A New Documentary Suggests Prince Andrew's Disastrous BBC Interview Was Conducted to Clear His Name Before This Family Event

Prince Andrew wishes everyone would forget his scandalous association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. The disgraced royal’s 2019 BBC interview, where he tried to downplay his friendship with Epstein, is the subject of a new British television documentary, Andrew: The Problem Prince.

Former TV journalist Emily Maitlis, who conducted the infamous interview and produced the documentary, wrote a piece for The Sunday Times about why she believes Andrew put himself in the media firing line in the first place. She thinks it comes down to his daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. “How could an interview that aimed to provide answers for vulnerable young women not end up hurting other vulnerable young women — his daughters — along the way? These were things I struggled with in the aftermath that still cost me a fair amount of thought today,” she wrote.

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Maitlis doesn’t answer all of the questions she still has, but she keeps coming back to the fact that Andrew likely did it to “clear his own name” for a very important family event: his daughter’s wedding. “As we were putting together a new documentary on Andrew, I started to wonder if I hadn’t in fact missed the obvious answer to that most asked question,” she pondered. “What if the prince was actually hoping to clear his own name in time for his daughter Beatrice’s wedding? What if he put himself through a rigorous hour of accountability so his own family could put it behind all of them?”

The public was baffled that Prince Andrew even agreed to the interview in the first place but thinking about Beatrice’s upcoming wedding — it puts things into perspective. His controversies cast a shadow on his daughter’s big day and maybe he naively thought he could smooth things over with an interview to charm his way back to the public’s good graces. Instead, it was a disastrous PR blunder, and royal watchers haven’t forgotten how he willingly hung out with Epstein long after he was convicted.

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