ALBAWABA - Trump feels "very badly" for British royal family after King Charles strips Prince Andrew’s titles.
The British royal family was punished by King Charles when he took away Andrew's titles because he was seeing the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Donald Trump said he feels "terribly" for them.
Buckingham Palace said Thursday that the ex-Duke of York, who is now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, will also have to leave the Royal Lodge on the Windsor estate, where he has lived for a long time.
US President Donald Trump speaks to members of the press aboard Air Force
The choice was made because people in the royal family were worried about the damage that constant news stories about Mountbatten-Windsor's friendship with the child molester were doing. One of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, has also reported that the former prince sexually assaulted her.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein before becoming president twice, was asked by reporters on Air Force One on Sunday evening about King Charles's move to take away Andrew's titles and peerages.
"I feel very bad," Trump expressed. "The family has been through a horrible thing." That's been a terrible event. That's too bad. "I feel bad for the family."
Trump has talked a lot about how much he admires Britain's royal family. In September, he made an unusual second state visit to the UK. He praised the "special relationship" between the US and Britain and said wonderful things about King Charles.
But Epstein's death in a New York jail cell in 2019 has caused Trump political problems in recent months. Trump is said to have been seeing Epstein. Several pictures of Trump and Epstein were projected onto Windsor Castle before he was welcomed by King Charles during his visit in September. The background played a soundtrack that ridiculed their relationship.
Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York (L) and Britain's King Charles III leave following a Requiem Mass
At the same time, Mountbatten Windsor's ties to Epstein have come under more scrutiny since new emails and a biography written after Giuffre's death in April at the age of 41 were made public. She wrote in the book that she was forced to have sex with the former prince three times, including when she was 17 and during an orgasm after Epstein put her in danger. She said that Mountbatten Windsor "thought that having sex with me was his birthright."
That he had sex with Giuffre when she was 17 has never been true for Mountbatten-Windsor, who is 65 years old. He agreed to pay her £12m ($16m) to end a court case, but he didn't say he was at fault.
Britain's Prince Andrew (Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth / POOL / AFP)
The latest bad thing to happen because of the incident is that John Healey, the UK's defense secretary, said on Sunday that Mountbatten-Windsor would lose the last naval title he had been given in 2015.
After Giuffre sued him in 2022, his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, took away his other honored military titles.
On Friday, a Democrat in Congress asked Mountbatten Windsor to appear before a committee of the US House of Representatives that is looking into how the government handled the Epstein case.
In July, the case got a lot more attention when the Justice Department said that the widely circulated list of Epstein's sex-trafficking clients did not exist and that they would not be sharing any more information about the case.
