Royal or otherwise, sex abuse stories have a grim familiarity in the wielding of male power | Sonia Sodha
Things are not looking good for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the Queen's second son formerly known as His Royal Highness. Last week, a judge in New York rejected his attempt to get the sexual abuse lawsuit Virginia Giuffre has filed against him thrown out. Giuffre is suing him for damages, claiming that she was forced to have sex with him three times in 2001 by the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and his sex trafficker accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, allegations that Andrew denies. The royal family responded by announcing that he has been stripped of his military honours, royal patronages and the use of his HRH title.
Any praise for the monarchy for depriving him of his titles is misplaced. The royal family left it until the last possible moment to act. Andrew has brought them into far graver disrepute than Prince Harry, who lost his titles for what, by comparison, is the laughably inconsequential transgression of walking away. The raging debate about the consequences for the monarchy is a distraction from the sexual abuse allegations at stake and accountability for the men complicit in the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell. It should not take a man of Andrew's obviously questionable character to expose the absurdities of a constitutional hereditary monarchy in a modern democracy.
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