The truth about Prince Andrew
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: After 32 years of silence, ex-lover gives account of affair to defend him from ‘sex slave’ claims
ON A cold dark day in London last month, I was thinking about coffee and pondering my New Year’s resolutions when the phone rang. ‘Do you think he did it? asked the voice at the other end. Instinct told me it was about Prince Andrew. ‘Who did what?’ I stalled. The voice replied: ‘Do you think Prince Andrew slept with a teenage sex slave?’ I stopped breathing, muttered something unintelligible, hung up and Googled for news.
My first reaction was fury, then disbelief, at the lurid allegations being made against a man I have known for more than 30 years.
Prince Andrew is a dear friend of mine and godfather to my daughter. I’ve only known him to be honourable and honest, with Christian values. I dismissed this latest story as just another sexual slur.
But I couldn’t shrug off Virginia Roberts’ assassination of his character any more than he has been able to. He was being accused of the very worst kind of behaviour. The stain on his reputation is spilling across his life like blood from a new wound.
I know too much about the media and the law courts to allow the disgrace of an innocent man. That is why I have decided to now reveal some of the details of my relationship with Andrew. Most people in this country have formed their own impression of him – either good or ill. My view is clear: I believe him to be a good man.
I firmly believe I can help rebut, with authority, the allegations against him. I will use those details to challenge Virginia Roberts’s description of a man which does not tally with the person I have known for more than half my lifetime.
I will also use them to demonstrate how the global media is hiding behind the skirts of Ms Roberts’ testimony to besmirch an innocent man – just as it besmirched me when it claimed I’d crossed the line from appearing in mainstream films containing erotic scenes, to films made for the sex industry. (Falsely accused of appearing in porn, I sued for libel and won.)
This new attack on Prince Andrew brought back poignant memories of the Caribbean island of Mustique, more than three decades ago.
It was then, as I holidayed with him in the autumn of 1982, that news of our romance broke. The press we received rivalled that of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. (Now, with Ms Roberts in the news I find myself wondering, is it only American women who are the nemesis of the British royals?)
To be clear: Andrew has denied the accusations Ms Roberts has levied against him. An official Buckingham Palace spokesman last month said: ‘It is emphatically denied that the Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts. The allegations made are false and without any foundation.’
Andrew later issued a personal denial at Davos, Switzerland. He said: ‘For the record, I refer to events that have taken place in the last few weeks. I just wish to reiterate and to reaffirm the state- ments which have already been made on my behalf by Buckingham Palace.’
I know him to be honest and I believe him. But it doesn’t matter what I think. The question is, when you have heard what I have to say, what will YOU believe?
The story of our first meeting is an instructive example of how our story was twisted from the start. It was widely – and wrongly – reported to have been in Tramp, the very same nightclub where Ms Roberts says she first partied with him. It’s undisputed in books and newspaper articles. Except what has been reported as fact is wrong. We didn’t meet there at all.
We were introduced by mutual friends on the night of his 21st birthday party in February 1981.
I was at the National Theatre understudying in the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.
Friends, including the landlady of my basement flat in Belgravia, were taking Prince Andrew for a meal but the ‘spare girl’ had gone missing. It turned out I was her understudy too.
I was tired and more than a little grumpy after the curtain came down and I hadn’t committed to what was effectively a blind date. I wasn’t even dressed to go out by the time a Royal Protection Officer knocked on my door and swept his torchlight past me, checking the flat.
I decided I ought to go and picked out a red suede Maxfield Parrish trouser suit with a nipped-in waist (this was the Eighties!) and a blue Chloe fur-lined raincoat for the winter night.
In the street, a car door opened. I climbed in and settled myself into the passenger seat, wrapping my coat around me. Prince Andrew proffered his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Andrew.” I don’t know what I’d expected. But it wasn’t for a prince to be doing his own driving.
We went to a restaurant called Bewicks on Walton Street, not far from Harrods, and ended up in the doorway together, jostling shoulder to shoulder. As I stepped forward, Prince Andrew did the same and we crashed into each other before both swiftly stepping back. The same thing happened a second later. ‘I am a Prince, I go first,’ he said. Being American, I retorted: ‘I am the Prince’s date, I go first,’ but he got his foot into the door just ahead of me, chuckling. We immediately had an easy familiarity.
As you can see from this exchange, he likes strong-minded women with a sense of humour.
It’s something I have in common with his ex-wife Sarah, the Duchess of York. I’m not saying he would never be interested in a meek teenage blonde, I am just pointing out that he is attracted to the very opposite.
In Ms Roberts’ diaries, which were apparently written eight years after the event (she must have a remarkable memory), her entry from the night she claims to have accompanied Prince Andrew to Tramp describes a boor whose behaviour and habits bear no resemblance to the gentleman I know.
Ms Roberts alleges she and Andrew were ‘let into the VIP section, where Andrew did not hesitate to grab us both an alcoholic cocktail and found a table in the corner of the extremely packed club. We took a few sips then headed to the dance floor. He was the most incredibly hideous dancer I had ever seen, and not to mention how embarrassing it was to have to be the one he smashed pelvises with, even if he was a prince.’
