Andrew never personally paid for the $16 million settlement he signed with Virginia Giuffre in 2022. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Charles provided the funds.
The Queen contributed $9 million, another $4 million came from Philip’s will, and Charles contributed $2 million.
Other family members also contributed money to settle the case before Virginia could bring it to trial in the United States. And to date, according to sources cited by The Sun, Andrew has not repaid a single penny of that loan.
The plan was for him to sell his chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, valued at $25 million, to repay the family loan. But the property was so heavily mortgaged that, in the end, he made almost nothing from the sale. Everything was left at zero.
The Windsor family decided to fund the settlement to end the scandal before the Platinum Jubilee in February 2022.
A source said at the time that they took “a little bit from here and a little bit from there.” But it is now clear that the money was used to silence Virginia and prevent her from confronting him in court.
Virginia accused Andrew of abusing her three times when she was 17, after being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. There is a photo of Andrew with his arm around her at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.
Andrew consistently denied everything. In his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview, he claimed he didn’t remember meeting her and was at a Pizza Express in Woking that night.
The out-of-court settlement was reached in March 2022, preventing him from having to testify in a U.S. court. Virginia died in April 2025 at the age of 41.
What’s most troubling is that Andrew even lied to his own family about his relationship with Epstein. He told them he had severed ties in 2010, after Epstein was released from prison. However, The Sun revealed emails proving subsequent contact.
That’s what led Charles to strip him of his titles and expel him from the Royal Lodge. Queen Elizabeth was devastated by the scandal, but she couldn’t banish her son. She knew Charles would have to solve that problem when she was gone. And that’s how it happened.