Prince Andrew asked sick question of BBC star as revealed in A Very Royal Scandal
Prince Andrew probed BBC journalist Emily Maitlis ahead of the jaw-dropping Newsnight interview.
Emily Maitlis was astonished when Prince Andrew quizzed her back in 2019 on whether she’d ever been abused.
The former BBC Newsnight journalist had been summoned to Buckingham Palace to discuss the possibility of a tell-all interview with Prince Andrew. The royal was known to have been a pal of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking.
He welcomed Emily Maitlis to a pre-interview meeting, accompanied by his daughter Beatrice and his secretary Amanda Thirsk. That was when he dropped the bombshell question, leaning forward and asking Emily and her colleagues: “Have any of you ever been victims of abuse?”
Viewers were on the edges of their seats, as dramatised scenes of the meeting aired on Thursday in the first episode of the new show A Very Royal Scandal. Amanda Thirsk (played by Joanna Scanlan) suggested that if Emily had been an abuse survivor herself in the past, then it could prejudice her perception of Andrew and prevent her from viewing him fairly.
Emily insisted she hadn’t been, but later confided in her husband that the interrogation had felt “horrible”. When Andrew – portrayed by Michael Sheen – probed again: “Nothing in your life?” and she declared: “Nothing that bares comparison.”
Amanda then chimed in, asking: “Your judgement wouldn’t be coloured by anything at all?”
She reassured Andrew – something which helped secure her the now notorious interview – but then, during a later conversation with her husband, brought up that she’d once been stalked.
“[What did I say about it?] Well nothing, having a stalker is not remotely comparable,” she told him, adding defiantly: “I don’t want to talk about it.”
A man who attended Cambridge University with her back in the 1990s, Edward Vines, bombarded her with unsolicited letters over a period of almost three decades.
