Emily Maitlis has revealed that Prince Andrew made a rather strange request after their now infamous 2019 Newsnight interview.
Emily sat down for an intimate interview with Prince Andrew where she grilled him over his former friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – resulting in the Duke of York stepping down from public life.
Despite the interview being viewed as a complete disaster for the royal family, Emily has now said Prince Andrew had actually wanted to spend even longer talking about Pizza Express and his ‘sweating’ issue.
Emily recalled: ‘Once we’d finished the interview, I said as a courtesy, “Is there anything that didn’t get included that you wanted to discuss?”
‘Prince Andrew said, “Well actually, there were a couple of things. You didn’t include my alibi.” He wanted to talk about the fact that he’d been at Pizza Express on the night in question.
‘And it was a very complicated moment for us because, on the one hand, I knew that if he included some of the stuff that he wanted to talk about, for example the sweating and the Pizza Express alibi, it was not going to help his case, in fact, it was actually going to make it look worse.’
The former Newsnight presenter said she felt a kind of ‘responsibility’ to not let Prince Andrew ‘walk into that’ – but also felt responsible to include things he felt were important to mention.
Despite her massive success after the interview with Prince Andrew, Emily also said it’s made her career more difficult as some sources are now intimidated due to her fame.
She said: ‘So, I think it’s slightly double-edged. Some people come towards you, and some run a mile.’
The journalist grilled Andrew over allegations that Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre was trafficked to have sex with the royal when she was 17 – still a minor under US law – during the Newsnight exclusive.
The Duke denied he had sex with Ms Giuffre, adding he had no recollection of ever meeting her and that he had spent the day of the alleged meeting at a Pizza Express restaurant in Woking, Surrey, at a party with one of his daughters.
In one alleged encounter, Ms Giuffre claimed that Andrew had sweated heavily as they danced at London nightclub Tramp.
However, he denied this saying he could not sweat at the time due to a medical condition relating from his time serving in the Falklands War.
Maitlis – who left the BBC in February 2022 and now works on Global’s The News Agents podcast – said: ‘This is how I know that Prince Andrew was happy with the interview, because he stayed chatting. He seemed very jolly.’
She added: ‘A whole load of people came in and I said, “What’s going on?” And they said: “Oh Thursday evenings we have cinema night at the palace. You can stay if you want.”
‘And at that point, I just thought: “I’ve got to get away from here. I need space to work out what just happened.” ‘
Last year, Andrew reached an out-of-court settlement – which was not an admission of wrongdoing – with Ms Giuffre reportedly worth up to $12 million (£9.6 million) following her claim against him in the US.
The duke has always strenuously denied the allegations against him.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York in August 2019 at the age of 66 while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. The death was ruled a suicide.
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