Prince Andrew, Duke of York Quotes

[On his alleged meetings with Virginia Giuffre, his accuser] I don't know if I've met her but no, I have no recollection of meeting her.

I put away childish things and false bravado and returned a man full in the knowledge of human frailty and suffering.

[T]he people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful.

It’s a simple answer. That’s my life. That’s what I expect. Right? That is because of who I am and that is because of the life of the family within which I’ve been brought up. So to me this state of affairs is not extraordinary. To anybody else who looks in, they think I’m bloody mad! But that’s what we do.

[Explaining that he could not have had sex with Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts) at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell] I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose four or five in the afternoon. And then because the duchess [Sarah Ferguson] was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other is there.

[Asked on how the photograph might have been faked] I don't believe it's a picture of me in London because . . . when I go out in London I wear a suit and tie. [...] Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don't recollect that photograph ever being taken. [...] I'm at a loss to explain this particular photograph.

[On the 2001 photograph of himself with Giuffre (then Roberts) and Ghislaine Maxwell] I have absolutely no memory of that photograph ever being taken.

Andrew, unfortunately, exhibited classic symptoms of what is scientifically recognised as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. The combination of minimal self-awareness and dim wattage leads sufferers of this condition to overestimate their own capabilities. Years of enjoying unearned obeisance to his royal position allowed Andrew to bang on with a combination of overweening self-confidence and unchallenged ignorance. It also made him an easy mark for con men and crooks.

[Explaining why he stayed at the New York home of Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, in 2010.] It was a convenient place to stay... At the end of the day, with the benefit of all the hindsight one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But at the time, I felt it was the honourable and right thing to do. And I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable but that is just the way it is.

If you're a man it is a positive act to have sex with somebody [...] You have to … take some sort of positive action and so therefore if you try to forget it’s very difficult to try and forget a positive action and I do not remember anything.

So whilst I think back to a day when a young man went to war, full of bravado, I returned a changed man.

My reflection makes me think even harder and pray even more fervently for those in conflict today, for those family’s [sic] torn apart by the horrors they have witnessed.

I kick myself for, on a daily basis, because it was not something that was becoming of a member of the royal family [...] And we try and uphold the highest standards and practices and I let the side down, simple as that.