Do Beatrice and Eugenie York recall the moment they first set eyes on their mother’s ‘supreme’ friend Jeffrey Epstein?

That sunny day in the Bahamas – April 16, 1998 – came smack bang in the middle of their Ascot prep school’s Easter holidays. 

A flight log entry for billionaire Epstein’s private jet marked their brief encounter in Nassau as ‘Princess Sarah Ferguson and kids’.

Epstein’s former housekeeper claimed that the young princesses, then aged nine and eight, along with their mother, later visited his private Caribbean island, Little St James. The island, a seemingly idyllic retreat, was infamously nicknamed ‘Paedo Island’ due to the sordid sex parties and orgies held there, often involving underage teenage girls.

The princesses at that young age could not have been aware of its concealed horrors or foresee the significant impact the U.S. financier—known to them as ‘nice Jeffrey’—would eventually have on their family.

Their father’s ill-fated dealings with Epstein – culminating in allegations made in 2014 by the late Virginia Giuffre that she had sex with Prince Andrew as a 17-year-old after being trafficked by the financier and his lover Ghislaine Maxwell – have led Beatrice and Eugenie, publicly at least, to distance themselves from him in recent years. 

Inevitably, they have fallen back on their close bond with their mother, and even taken to calling themselves ‘The Tripod’ because of their unbreakable three-way relationship.

Now that tripod is looking distinctly wobbly, because it’s the duchess’s turn to face up to the consequences of her own friendship with the businessman, who apparently committed suicide in a New York prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

A bombshell email obtained by The Mail on Sunday revealed how the Duchess of York lied back in January 2011 when she vowed to cut ties with the child sex offender, saying ‘I abhor paedophilia’ and describing her decision to accept money from him as a ‘gigantic error of judgment’. 

Behind the scenes, however, she sent a crawling email, apologising for disowning him and calling him her ‘steadfast, generous and supreme friend’.

‘I know you feel hellaciously let down by me from what you were either told or read and I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that,’ she gushed.

This week, as she was dumped as patron by seven children’s charities – and forced to step down from another in the US – the desperate duchess made the extraordinary claim that she had actually been trying to protect Beatrice and Eugenie.

Her spokesman insisted she sent her fawning email after a ‘chilling call’ in which a ‘menacing and nasty’ Epstein threatened to ‘destroy the York family’ in ‘a Hannibal Lecter-type voice’.

But will Beatrice, 37, and Eugenie, 35, view it the same way? How will they navigate the latest crisis to engulf their family? And what impact will this unfolding scandal have on their future roles as working royals?

‘Revelations that their mother was much closer to Epstein, and for longer than claimed, will break a major bond of trust,’ a royal source told the Daily Mail.

‘Exactly what hold did Epstein have over her? Are there more skeletons hidden? The girls will have as many questions as the rest of us.’

Among them, no doubt, will be the matter of just how much money Epstein gave their financially incontinent mother, given her own explanation that she later lied because she was terrified of him.

In the past she has admitted accepting £15,000 in 2010 to cover her unpaid bills – an amount which would have been spare change to a man like Epstein – and a drop in the ocean of what were then Fergie’s vast debts.

The true figure the duchess was given was said by author Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise And Fall Of The House Of York and recently serialised by the Daily Mail, to be closer to £2million. 

Even worse, perhaps, are claims that it was Fergie, not Andrew, who forged the original friendship with Epstein and paved the way for him to be brought into the royal fold. Prince Andrew claims they didn’t meet until 1999 – a year after the duchess, with their daughters in tow, met up with Epstein in Nassau.

Ghislaine Maxwell, friend of Prince Andrew and Epstein’s ex-girlfriend, also points the finger at the duchess.

According to newly released transcripts of interviews between Maxwell – still in prison in the US for sex trafficking – and US officials, she denies introducing Andrew to her former lover, saying: ‘I think Sarah is the one that pushed that . . . I thought Sarah was trying to put the moves on Jeffrey, if I’m being honest.’

What is clear is that, as their friendship blossomed, Epstein became a recognisable figure – and name – in the girls’ childhoods, popping up as a guest at Balmoral and Sandringham, as well as Beatrice’s Victorian-themed 18th birthday party in July 2006.

Epstein, dressed for the occasion as a decorated naval officer and standing between now disgraced Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and a masked Ghislaine, was invited to that lavish event at Windsor Castle, despite the fact that two months earlier an arrest warrant had been issued against him for the sexual assault of a minor.

According to the royal source who spoke to the Daily Mail this week: ‘Unlike many of their father’s business associates, he became a regular presence in their lives because he had started dating someone even more familiar to them, Ghislaine Maxwell.

‘Andrew had few real friends but Maxwell was let into his family rather than being kept at arm’s length. Epstein was let in, too.’

The 18 months Epstein spent in jail in 2008 and 2009 didn’t stop the duchess accepting his offer to pay off some of her humongous debts a year later – a decision which came back to bite her, first in 2011 when it became public knowledge and then again this week when her toe-curling email to Epstein was exposed. 

Royal expert Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of Fergie: The Life Of A Duchess, says that both princesses, now mothers themselves, would have been all too aware of the financial pressure their mother was under back in 2010 and 2011.

‘They probably knew what a state she was in when that email was sent 14 years ago,’ she said. 

‘I think their first instinct will be to protect her. They’ve got no alternative but to support her even though they’ve already had to put up with a lot.’

