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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
A Very Royal scandal has hinted at an uncomfortable question Prince Andrew reportedly asked Emily Maitlis and the Newsnight team before his infamous car crash interview in 2019.
The new Amazon Prime drama recounts the tell-all interview that saw Andrew discuss his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, deny having ever met 17-year-old Virginia Guiffre, and come up with odd excuses to do with perspiration, the Falklands War and Pizza Express.
Emily Maitlis, the presenter quizzing Andrew in the real-life interview, serves as an executive producer for the new series.
The new show depicts the Duke asking the presenter (played by Ruth Wilson), as well as Newsnight staff Stewart MacLean and Sam McAlister, if any of them have been abused, to see if their judgement of the case would be coloured by any personal experience.
The scene sees Michael Sheen’s Andrew leaning forward and asking them: “Have any of you ever been victims of abuse?”
Wilson’s Maitlis, shocked by the question, replies: “Nothing that bears comparison,” while MacLean and McAlister, who both look uncomfortable, say they have not.
“So you’re judgement wouldn’t be coloured by anything at all?” clarifies Andrew’s press secretary Amanda Thirsk, played by Joanna Scanlan, to which Maitlis’s character replies: “Not at all”.
The Independent understands that the abuse question was included in the show following interviews with people present at the meeting.
Representatives for Maitlis and Andrew have been contacted about whether the question was actually asked.
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Later in the episode, the chilling question seems to stay with Maitlis as we see her confiding in her husband that the question made her think about her experience of being stalked.
In 2022, a stalker who had a three-decade fixation with Maitlis was jailed for eight years after attempting to breach a restraining order for the 20th time.
“You know at the end of my meeting with Prince Andrew he asked me if I had ever been the victim of abuse? It felt horrible,” she tells him.
“What did you say?” her husband replies as she says, “Well nothing, having a stalker is not remotely comparable and I don’t want to talk about it.”
A Very Royal Scandal follows Netflix’s film Scoop, which dramatised the Prince Andrew interview just six months ago, all without reference to the abuse question.
In The Independent’s three-star review of the new series, Nick Hilton writes that the programme depicts Andrew as “grotesque and stupid” and that Maitlis’s recollection of the events are very different to what we saw in Scoop. You can read the full review here.
