Since her divorce, the Duchess of York will basically go to any event that pays her. She turns up at some of the most random-ass red carpets and events I’ve ever seen, still, to this day. Besides those paid gigs, Sarah is still the patron of many charities, and to her credit, she’s always shown up for those charities too. She’s shown up more often than many “working royals,” let’s say that. Well, no more. Over the weekend, the Mail revealed that Sarah Ferguson sent an apology email to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011. The backstory: in 2010, Epstein gave Sarah a lot of money, she gladly accepted the money, then people found out she accepted the huge sum from a convicted pedophile, so she issued a public apology about it. All of that has been well-known for years. What people didn’t know was that following her public apology, Epstein threatened to sue her, so she sent him a sugary apology email, pledging her friendship to him forever. In the 48 hours after the Mail published the email, seven charities dropped Fergie as their patron.
Seven charities have dropped the Duchess of York as a patron or ambassador after an email from 2011 emerged in which she called sex offender Jeffrey Epstein her “supreme friend” and seemed to apologise for her public criticism of him.
Julia’s House, a children’s hospice, was the first to remove Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, saying it was “inappropriate” for her to continue in the role. The Teenage Cancer Trust, Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Children’s Literacy Charity, National Foundation for Retired Service Animals and Prevent Breast Cancer also announced they had dropped the duchess as patron. The British Heart Foundation said she would no longer be its ambassador.
A spokesperson for the duchess said she was not commenting on the charities’ decisions.
It comes after the Mail on Sunday and Sun newspapers published a 2011 email from the duchess to Epstein, which appears to have been sent after she had publicly claimed to have broken off contact with him. In the email, she appeared to privately apologise for her public rejection of Epstein, saying: “You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.”
That seemed to contradict her public denunciation of Epstein in an interview earlier that year, in which she had said her involvement with him had been a “gigantic error of judgement” and that: “What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.”
A spokesperson for the duchess said her subsequent email to Epstein, describing him as a friend, had been sent because she was trying to counter a threat from him to sue her for defamation – and that she still really regretted any association with him.
As many have pointed out, it feels like Fergie is being targeted. I’m not saying that what she did was no biggie, but you have to keep in mind, we’ve barely scratched the surface of both Fergie and Andrew’s connections with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Literally writing “You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me” in black-and-white to a convicted pedophile will take down most public figures, I just didn’t think it would happen to Fergie before it happened to Prince Andrew or Donald Trump. But yeah, this has the feel of Buckingham Palace tossing Fergie right under the bus. Is this… King Charles’s housecleaning? Settling old scores, future-planning, taking care of some final business?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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