Beatrice and Eugenie have become all too accustomed to witnessing their mother’s shenanigans – stretching right back to August 1992 when the duchess, then separated but not yet divorced from Prince Andrew, was photographed, topless, having her toes kissed by her Texan financial adviser John Bryan while on holiday in St Tropez.

The princesses, then aged four and two, were present at the time, with Bryan later claiming that they were ‘playing Cinderella’ and that it was ‘a beautiful family moment of love’. 

Beatrice and Eugenie were mercifully too young to be aware of that bizarre incident, and as they grew up and their extravagant mother’s humiliating debts became public knowledge, newspapers were kept out of sight at home at Sunninghill Park in Berkshire – and later Royal Lodge in the grounds of Windsor Castle – as well as at school.

They were a lot older, of course, in May 2010 when the duchess was secretly filmed offering access to Prince Andrew for £500,000 to an undercover reporter posing as a businessman and boasting: ‘I can open any door you want.’

She was in the South of France with Beatrice – at supermodel Naomi Campbell’s birthday party – when her publicist called her eldest daughter with the news that her mother had been caught out by a tabloid sting.

It was left to the princess, then just 22, to break the stomach-churning news before they fled on a 7am flight back to London where Beatrice, the duchess later recalled, cried for two days solid.

In her book Finding Sarah, Fergie recalled that ‘Beatrice became protective’, while Eugenie, then a student at Newcastle University, ‘promised her complete support’.

It was just a few months later, of course, that the duchess accepted cash from Epstein, creating another storm. 

The princesses would have been aware of her public ‘mea culpa’, but are unlikely to have known that behind the scenes she was also secretly grovelling to the villainous billionaire.

But it was in 2014, when Virginia Giuffre first made her allegations against their father, that his daughters’ charmed lives were really shaken up. 

According to the royal source who spoke to the Daily Mail: ‘They were in their early 20s and weren’t quite sure what to make of it all.

‘They were assured by their mother that he was innocent and the fact that Granny [the late Queen] let their father carry on regardless was confirmation that Giuffre wasn’t to be believed. 

‘They also found it difficult to believe that nice Jeffrey could be involved in anything so sordid.’

The princesses focused on their own careers, working in the private sector rather than becoming full-time working royals. 

But their lives were disrupted once again by their father’s catastrophic Newsnight interview in 2019 – ‘something Beatrice encouraged him to do’, says the royal source.

‘In the aftermath, the girls were asked to show some support to try to shore up Andrew’s position – an interview or some such,’ the source adds, ‘but they refused persistent pleas from their parents, and from then on both girls began to keep their distance’.

Their relationship with outcast Andrew was put under further strain in 2022 when he reached an out-of-court settlement – reported to be around £12million – with Virginia Giuffre, despite insisting he’d never even met her.

‘They didn’t understand why he would do so if he was innocent,’ said the source.

Giuffre’s suicide earlier this year, not to mention the prospect of a forthcoming memoir she wrote, suggest displays of public support for their father will be on hold for the moment. Both Beatrice and Eugenie have made their own happy families.

Eugenie, who married in 2018, has two sons, August and Ernest, with her marketing executive husband Jack Brooksbank. 

Beatrice, who married property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in 2020, has two daughters, Sienna and Athena. 

The Duchess of York utterly dotes on all four grandchildren and, says the royal source, the girls ‘remain doggedly close to their mother’. 

In a podcast in May hosted by Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, the girls praised their mother – but made no mention of their father.

‘We are each other’s biggest fans . . . We turn up for each other and that relationship and the work that she put into creating that is probably one of the things that we’re most proud of.’

How their mother’s latest fall from grace will affect that relationship moving forwards remains to be seen.

While both parents have now lost all their charitable patronages, the princesses have dozens of their own between them.

Beatrice’s include premature birth charity Borne, the Teenage Cancer Trust and the Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice.

Eugenie is also a patron of the Teenage Cancer Trust – one of the charities that split from the duchess this week – as well as Horatio’s Garden, which supports spinal injury patients, and Tate Young Patrons. She is also the co-founder of The Anti-Slavery Collective.

Days after her mother’s bombshell email was revealed, Eugenie took to social media to promote the charity’s campaign against fake fashion, speaking of the evils of human trafficking – something which, of course, Epstein and Maxwell were found guilty of.

The timing was seen by some as a sign of how she and Beatrice will refuse to allow the toxic scandals of their parents to negatively impact on their public lives. It’s not the first time the princesses have distanced themselves when necessary.

Last Christmas, after the Duke of York became embroiled in another saga involving a close confidant alleged to be a Chinese spy, Beatrice decided at the last minute to join the King at Sandringham for festivities rather than be with her parents at Royal Lodge.

The King, it is said, remains committed to his nieces – now ninth and 12th in line to the throne – and to keeping them close as part of his pared-back monarchy, stretched further by his and the Princess of Wales’s cancer battles, even if they are not full-time working royals.

Earlier this year, they helped host a Buckingham Palace garden party with Kate and William. In May, Beatrice joined the King and Queen for an event at Kew Gardens. The King’s Foundation also announced recently that Eugenie would be a mentor for its new 35 Under 35 network.

Majesty magazine’s Ingrid Seward believes the princesses are striking a careful balance between duty to the Crown and loyalty to their parents: ‘It’s not an enviable position. Those poor girls have had to deal with a lot. There’s not much they can do.’

The royal source concurred: ‘Both have managed to transform themselves from party princesses to royals with jobs and families who support the principles of monarchy and duty.

‘The King and Prince William remain committed to the girls and to keeping them close, even if both of their parents finally have to be fully banished.’