Prince Andrew is accused of manipulating an interview

It has been revealed that Prince Andrew asked the BBC to “include more detail” in his interview about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the car accident.

The brother of King Charles III sat down with Emily Maitlis to clear his name, but the revelations were so catastrophic that he was forced to withdraw from public life shortly afterwards.

Now the one-hour meeting is being dramatized in a new Amazon Prime show A very royal scandalwith Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis.

Maitlis was a guest on ITV’s Good morning, Great Britain before the show's release on Thursday and was asked if the prince had lied.

“I thought he made a great effort to remember his lines,” she told the show, adding that he had a request after the interview ended.

“He asked for certain additional parts to be included, and one thing we found quite complicated was the dilemma as a journalist when someone asks you to include something. You know, do you manipulate it?

“Or are you disturbing, you know… the chronology of the lesson you just recorded?”

Prince Andrew's interview was widely ridiculed online, including for his response to accuser Virginia Giuffre's report that she was taken to the London nightclub Tramp by Epstein.

She described dancing with Andrew while he was sweating profusely, but the prince said she couldn't be wrong because “on that particular day, March 10, I was at home, I was with the children and I had taken Beatrice to a party at a Pizza Express in Woking, I guess it was about 4 or 5pm.”

Another section that received a lot of comment was Maitlis' statement that Giuffre “spoke very specifically about that evening. She described how she danced with you and how you were sweating profusely.”

Andrew replied: 'There is a slight problem with sweating because I have a particular medical condition which is that I don't sweat, or at least I didn't sweat, and that was… yes, I didn't sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was being shot at, and I… it was just almost impossible for me to sweat.

“And it is only because I have done a number of things in the recent past that I am now able to do them again. I am sorry to say that there is a disease that says I have not done it, so…”

Maitlis told Good Morning Britain: “The team debate was about how we feel when we put these extra bits in. And on the one hand, he's asked you to do that. He's asked you to put the sweating in afterwards, you know.

“He asked us afterwards to elaborate on Pizza Express' alibi and we felt we couldn't ignore his request. But I think it made us feel a little vulnerable as journalists to go back and add extra stuff.”

Jack Royston is chief correspondent for the royal family Newsweeklives in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek'S The Royals Facebook page.

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