Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s posture and expression, as he was driven away from a police station, hit as symbolic.
Of all the horrors the Epstein files have revealed, for some reason it’s today’s picture of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, in a car leaving a Norfolk police station after being arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, that makes me really rage.
It’s the slouch. Look at him, sliding down the seat, attempting to slither away from the cameras, to hide.
It’s the eyes, wide with what looks like shock.
Yes, yes, we might all be shocked and we might all try to hide if we were visited by the police on our birthday and carted off over allegations we’d shared confidential material with a child sex offender, but on Andrew, this posture, this expression hits as symbolic.
The Epstein files paint a distressing picture of powerful men hiding. Entrepreneurs, professors and political types seem to have presented an acceptable version of themselves to the world, while hiding a darker version behind. God knows how many we’ll find were hiding criminality, but we already know many were hiding ongoing friendships with Epstein, long after he was convicted, and many were hiding misogyny. Some spoke with Epstein of women (not that they use that term, they use “pussy”) as sluts and whores and cunts, the younger ones as nothing more than sex objects, the old as too old to fuck, useless, irritating.
They hid who they really were… but they also didn’t try that hard, because who would dare catch them? Look at Andrew. He didn’t seem to think, even while still a titled royal, that he needed to go to great lengths to hide his relationship with a convicted sex offender. He met Jeffrey Epstein in the middle of New York bloody Central Park five months after the financier was released from prison for soliciting a minor. (Andrew claims he only met Epstein to end the friendship, though recently released files show he remained in contact with Epstein long after that 2010 park meeting).
It seems many of the men in Epstein’s circle couldn’t imagine powerful people like them would be held to account for poor behaviour, and were shocked, disgusted when they were. Take this email from the artist Andres Serrano sent to Epstein during the 2016 US Election campaign. “I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons. But so disgusted by the outrage over ‘grab them by the pussy’ that I may give him my sympathy vote’”.
Then there’s the academic Noam Chomsky soothing Epstein in 2019 over the “horrible way you are being treated by the press and in public”. “The best way to proceed is to ignore it,” Chomsky wrote. “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” (Chomsky’s wife has said the linguist was naive and unaware of Epstein’s earlier conviction.)
And so, back to that picture of Andrew in the car. Many are delighted by it, and you can see why – one of the men in Epstein’s circle is being subjected to police scrutiny. But I look at that picture and only feel rage. I see a man still trying to hide, a man still shocked that the police and the press have come for him.
