The Duchess of York’s former spokesman has attempted to excuse her groveling email to Jeffrey Epstein by saying the pedophile made a threatening phone call in which he channeled Hannibal Lecter.
It is the first sign of a public fight back from the disgraced duchess, who has seen charities sever ties with her after the email, which praised Epstein as a “supreme friend,” was published.
James Henderson told the Daily Telegraph: “People don’t understand how terrible Epstein was.”
“I can remember everything about that call. He said he would destroy the York family, and he was quite clear on that. He said he would destroy me. He wasn’t shouting. He had a Hannibal Lecter-type voice. It was very cold and calm and really menacing and nasty,” he said.
Henderson said he was so shaken that he saved Epstein’s number to ensure he would never pick up a future call.
He added, “He [Epstein] was very, very clear. He said, ‘I will destroy the family.’ The pressure she was put under to protect her family must have been huge… That call was chilling. It was about two minutes long. But it was a two-minute threat in a Hannibal Lecter-type voice.”
Ironically, given that Prince Andrew and his former wife were friends with Epstein, and Andrew said in a BBC interview he didn’t regret that, Henderson then said: “It was a chilling call and I’m surprised anybody was ever friends with him given the way he talked to me.”
The Duchess of York wrote Epstein a fawning email weeks after denouncing him, calling him her “steadfast, generous and supreme friend” and apologizing for letting him down, which has now destroyed her royal charity portfolio. Julia’s House, the British Heart Foundation, the Teenage Cancer Trust, and others have all dumped her after the email was published this weekend.
Desperate spin from her camp—that she was intimidated into writing the message by Epstein’s menacing threats—has failed to blunt the damage. Indeed, it is precisely the two-faced nature of the grovel—public denunciation followed by the private flattery—that looks like it will finish her off.
Despite the near-universal disgust with the Yorks, King Charles is still keeping faith with the pair, according to a report in the Daily Mail on Tuesday.
The report quoted a palace insider saying: “The King doesn’t want to cut ties with his brother, former sister-in-law, and that side of the family.”
It is an astonishing decision. Here we have a convicted sex offender’s former friend in Andrew, and his fawning apologist in Fergie. Yet, Charles persists in treating them as if they can remain part of royal family life without the public objecting.
Prince William sees the danger, according to the Mail’s insider, who said: “William feels even more strongly than the king that Andrew and Fergie are an embarrassment and will be urging his father to act.”
Fergie has lived on borrowed royal grace for decades—from the 1992 toe-sucking scandal to the 2010 $609,000 cash-for-access sting, to a $8.16 million chalet debt debacle. Each time, she bounced back.
But this time feels different; charities and books for children cannot coexist with messages praising the world’s most notorious pedophile, no matter how “nasty” his phone calls may have been.
Daphne Barak, the former friend of Fergie whose byline appeared on the stories that published the emails in the newspapers this weekend, told GB News: “I don’t understand how a convicted pedophile, a sex abuser, who had to register himself everywhere he went, could sue somebody for calling him a convicted pedophile. I don’t understand, unless there are things that she didn’t tell us.”
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