Newly released court documents have exposed how convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein attempted to use his relationship with Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, to rehabilitate his public image after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage girls.
Emails disclosed by the US justice department show that Epstein and his publicist, Mike Sitrick, devised a plan to pressure Ferguson into retracting her 2011 public condemnation of Epstein. In a Daily Telegraph interview, Ferguson had expressed deep regret over her association with Epstein, calling it a “gigantic error of judgment” and vowing to sever all ties.
Epstein, however, believed he could persuade Ferguson to release a statement declaring he was “not a pedophile”. Sitrick suggested that if “gentle persuasion” failed, they should “turn up the heat even to the point of sending her a draft defamation lawsuit”. He argued that a retraction from Ferguson would be “a major turning point” for Epstein’s reputation.
Despite Epstein’s concerns that he could not “depend” on Ferguson, she privately emailed him the following month to “humbly apologise” for her comments, describing him as her “supreme friend”. It remains unclear whether she was threatened with legal action.
The files also reveal that Ferguson continued her relationship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, calling him the “brother [she] always wished for” while he was under house arrest in 2009. Epstein had earlier paid off £15,000 of her debts, a fact she acknowledged in her 2011 interview.