‘We immediately had an easy familiarity’ ‘Prince Andrew does not drink alcohol’
She continued: ‘We only stayed at the club for little over an hour before his Highness was dripping from sweat and ready to embark on a quieter setting where we could get to know each other better, and from the way he was fondling me on the dance floor, I knew this was a man’s polite way of saying he wanted to intimately get acquainted.’
I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. Don’t you think people would notice a member of the royal family at Tramp, behaving the way she depicts Prince Andrew on the night in question? Where are the pictures, the gossip column entries, the witnesses?
Indeed, my experience of being with Andrew on our first date in Bewicks informed me of the effect he has on any gathering. Conversation drops. Body language changes. There is a bow wave of deference. But Ms Roberts will have us believe this extraordinary hour in Prince Andrew’s life passed unchronicled.
It was in Bewicks that I first learned something that is today widely known and accurate: Prince Andrew does not drink alcohol.
Not at all. This flatly contradicts Ms Roberts’ account.
Let’s consider her derogatory description of his behaviour towards her. In my experience, being in Prince Andrew’s company was never as Ms Roberts claimed. Then, as now, he was very attractive to women. What need would he have for any women to be supplied for ‘forced sex’?
Consider the following. The man I met that first night had impeccable manners. He collected me from my home, drove us to the restaurant, managed to have plenty of fun without consuming any alcohol, drove me back and secreted a note which I found the next morning on my rustic Biedermeier dresser. ‘Come to BP tomorrow for lunch,’ it said. Initially I wondered why he was taking me to a petrol station – it took me a moment to realise he meant Buckingham Palace. I went.
We had lunch on trays in his flat in the Palace. He was playful, tactile and friendly. And that’s how it started, immediately.
I was single, he was single, we had every reason to be carefree and no reason not to be.
When Andrew comes into your life there is no room for anyone else. He takes up all the space. He walked into my life and that was it: he was my life.
The weeks and months that followed created some of the happiest memories I have of my life. I could come and go to visit my boyfriend in Buckingham Palace without causing an international scandal – I even used to take my pet parrot with me. On one occasion, I went to the Palace, only to find he had moved rooms and I found myself on the wrong floor walking up and down calling out ‘Aaaandreeeeeew!’
Luckily, I was not mistaken for palace intruder Michael Fagan and arrested, but eventually found by a page and directed to his new rooms.
It was a blurring of two very different worlds. I bought Andrew his first pair of denim jeans and he gave me a T-shirt of his which I loved. It said ‘Don’t Panic’. He bought me one of my own emblazoned with ‘Here comes Trouble’. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted. Either way, looking back, he was right. The point I’m trying to make is that Andrew is a nice man, a tender, loving and caring normal boyfriend.
This is not the person portrayed by Virginia Roberts. She seems to be operating on the old myth that the royals never explain and never complain but in this I believe she has erred. It is true the usual policy has been a do-nothing and say-nothing strategy imposed by the men in grey suits at the Palace.
It’s still too often the default setting and today is even more outmoded and ineffectual than it was in 1982. While Prince Andrew diplomatically mounts his defence, the damage to his reputation is already done.
He’s a man whose efforts have been, unfairly, more often met with criticism than praise. He is a war hero who, alongside the other brave men of the Falklands Task Force, risked his life for his country. While Prince Harry is lauded for his service on the frontline in Afghanistan, Prince Andrew’s courage in the Falklands conflict is all but forgotten.
The day the Falklands War was announced in April 1982, Andrew and I were due to have lunch at our favourite Italian restaurant, in Belgravia. He telephoned me at my flat and said that he wouldn’t be able to come because the country was at war. He was then attached to HMS Invincible as a Sea King search-and-rescue pilot.
I was so shocked I responded unreasonably and with anger. I slammed around the kitchen, crashing cupboard doors.
I threw the phone down, went out and got into my green Mini, turning the car radio on just in time to hear the BBC announcing war had been declared against Argentina. I was so startled, I drove straight into the back of a parked Post Office van.
Leaving my car where it was, I returned to the flat where Andrew had by now arrived. He was looking pretty miserable, albeit very handsome in his uniform. We said goodbye only after I tried everything – and I mean everything, both reasonable and unreasonable – to stop him going. He left giving me a small volume of Kipling’s poems with a bookmark on ‘If–’, reminding me that he was one of the men and that this was his job.
Later, there was a media frenzy when we took a beach holiday on Mustique at Princess Margaret’s villa. Once we arrived I was almost under house arrest. The paparazzi were flying over low in light aircraft or swimming up to the beach in scuba gear. There was a palpable sense of real physical danger.
Later the media thought that I would cash in on my royal relationship with a rollicking kiss-and-tell.
I turned down a written offer of £1 m from the News Of The World just to pose for a photograph and confirm that I was Prince Andrew’s girlfriend.
The harder they pushed, the more resistant I became.
What starts as sexual innuendo turns into a cruel joke, then quickly descends into a vicious verbal attack that leaves deep emotional scars. To be publicly and falsely labelled as guilty of sexual misconduct is as wrong as flogging a woman for the crime of being raped. It is fortuitous that I have had the spiritual guidance of the Dalai Lama since 1990. Without it, I doubt I would have had the courage to speak out now.
‘Andrew is a tender, loving normal boyfriend’