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The former Duke of York told Jeffrey Epstein “it would be good to catch up in person” months after the convicted sex offender was released from prison, newly released emails reveal.
The publication of the correspondence comes two days after Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was stripped of his titles and struck from the official roll of the peerage in an attempt by Buckingham Palace to halt the damage caused by the former duke’s spiralling scandals.
Epstein was jailed for soliciting prostitution from a minor in July 2009. In email exchanges between the pair released on Friday, the disgraced financier suggested to Mountbatten Windsor on April 15 2010 that he meet the former JP Morgan executive Jes Staley, who was banned from the UK banking sector for life in June for misleading the watchdog over his relationship with Epstein.
Mountbatten Windsor replied that he would not be in the UK but would “make sure I meet [Staley] soon on another trip”.
“Also I have no immediate plans to drop by New York but I think I should at some stage soon. I’ll look and see if I can make a couple of days before the summer. It would be good to catch up in person.”
The pair were pictured together in Central Park in New York in December that year in a meeting that Mountbatten Windsor later called a “wrong decision”.
During his disastrous 2019 interview with the BBC’s Newsnight, Mountbatten Windsor said the “sole purpose” of the visit was to halt contact with Epstein and that he met him in person because breaking the news “over the telephone was the chicken’s way of doing it”. He nevertheless stayed at Epstein’s New York mansion for several days.
“I wanted to make sure that if I was going to go and see him, I had to make sure that there was enough time between his release because it wasn’t something that I was going into in a hurry, but I had to go and see him. I had to go and see him. I had to talk,” he said.
Mountbatten Windsor said the conversation ended in a mutual agreement to cut contact, which he claimed to have kept to. A separate cache of court documents released in January, however, showed that a “member of the British royal family”, believed to be the former duke, emailed Epstein saying: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
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The correspondence was released on Friday in unsealed court documents from a 2023 legal case between the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan.
The government of the territory, where Epstein owned a private island and conducted most of his financial affairs, sued the bank over its alleged dealings with the billionaire. JP Morgan denied the claims, saying it was not aware of Epstein’s activities and it settled the cases without admitting liability.
The court documents also reveal that JP Morgan warned the US government about more than $1bn in transactions linked to Epstein that were possibly related to reports of human trafficking.
Pressure had mounted on Buckingham Palace to take further action against the former duke after the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir and revelations about the terms of his residency at Royal Lodge, where it was confirmed he lived effectively rent-free.
Giuffre, who died by suicide in April aged 41, repeated her allegations against the former duke in her memoir released last month. She says she was forced to have sex with Mountbatten Windsor on three occasions, including when she was 17 and also during an orgy after being trafficked by Epstein. Mountbatten Windsor vehemently denies the allegations.
It was revealed on Friday that Mountbatten Windsor is in line to receive a large one-off payment and an annual stipend designed to prevent him overspending in his new life as a commoner after a back-and-forth about where he would go after leaving Royal Lodge.
