Prince Andrew is facing renewed scrutiny after his former crisis manager, John Bryan, was secretly recorded alleging that the Duke of York had sex with underage girls while connected to Jeffrey Epstein. The footage was captured by James O'Keefe, the conservative activist and founder of Project Veritas, and released online earlier this week.
In the hidden camera video, Bryan tells an undercover reporter that he once defended Andrew publicly in a 2022 Daily Mail article, only to later learn the royal had lied to him. "I was really p---ed because he lied to me," Bryan said in the recording. When pressed by the journalist, he added: "That he was f---ing underage girls. I was so p---ed."
The explosive claim is a stark reversal for Bryan, who previously worked behind the scenes to help Prince Andrew manage the fallout from his 2019 BBC Newsnight interview. In that appearance, Andrew denied ever meeting Virginia Giuffre, who alleged she was trafficked by Epstein to have sex with the prince at age 17.
At the time, Andrew famously claimed he was at Pizza Express in Woking with his children and said he could not sweat due to a medical condition, attempting to discredit Giuffre's claims.
Following the disastrous interview, Bryan reportedly drafted a five-page crisis strategy urging Andrew to express sympathy for Epstein's victims. The advice, however, was not followed.
Bryan, a businessman who dated Andrew's ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, from 1991 to 1997, was already a controversial figure in the royal orbit. He gained notoriety in 1992 after a photograph surfaced of him appearing to suck Ferguson's toes during a vacation in the South of France while she was still married to the prince. The incident led Queen Elizabeth II to reportedly demand Ferguson leave Balmoral Castle, and Prince Philip never spoke to her again.
Despite the scandal, Bryan remained in contact with both Ferguson and Andrew over the years. In the 2022 Daily Mail interview referenced in the tape, he claimed Epstein's real target was Queen Elizabeth. "I truly believe Epstein was going after her, but Andrew never gave him the ammunition to do so," Bryan said at the time.
Now, his stance appears to have changed. The timing of the video's release adds to its sensitivity, coming just weeks after the reported suicide of Virginia Giuffre, a conclusion some family members dispute. Other Epstein-linked figures, including Epstein himself and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, also died under controversial circumstances.
A friend of Prince Andrew told The Daily Beast the footage amounted to "dinner party bragging" and claimed the prince and Bryan are no longer in regular contact. Andrew has not issued a public response, and attempts to reach his former media advisers for comment have been unsuccessful.
