready for... MEGFLIX
BUT, SURPRISE! JUST LIKE HIS INABILITY TO SWEAT, IT’S RECENTLY BEEN CURED
FROM his inability to sweat to his ‘Pizza Express’ story, providing alibis to reject the allegations made by his sex accuser Virginia Roberts has been a painful experience for the Duke of York.
Now, in the final part of the Mail’s forensic investigation into the allegations made against the duke, yet another bizarre excuse has emerged.
This time it counters Miss Roberts’s assertion that the pair went horse riding together during a sex-filled break at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, Zorro, about 20 years ago.
Recalling the alleged trip in her unpublished memoir, Miss Roberts wrote: ‘My job was to entertain him endlessly, whether that meant having to bestow him my body during an erotic massage or simply take him horseback riding.’
However, a friend of the duke told the Mail: ‘It’s well known amongst his family and friends that the duke had a hay fever allergy that was with him all his life. So he gave up horse riding in his teens. The duchess persuaded him to take an acupuncture cure in later life and that dealt with the horse hair allergy as well.
‘So he took up horse riding again in his 50s, took lessons in 2017 and 2018 and was proficient enough for Trooping the Colour in honour of his mother later that year.’ Extensive picture research appears to back up the comment by one of the duke’s most loyal supporters.
Although Andrew has been pictured at horse shows over the years, there was a decades- long gap between him being photographed on horseback as a youngster to images of him in the saddle in recent years.
Even so, the claim is sure to provoke raised eyebrows, after a litany of similar excuses have fallen apart.
Andrew denies all Miss Roberts’s allegations. The horse allergy alibi emerged in this newspaper’s painstaking investigation into her sex claims against the duke.
In the fourth and final part of our series, we ask questions about her suggestions the pair spent a couple of days together at Epstein’s Zorro ranch when she was a teenager and reveal that a long-serving police bodyguard is certain that she and Andrew were never there together.
Instead, he is sure – based on a contemporaneous Filofax record – that the duke visited the ranch just once with a beautiful American brain surgeon, Melanie Walker, with whom he had a close friendship at the time.