I recently interviewed Amy Wallace. You probably don’t recognise her name. That’s because she’s a ghostwriter; her most recent project, Nobody’s Girl, the story of Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s life, is a harrowing account of abuse and survival – until, that is, Giuffre’s death in April 2025, six months before its publication. But it is also an attempt to prise open that most gummed-up jam-jar lid of an institution the British monarchy, which has enjoyed decades of successfully burying uncomfortable and inconvenient things.
In Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre alleges that Prince Andrew sexually abused her on three occasions: in London, New York and on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. Andrew has always denied any wrongdoing and reached an out-of-court financial settlement with Giuffre in 2022.
In his extraordinary appearance on Newsnight in 2019, he said: “I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened.” He also claimed he lacked the ability to sweat and that, on one of the occasions when he is alleged to have had sex with Giuffre, he was in fact at a PizzaExpress in Woking. These odd claims are, in part, why the interview is so well remembered, but there was also something subtler going on. Watching Andrew, you realised he didn’t think he had to persuade anyone. He only had to deny. His confidence wasn’t rooted in the strength of his argument, but in the institution that had spent decades insulating him from ordinary scrutiny. His total certainty that he did not need to convince anyone – that people would accept his version of events and remain deferential – was laid bare.
The royal aura evaporated. For perhaps the first time in his life, Andrew encountered an audience that did not regard his title as evidence of his moral authority. Royalty has always depended on a peculiar kind of epistemic privilege. The royal family does not just inherit wealth or constitutional status, but credibility itself. This is a strange privilege because it is almost impossible to see while it is operating. It works quietly, invisibly, until it collides with someone who possesses little independent credibility.
We tend to imagine power as something exercised through laws, wealth or force. But perhaps its most potent form is the ability to define reality itself: to have your account treated as the default version of events until overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. That is what deference buys. It shifts the burden of proof. The powerful begin by being trusted; everyone else starts with doubt. Only when that assumption breaks down do we notice it was ever there.
Giuffre had to assemble her credibility piece by painstaking piece: testimony, corroboration, litigation, documents, photographs. Andrew simply shook his head. That asymmetry tells us something profound about hereditary power. Some people are born into being believed. I don’t think there can be much greater contrast than with Giuffre’s many years spent trying to convince the world that she even existed. Many people – including Andrew – had argued that the infamous photograph of her and the former prince was not real, and had been doctored in some way. It was not until this February, nearly a year after her death, that newly released Epstein emails demonstrated otherwise. A message sent by “G Maxwell” to Epstein in 2015 said: “In 2001 I was in London when [redacted] met a number of friends of mine, including Prince Andrew. A photograph was taken as I imagine she wanted to show it to friends and family.”
“It truly does vindicate Virginia,” Giuffre’s brother, Sky Roberts, told the BBC. “She was not lying this entire time.”
That episode – a fragment in the wider horror of the Epstein case, which is estimated to have involved at least 1,000 women and girls – is monarchy in miniature: an illustration of the difference between royals enjoying automatic credibility and ordinary people having to earn it. It is yet another anti-democratic trait of constitutional monarchy – add it to the pile. Most authority figures eventually have to answer to a higher power: voters, employers or shareholders. This absence of scrutiny and accountability lends itself to myth-making and secrecy. The Giuffre case is a reminder always to be suspicious of power, always to question authority.
Because Andrew is not an aberration. The problem isn’t one person behaving appallingly. Bad people are in your family, at the bus stop, down the pub. They inhabit institutions, too. The problem is that hereditary power encourages a culture in which status becomes evidence and confers a credibility unavailable to anyone else.
This is why republicans should resist making arguments about Andrew in isolation. Don’t ask whether King Charles is decent, or whether the Prince and Princess of Wales are dutiful, or whether the monarchy raises money for charity. Instead, ask: should any family inherit extraordinary moral authority by accident of birth? Democracies are built on the proposition that no one is born fit to rule. We continue to suspend that principle for the country’s hereditary head of state.
You do not have to storm the Capitol to recognise that institutions warrant scepticism. Nor do you have to cheer every populist assault on expertise to understand that authority should never be immune from challenge. The monarchy asks us to believe first and question later – if at all. That is not a democratic instinct. It’s a feudal one.
Listen to Amy Wallace in conversation with Oli Dugmore on our interview podcast The Exchange
[Further reading: Meet the people who handle the King’s billions]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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