The arrest of former Prince Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, could mark a turning point in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case and pave the way for further investigations and potential charges, two writers involved in exposing the network have said.
British journalist Emily Maitlis, whose explosive 2019 BBC interview with the then-Prince helped propel the scandal into global headlines, said his arrest last month was shocking, but also symbolically powerful.
“I mean it was an extraordinary thing. For a member of the British royal family to be arrested, a man in that position… we do not have moments like that,” she said at the All About Women event in Sydney on Sunday. “What’s interesting is, of course, that he was arrested for misconduct in public office, a white collar crime, it had nothing to do with the allegations that pursued him for the last 15 years.”
The arrest was symbolic because it suggests investigators are now willing to pursue accountability around the broader Epstein network through whatever legal avenues are available, she said. Even if, like Mountbatten-Windsor, those charges sit outside the sexual abuse allegations that have defined the public conversation around the case for years.
“I would be surprised if there wasn’t more to come,” she continued.
Amy Wallace, who co-authored and posthumously published alleged victim-survivor Virginia Giuffre’s memoir “Nobody’s Girl,” agreed that Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest could represent the beginning of a wider reckoning.
While Epstein’s death in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction in 2021 brought a degree of legal closure to the case, she argued that many questions about who enabled or protected the operation still linger.
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She added that the sheer number of potential victims highlights how much of the network surrounding Epstein remains unexplored: “There are at least a thousand, maybe more.”
But, like Maitlis, she feels cautiously optimistic that Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is “the beginning” of something.
“The one thing I would try to be hopeful about is this idea that sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime, but sometimes the cover-up is what gets the guys. And that’s what is going on now,” she said.
“I think what’s happening now is the beginning of a potential opening up of all these cover-ups… I’m hopeful that has power, and that ends up in something that really rights a wrong.”