riddle me this: are you familiar with why prince andrew is awful? back up. do you even know who prince andrew is?? much less, why he need be deemed awful?

oh hayyy, let’s talk.

since the crown is now slated to end after season 5, we can assume it ain’t gonna get to dramatic portrayals of the now times.

and fyi, people, the now times are SUPER DRAMATIC.

you are, i imagine, like yes, yes, oline, sussexit, yada, yada, we know, we know, but yo, if you are not talking about prince andrew then, no, my friend, YOU DO NOT EVEN BEGIN KNOW.

you’ve maybe by now heard of a man named jeffrey epstein? a man who, according to ariel levy’s reporting, was trafficking and assaulting upwards of TWELVE girls per month for the last twenty years. the last twelve years of which EVERYBODY KNEW. (for more on that, here’s vicky ward’s reporting. here’s the guardian‘s reporting. here’s the miami herald‘s archive of their investigative reports on epstein.)

for now though, i wanna talk about jeffrey epstein’s BFF, prince andrew. the man who is singlehandedly responsible for the vomit face being my most frequently used emoji.

let’s use this as a jumping off point…

prince andrew is 60! an age by which we would most of us hope to know better and to be at a point of taking responsibility for our lives. alas, royalty are not #justlikeus.

prince andrew is sad. his great milestone has been diminished. there is no longer even a governmental requirement to fly flags in celebration of his birth!!! wah-wah.

how have we arrived at this sad state of affairs?

in VAIR VAIR BRIEF: jeffrey was a man with a lot of money who groomed, procured, manipulated, trafficked, and raped girls.

(let us not play cutsie and hide behind the typical language of “he had a penchant.” fuck that.)

FOR DECADES.

with the help of this woman, ghislaine maxwell.

go, do your research on that. anyhoo, these peeps were also friends with prince andrew.

because, allegedly, he loved their planes and islands and fancypants lifestyle.

and THAT’S why, after epstein was arrested for recruiting an underage woman in 2008, andrew remained his dear, good friend.

going so far as to visit him in new york city in 2010 after epstein completed his bizarro joke of a prison sentence (in which he got “work release” for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week).

here they are on their infamous tete a tete:

mind you, this is AFTER epstein was convicted and served time for being a sex offender.

so this is photograph of a prince of england on a walk with someone who, if he is living by the dictates of his release (which, honestly, WHY WOULD HE IF HE IS STILL, AT THIS POINT, TRAFFICKING GIRLS?!?!?!), is listed on the local sex offenders registry.

so there is no saying that prince andrew did not know the man he is talking to in this photograph was a sex offender. that is fact.

in a completely BONKERS train wreck of interview that andrew gave the BBC last november (the train wreckyness is evident in the fact that a youtube reel condensing “the best (WORST) bits” of this interview is over ten minutes long), he said he went to nyc then to break up with epstein as a friend.

it remains unclear why this task involved a FIVE day stay in epstein’s mansion.

so, here’s the story: prince andrew continued to affiliate with a known sex trafficker/rapist, looooooong after that fact became known.

because he allegedly loved the man’s islands and planes and jet-set lifestyle.

i won’t bore you with the full richard kay piece, because it is short and stupid, and reads like fan-fic for the birthday andrew could have had had he not spent the last ten years affiliating with a predator. the flags were not raised, man. boo-fucking-hoo.

forgive me, i have no sympathy here. at the very least, he knew who he was hanging out with. at the very most, he did not care.

the part of the kay piece that has incensed me is this:

and this…

(1) this is a man covering his ass on national TV, so are we surprised he wasn’t like *JAZZ HANDS* i just really, really love sixteen year old girls?

(2) LOOK HOW QUICKLY THE WOMEN ARE DISPOSED OF IN THAT SECOND PARAGRAPH!!!!!

“it wasn’t his love of women.”

well, yeah. no one said anything about love here.

but also note the separation– the idea that jeffrey epstein’s “girl problem” is separable from his money, his dinner parties, the important people he collected. like you can take one and just leave the other behind. like the girls weren’t at the dinner parties, circulating among the important people, candy specifically for the important people.

true story: the BBC interview was bad.

heads rolled.

princess beatrice’s wedding was apparently, once again, rescheduled.

the sussexit happened and the problem of andrew receded.

along with the memory of this man going on national television and claiming that, due to his service in the falkland’s war, for a time, he had a medical condition that meant he could not sweat, and so the woman who remembers him as the sweaty man who raped her cannot possibly be telling the truth.

to which the daily mail– god bless them, sometimes they do good work– responded with a deep dive of Times Prince Andrew Was Seen Dancing/Sweating in Public.

btw, there is merch.

there is also some quality pizza express content.

because andrew said he knew he hadn’t had sex with virginia giuffre, then age 17, because– and i am not even joking– he had been at a pizza express in woking on the night in question. 

for the record, he also doesn’t remember being present in this photograph:

so the evidence here suggests that prince andrew did something bad. how bad remains unsettled, if we’re looking for definitivity. but epstein was legit a monster. post-2010, that was known.

i believe virginia giuffre when she says prince andrew raped her in 2001. i believe her because that would not be a fun thing for any woman to say out loud, much less in a court of law; because she seems clearly to have been trafficked by epstein and maxwell; and because the general vibe around epstein seems to have been trés trés anything goes, young girls included.

he had boats, islands, planes, dinner parties, at all of which entrapped girls were put on show.

it is a choice to close your eyes to what is happening in front of you.

that said, i do not think any of their eyes were closed.

so here is my ultimate beef with this dumb bit of fan fic in the daily mail.

richard kay writes this:

WHO THE FUCK IS THINKING THIS???!?!?! clearly he goes away. clearly he has been voted off the island. CLEARLY we will not be bringing him back for later seasons!!!!!! game = OVER.

but is it?

this is allegedly the queen’s favorite son.

though andrew has stepped back from royal duties, there was hullabaloo over not raising the damn flags.

harry and meghan have had a more punishing removal from the royal family than andrew has.

they have been stripped of far more, while the queen’s favorite son deferred his own birthday promotion and evades the FBI.

but, obviously, this is power. the game is never over, and it looks like epstein played a really fucking long game and will continue to do so from the beyond for quite some time.

i imagine andrew will pay no price, beyond briefly being a meme about sweating and pizza express and providing an income to others through sweating/pizza express arts and crafts available on etsy.

that’s not the end of the world, right?

once upon a time, charles was basically a pre-internet meme about a tampon and that panned out ok.

but the difference there is charles had a consensual affair. andrew is accused of raping a minor. those two things are not equal. alas, twenty years later, in the eyes of the world, they kind of still are.

a man did a bad thing, a wrong thing. but, eventually, we’ll move on and he’ll sneak his way back into public view and, slowly, like the lobsters in the pot, we’ll grow accustomed to his face and be impressed by his mother’s love for him and the memory of the horror he inflicted will drain away, because he’ll be older, feebler, less monstrous, seemingly less capable of having committed such violence, though we know in our heart of hearts he did.

that is my prophecy. please, dear world, prove me wrong.