Ever since Prince Andrew was first publicly accused in 2011 of having sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s underaged “sex slaves,” he has reassured his mother that there is nothing to the allegations.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Andrew attend Royal Ascot 2017 in Ascot, England. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images Archives) 
For years, Queen Elizabeth has taken her second and reportedly favorite son at his word. But concerns about Andrew’s ties to Epstein were revived after the financier’s arrest on new sex trafficking charges in July. The convicted pedophile’s reported suicide in August also brought an onslaught of new questions and a stream of embarrassing headlines about Andrew.
The 92-year-old monarch failed to reassure the public of her son’s good nature and value to the royal family by riding with him in a car to churchnear her Balmoral estate the day after Epstein’s death. Andrew also was roasted online last weekend after he returned from his luxury Spanish golf vacation and was photographed resuming his royal duties at the Royal Regatta in Devon, the Sunday Times reported.
“You people truly have no shame,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Andrew has been a stain on HM’s legacy. This has been terribly handled. You can hide behind your mother, you can hide behind the smiles after your friend kills himself but the truth will catch up to you.”
Criticism over Andrew’s Devon appearance added to concerns among Buckingham Palace aides that the negative reports are not going to stop — not as long as the response from Andrew and the palace continues to be terse, carefully worded denials and photo-ops that try to pretend there’s no scandal, the Sunday Times reported.
There are “increasing signs of alarm at Buckingham Palace over what one royal source complained had become a public relations ‘fiasco,'” the Sunday Times added. Another source close to Elizabeth said she is “concerned and distressed by all this.”
The queen overall is worried that “the Epstein affair is bringing a more lasting whiff of scandal to the monarchy,” the Sunday Times added.
Giuffre told the media outside of a federal court in Manhattan last week that Andrew “knows exactly what he’s done, and I hope he comes clean about it.” More negative headlines could come if Andrew resists talking to the FBI in its ongoing investigation of Epstein’s alleged crimes — even though one report said Andrew was willing to be questioned.
Royal aides also fear that more embarrassing revelations could come in U.S. federal court come if any of Epstein’s employees or associates are charged in his sex trafficking operation, the Sunday Times said. Attorneys for Epstein’s victims have also said they want to talk to Andrew about what, if anything, he knows.
Princess Eugenie walks up the aisle with her father, Prince Andrew, at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on Oct. 12. (Yui Mok/Pool/AFP/Getty Images) 
The scandal already may have hurt one long-awaited project of Princess Eugenie. Andrew’s younger daughter likely will put her upcoming anti-slavery and sex trafficking podcast on hold in light of the Epstein scandal, The Sun reported last month. Eugenie, co-founder of the Anti-Slavery Collective nonprofit, announced the podcast in July.
Both Eugenie and her older sister, Beatrice, have struggled with allegations that their father at least knew about Epstein’s alleged abuse of girls and women, The Sun said.
“It’s all very difficult for Eugenie at the moment — she and Beatrice are very close to their father and are being very supportive,” a source told The Sun. The source said that Eugenie realizes it is not good timing for her to launch a podcast against modern-day slavery, given that her father’s one-time friend allegedly created a network of girls and women to provide sexual services to him and to his powerful male friends.
In a 2011 interview with the Daily Mail and in a 2015 lawsuit, Giuffre alleged that Epstein’s socialite friend Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to give massages to Epstein when she was a 15-year-old spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Epstein was a neighbor of the future president in Palm Beach, Florida.
Giuffre also claimed that Epstein and Maxwell forced her to have sex with Andrew three times in 2001, when she was 17. The encounters took place at Epstein’s New York mansion, at an “orgy” on his private island in the Caribbean, and at Maxwell’s mews home in London. Giuffre claims that the London encounter occurred the same night she and Andrew were infamously photographed together, with Andrew’s arm around her bare waist.
Notably, one of the more embarrassing efforts by Andrew to defend himself has apparently been to let his friends make anonymous claims to the U.K. media that the photo with Giuffre must have been faked. Their argument? Andrew’s fingers are “much chubbier” in real life.
In a statement issued late last month, Andrew admitted it had been a “mistake and an error” to see Epstein in 2010 after the financier was first investigated for sex trafficking and controversially served only 13 months in jail on a lesser charge of soliciting sex from a minor. Andrew said he “deplores the exploitation of any human being,” along with the suggestion he would “condone, participate in or encourage any such behavior.”
One royal source told the Sunday Times that the queen has preferred to overlook Andrew’s “misdemeanors” over the years — transgressions involving influence-peddling scandals, associations with unsavory political figures and reports of general boorish behavior. That’s because she is close to him and to his daughters. But it’s becoming apparent to the queen that the Epstein case goes beyond the usual “misdemeanors,” the Sunday Times said.
“You’ve got a serious crime linked to the kind of behaviour towards women that people feel particularly strongly about at the moment,” a royal source told the Sunday Times.
Added Sunday Times writers Tony Allen-Mills and Roya Nikkhah: “Whatever one makes of the lurid allegations of massages, orgies and birthday parties with 12-year-old girls, the Epstein scandal has from the start been a public relations disaster for the royal family. No one at Buckingham Palace appears to have realized that the #MeToo movement might reignite the seemingly dormant Epstein case, in which the prince has figured for almost two decades.”
Allen-Mills and Nikkhah added that Andrew has never been the most popular of royals, writing: “At the heart of the Epstein hatefest stands a prickly, difficult and frequently reckless English prince who has never learnt how to make himself liked by the British public.”