Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell had an ‘easy warmth’ around each other and may have dated in the past, a friend of the pair has claimed.
Euan Rellie, who is a New York-based, British investment banker, attended the University of Oxford with Maxwell, 60, and was a guest at dinner parties that she and her disgraced ex-boyfriend Jeffery Epstein hosted in the US.
He recalled being invited to Epstein’s New York home one evening and the disgraced socialite admitted that it was ‘for my friend Prince Andrew’.
And a former Palace police guard made similar claims. Paul Page said he and colleagues wondered if the Andrew and Maxwell were ‘intimate’ due to the frequency of her visits to the Palace.
Mr Rellie and Mr Page made the revelations during an interview with Ranvir Singh for the upcoming ITV documentary, Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile.
Speaking in the upcoming documentary, Mr Rellie said: ‘She described Andrew as being her friend, not Jeffrey’s.’
‘I got the sense that Prince Andrew and Ghislaine had probably been girlfriend and boyfriend in the past. They had an easy warmth around each other’, reports The Telegraph.
This comes as the disgraced socialite is set to be sentenced on sex trafficking crimes on June 28.
The sentencing date was set by Judge Alison Nathan on Friday afternoon.
The delayed sentencing was based on the defense attorneys’ decision due to recent ‘compelling’ evidence they say could overturn the trial, as well as Maxwell’s conviction.
Meanwhile, a former royalty protection officer claimed the Duke of York would ‘shout and scream’ if his teddy bear collection was knocked out of place by palace maids.
The former constable, who left the Metropolitan Police in 2007, was part of the elite Royal Protection Squad and had access to the Duke of York’s private residence.
He claimed that Andrew had a bed with ’50 or 60′ stuffed toys and maids were given a laminated picture so each bear could carefully be put back in its original position.
He said: ‘It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed and basically there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ.
‘The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream.’
Writer Elizabeth Day was introduced to Andrew’s ‘strange’ teddy bear collection back in 2019 at Buckingham Palace.
She wrote: ‘I was told to wait in a corridor where my only other companion was an oversized teddy bear squashed into a seat.
‘When I was ushered in to meet Prince Andrew, I asked him about it. He sniggered and told me it had been a wedding gift from his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.
‘It seemed rather strange to me that a grown man should be so amused by the presence of a stuffed toy, but I suppose the English upper classes have a long history with teddy bears used as transitional objects to express emotions they might feel uncomfortable with.
‘I wondered if this was someone who had never really grown up because he had never had to. Here he was, taking up space in his mother’s house, carrying out a made-up job to keep him entertained and still having a teddy bear his ex-wife had given him. It was weird.’
The royalty protection officer – who was in the Royal Protection Command from 1998 to 2004 – also said that officers believed the Duke has a close relationship with Robert Maxwell’s daughter, The Sun Online reports.
Page, who was jailed in 2009 for a £3million fraud scam, claimed Ghislaine Maxwell rarely signed in and entered the palace ‘at will’.
He added: ‘From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace at will, we suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew.
‘She kept coming in and out, in and out.’
This is an excerpt from Daily Mail.
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