A photographer present during Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's Newsnight interview has claimed that Andrew shared further details about his infamous sweating claim off-camera. Andrew's interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019 has been widely seen as the conversation that toppled a prince.
Interview context and allegations
During the interview, Emily questioned the then-Duke of York about his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Giuffre. Virginia, who took her own life in 2025, accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. Andrew has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and settled a US civil sexual assault case brought against him by Virginia in 2022.
Andrew dismissed some of Virginia's allegations during the Newsnight interview. One such claim was that Andrew had been "profusely sweating" while they danced together at Tramp nightclub in London. He told Emily: "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 shot at ... it was almost impossible for me to sweat."
Photographer's account
Andrew's sweating claim quickly dominated headlines and has remained one of the interview's standout moments ever since. However, photographer Mark Harrison, who worked on the interview, says Andrew left out some context. He described the experience to the Fred and Harry Borden channel on YouTube: "I'm told to shut up during the actual interview, and the interview starts and then there are these moments. I mean, I've watched his sunshine, his bonhomie, his charm up until this point."
"And suddenly I find myself; his body language changes. He's defensive in his posture. I hear words like sex, Pizza Express, sweating, these key moments, and my eyebrows are going up."
Mark went on to describe how the interview paused and a "conflab" ensued. While they chatted, Andrew recounted the sweating story in "enormous detail", details that allegedly didn't make it into the final interview. "So the interview pauses, and there's a conflab, and they stop, and then Andrew says, 'Oh, I'm sorry. Apparently, I got a date wrong'. And then he tells the story about what became the sweating story."
Details not on camera
"But in the break, he tells the story in enormous detail, the story that he didn't actually then do on camera; his story, which hasn't been mentioned anywhere. So this is new, is that he described being a pilot in the helicopter being shot at and that the training they'd been given was to do the absolute opposite instinct. So your instinct, I presume, would be to turn away from a missile."
"But apparently, he'd been taught to turn, well, to do the opposite of your instinct, whether that means turning towards the missile, but something that's against the grain. And this had brought on, he described, this absence of sweating condition."
Mark claimed Emily then asked Andrew if he'd ever told this story to the cameras before. He hadn't. So, once they started rolling again, they decided to "go for it", but Mark says Andrew didn't include this context.
