Photographs of the child sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell released by the US justice department appear to show how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor facilitated their access to British high society.
Epstein and Maxwell are pictured hunting with the former prince at Balmoral and with him in the royal box at Ascot. A separate picture shows Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street.
One image shows Mountbatten-Windsor reclining across the legs of five people, whose faces have been redacted, with his head near a woman’s lap. In this image, Maxwell appears to peer down and smile at him.
Sky News reported on Saturday that the photograph was taken at Sandringham, the late Queen Elizabeth’s Norfolk estate, where King Charles and members of his family will spend Christmas. The broadcaster said it had cross-referenced the picture with other images taken there.
Another picture, understood to have been taken in 2002, shows Maxwell posing in Winston Churchill’s war rooms, the secret underground meeting place for the British cabinet during the second world war, with a group that includes the former US president Bill Clinton and the actor Kevin Spacey.
A trove of documents relating to Epstein, a convicted child sex offender who died in jail in 2019, was uploaded on Friday night to the US justice department website, which held users in a queue as it experienced an “extremely high volume of search requests”.
The data release came after the US deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said “several hundred thousand” documents from the “Epstein files” would be released before a legal deadline. He said the need to protect Epstein’s victims meant thousands more would be released in the coming weeks.
The US justice department was legally required to make all files related to the investigation into Epstein public by midnight on Friday after the passing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The images released on Friday, which also contain images of Mounbatten-Windsor’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson, help illustrate how he gave Epstein and Maxwell access to the upper echelons of British life.
Many of the images are undated, but it is understood that Epstein and Maxwell were invited to ladies day at Ascot on 22 June 2000 by Mountbatten-Windsor. Although the event was also attended by the late queen and the queen mother, Mounbatten-Windsor has previously said Epstein and Maxwell were his guests.
Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in Manhattan, New York, as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. He had previously pleaded guilty to child sex offences in 2008. Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2021.
Mounbatten-Windsor’s relationship with Epstein ultimately prompted his exit from royal life. He stepped down from official duties in 2019 after a disastrous Newsnight interview in which he said he did not regret his association with the financier despite his criminality.
Three years later, he paid millions to Virginia Giuffre, who claimed she was sexually assaulted by him when she was trafficked by Epstein as a teenager. Mounbatten-Windsor settled Giuffre’s lawsuit despite claiming he had never met her.
The publication of a posthumous memoir by Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, and the US government’s release of documents from Epstein’s estate, brought more scrutiny of his relationship with the financier. Mounbatten-Windsor’s brother, the king, stripped him of his royal titles in October.
Among the hundreds of photos included in the files are several images of Clinton, whose spokesperson said he had cut contact with Epstein when his crimes came to light. Also featured are musicians Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson. There is no suggestion this indicates any wrongdoing on their part.
Peter Mandelson, who was sacked from his job as the UK’s ambassador to the US earlier this year after revelations about his friendship with Epstein, is pictured with him as he is presented with a birthday cake. Mandelson helped facilitate a meeting between Epstein and the former prime minister Tony Blair in 2002.
Many of the photos and documents are heavily redacted, prompting criticism from US lawmakers and lawyers for Epstein’s victims.
On Saturday, Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she felt the US justice department was “brazenly going against” the Epstein Transparency Act by failing to release the information in full.
“What we worry about is a slow rollout of incomplete information without any context as to what we’re looking at,” she said. “It’s really important that we see everything that they have released.
“We are certainly hoping that it’s a path to justice. The release of all of these documents comes at a great cost to us, they’re incredibly triggering and re-traumatising but we feel incredibly strong that they need to be released because we need to know what happened in this case.
“This is a sex trafficking case that has spanned more than three decades, it’s spanned continents, it’s spanned political administrations and when it comes down to it, we just want all of the evidence of these crimes out there so we can find justice, finally.
“I think that there’s definitely a range of emotions. There’s fear that we’re not going to see all of the information released, there’s hope that some of the people who perpetrated these crimes will be held accountable but I think that the amount of information that was released today was so copious that it’s going to take us all some time to get through and we really don’t know what our feelings are going to be as we wade through it.”
