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Shock new allegation about Jeffrey Epstein’s payment to Duchess of York
Charities have rushed to dump Fergie after it was revealed she stayed in touch with the convicted sex offender, and allegedly accepted millions more than thought.
Daniela Elser
September 24, 2025 – 10:13AM
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Fergie storms out of 60 Minutes interview in resurfaced clip
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, stormed out off an interview with 60 Minutes reporter Michael Usher back in 2011.
Source: News.com.au
Downfalls in royal history have historically come via bloody axe or marauding Frenchie but in the case of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York hers has come via an email.
The disaster-prone duchess has finally done it; she has been outed as having done something so toxic there can be no third-act comeback, PR-Lazarus-ing for her.
On March 7, 2011 Fergie gave an interview to the Evening Standard offering a “heartfelt apology” for accepting £15,000 ($A30,000) from convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, vehemently declaring she would never “have nothing ever to do” with him again.
This week we learned that was a lie – Seven weeks later, on April 26, 2011, she was grovelling at Epstein’s feet, sending him an email that to read it, you should have a sick bag handy for the inevitable involuntary retching, calling him a “supreme friend”.
But wait, there’s more!
Fergie did not just allegedly accept that sum from a man who, by that point in time, had been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution, but £2 million ($A4 million).
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York has been embroiled in a huge media storm this week. Picture: Stefano Rellandini / AFP
That is the astonishing new claim made by leading biographer and historian Andrew Lownie whose superb, recently released Entitled truly unmasked Prince Andrew, The Duke of York as being an even slimier, more sexually grotesque lump than thought.
This week Lownie did a live interview with The Royalist’s Tom Sykes, alleging that the sum that Epstein gave Fergie was actually 13,233 per cent more than the figure she copped to accepting back in 2011.
Lownie said: “It’s not £15,000, it’s more like £2 million. It’s why Andrew went to see him in December 2010, just to get a bit more money out of him, and what she hasn’t explained, even the £15,000, is whether that money was repaid. We can’t trust a single word she says.”
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Since the news of Fergie’s Epstein email broke on Sunday, six charities, including ones that have kept the duchess on their books for more than 30 years, have rushed to dump the duchess and sever ties with her.
What’s a polite, will-get-past-my-editors way of saying, ‘she’s totally and utterly f**ked’?
Both Fergie and Andrew are seeing themselves on the outer with the royal family. Picture: Jordan Pettitt/POOL/AFP
Somehow it has finally happened – Fergie has hit reputational armageddon.
For decades the disaster-prone duchess has been renowned for being pathologically foolish and an egregious money-grabber, her insatiable appetite for mammon and living like Marie Antoniette’s spendthrift older sister regularly landing her in hotter water Bezzelebub’s hot tub.
After all, this is the woman who managed to claw her way back into King Charles’ good graces and the public’s affection after being secretly filmed by a hidden camera offering to sell access to Andrew for about $1 million in 2010 before taking a briefcase filled with cash.
Sure, she was clearly grasping but there was beguiling about her irrepressible spirit and Tigger-ish charm. Ferige was a harmless walking disaster.
The Duchess of York has just become a velvet-headbanded Chernobyl. There’s being an entertaining idiot and then there’s sucking up to the world’s most notorious pedophile who had allegedly given her millions.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Picture: GETTY IMAGES
At the time of Fergie’s correspondence with Epstein, she was facing more than $10 million in debts and fighting to stave off bankruptcy. A debt restructuring deal was agreed to with many of her creditors which would see her pay about 25 cents to the dollar however her former assistant Johnny O’Sullivan, to whom she owed about $189,000 was holding out.
At this point, Andrew travelled to New York for that infamous last holiday with Epstein, during which they were photographed walking in Central Park.
“Prince Andrew went to Jeffrey Epstein for help in paying that debt,” a friend of the duke’s told Vanity Fair in 2021. “Andrew tells Epstein that his ex-wife has a real problem, and her entire restructuring is hanging in the balance with this former employee. And could he lend her some money? And Epstein said, ‘I’ll handle it directly with the employee. You don’t have to pay me back. Consider it a gift.’”
The publication of the photo of Andrew and Epstein in New York during that trip that was published several months later was the first domino to fall in a disaster that culminated in the duke’s infamous performance on Newsnight and him being forcibly removed from public life.
Somehow thought, Fergie had managed to, over the last decade, follow a different arc back into relatively goodish books of the late Queen and Charles. In 2023, after three decades of being Siberia-ishly consigned to some remote estate cottage downwind of the bins, she was finally invited back to Sandringham proper for the full whack, all-the-goose-you-can-eat Christmas celebrations.
Since then Fergie has been a regular supporting cast member at things like the Royal Family’s Easter celebrations and bobbed about in the Royal boxes at Ascot and Wimbledon.
Fergie has managed to stay in the royal family’s inner circle, though that position is certainly in doubt. Picture: Karwai Tang/WireImage
She was the woman most likely to be described as ‘bubbly’ and her pluck facing breast cancer and melanoma in the same year also helped her comeback arc.
But this week, the 65-year-old has truly exhausted her ninety nine lives. She’s a goner and rightly so.
There are many forgivable transgressions or at least ones whose severity can dim over time but allegedly accepting millions of dollars from a convicted child sex offender and describing him as her “supreme friend” is an unequivocal point of no return.
The closest Fergie is going to come to Prince William and Kate, The Prince and Princess of Wales any time soon is if she can scrounge up a fiver to buy the latest Hello with them on the cover.
No more Christmases in Norfolk, no more royal lunches and admittance to high society events. In the last year and a bit she went to the Cannes Film Festival and the prestigious AmFar gala, was on a panel with Sabrina Elba at the Global Citizen conference in New York, attended The Lady Garden Foundation Langan’s Ladies Lunch, The British Forces Foundation ball, and the F1 in Bahrain.
The taint of Epstein is such that it is impossible to ever see her being welcomed anywhere up to and including Pizza Express Woking.
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Fergie reveals coronation plans with the late Queen’s corgis
Fergie reveals coronation plans with the late…
After all these years, after the toe-sucking and her slapping a crown on anything saleable and having energetically milked her royal status such that the teet is long dry, Fergie has finally managed to make herself truly into a pariah.
Practically, this will not immediately mean much for Ferige’s day-to-day. Since 2008 she has been bunking down with Andrew in a wing at Royal Lodge and there the two will likely stay until King Charles can find some legal loophole to turf them out. (Toady Andrew has an iron-clad lease unfortunately.)
However the money tap will have to be wrenched shut. She has written more than 25 books, many of them for kids and with a new one set to be released next month. What publisher in the world now is going to want to do business with her? Ditto Mills & Boon for whom she has been typing out moderately successful bodice-rippers for the last few years.
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In 2023 Fergie told the Telegraph that the late Queen had once said to her, “Be yourself, Sarah. All anyone wants is for you to just be yourself.”
Unfortunately for the duchess, and the royal family, it turns out she appears to have done just that.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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