More than half of Americans want Prince Andrew extradited over Epstein links

A majority of Americans believe that Prince Andrew should be extradited to the US to face questions about his links with Jeffrey Epstein, a new survey shows.

A total of 53% of a sample of US voters quizzed by pollsters Redfield and Wilton Strategies agreed that the British royal should be compelled to agree to requests “to testify in court about his relationship” with the late convicted paedophile, The Times reports.

Only 8% said that they disagreed with extraditing the Duke of York, while 22% neither agree or disagree and 17% did not know.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The US poll comes after a YouGov survey last November revealed that just 6% of the British public believed Andrew’s account of his friendship with Epstein after the royal’s “car-crash” BBC interview.

Andrew is likely to face increased pressure to talk to US investigators in the coming weeks following the arrest of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell earlier this month. Maxwell, a close friend of Epstein, faces charges of procuring girls as young as 14 for abuse by the billionaire financier between 1994 and 1997.

She is appearing via video link before a judge at a US district court in Manhattan today. “The hearing is both an arraignment, in which the six charges against her will be read out, and a bail hearing,” the newspaper says.

Prosecutors have claimed in court documents that Maxwell “refused to open the front door to the FBI and tried to flee to another room when they raided her $1m home” in the New Hampshire town of Bradford on 2 July, the Daily Mail reports.

According to the court papers, she was being guarded by former members of the British military when she was arrested, adds Sky News. Investigators also found a mobile phone wrapped in tin foil that prosecutors have described as a “seemingly misguided effort to evade detection”.

Lawyers claim that Maxwell is an “extraordinary” flight risk as she has British, French and US passports and is “skilled at living in hiding”.

The socialite is currently being held in a New York jail, where she is being monitored constantly and made to wear paper clothes amid self-harm fears following Epstein’s apparent suicide in his prison cell last year.