Nearly 100 documents in the Epstein files that identified Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have been retroactively redacted — weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice made them public. Email exchanges between the disgraced former prince and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, once easily discoverable through a basic keyword search, now return nothing. The emails haven't been entirely removed from the database, but the identifying details that once linked them to Andrew have been scrubbed.
No one has claimed responsibility. It remains unclear whether the retroactive redactions were made at the request of Andrew, 65, or his legal team, or whether the DOJ acted on its own initiative. What is clear is that documents the public could read two weeks ago are now functionally invisible unless you already know exactly where to look.
Nearly 100 incriminating documents in the Epstein files that name Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor were allegedly secretly redacted weeks after their release, The U.S. Sun reported. Dozens of emails mentioning the former Duke of York, which were once easily findable via a basic keyword search, can now only be traced from screenshots showing their sent date.
Before the redactions, the files painted a vivid picture. Among them: an August 2010 email exchange between Epstein and a Russian woman called "Irina," which confirmed an evening arranged with Andrew. The documents contained an email exchange between Epstein and Mountbatten-Windsor in August 2010, in which the financier invited the royal to meet a "friend" for dinner in London. Mountbatten-Windsor replied that he would be "delighted to see her" and told Epstein to pass on his contact details. Epstein then described the woman as a 26-year-old Russian. Irina reportedly replied quoting Andrew's incomplete email address, writing:
Great!!!!!!! should I email him tdoy@rlwgp . . .
That partial email address — "tdoy," an abbreviation referencing "The Duke of York" — once returned nearly 100 document hits in the DOJ's Epstein Library. Now it returns nothing useful, according to journalists who had previously used it to trace the files.
Another email showed Epstein promising Andrew more "fun," to which the then-prince replied:
Yes please!
Epstein described one young woman to Andrew as "very cute" and told her that Andrew thought she was "beautiful." A separate allegation — brought by a U.S. lawyer named Brad Edwards — claims a woman in her twenties spent the night with Andrew before being given a tour of Buckingham Palace and tea. Sources referenced in the files also alleged that a Romanian model and a Russian woman were treated to a private dinner at the Palace while the Queen was away at Balmoral.
These are the details that someone, somewhere, decided the public no longer needed to see.
The reaction from Epstein's survivors has been pointed. Jess Michaels, a survivor of a 1991 sexual assault by Epstein and the founder and CEO of advocacy organization 3 Joannes, called the situation exactly what it looks like:
A cover-up of the cover-up of the crime.
Michaels said the situation feels like justice is being blocked and that survivors are "continuing to be gaslit." For the women who lived through Epstein's abuse — and who waited years for the system to acknowledge their suffering — watching documents disappear from a public database is not an abstract concern. It is a second betrayal dressed up as bureaucratic process.
Sky Roberts, the brother of Virginia Giuffre — Andrew's most prominent accuser, who died by suicide in 2025 — raised a question that no official has yet answered: why are the names of perpetrators being redacted while the names of survivors are not? Roberts stated plainly that the public does not have the "full truth."
He's right. And the redactions are making it harder to find.
Perhaps the most striking intervention has come from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown said he had spent the last week looking at the Epstein files, the documents relating to the disgraced financier released by the US Department of Justice. What he found moved him to contact the Metropolitan Police directly and demand a full inquiry.
Brown wrote that the evidence he uncovered was damning:
The evidence suggests some in the UK were complicit in trafficking. This demands a full inquiry.
The emails tell how Epstein used Stansted Airport to fly in girls from Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia. His messages link at least one to Britain and the former Prince Andrew. Emails in the Epstein files reveal arrangements for 90 flights into the UK including the private terminal at Stansted Airport, with 15 of these taking place after the financier's 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.
Let that sink in. Fifteen flights — after a conviction. Through a private airport terminal where passengers arriving on private planes wouldn't need British visas.
Brown said he was told privately that investigations related to Andrew did not properly check vital evidence of flights, and he has asked the police to look at this as part of the new inquiry. "The Stansted revelations alone require them to interview Andrew," Brown stated.
Brown is no conservative firebrand. He's a former Labour prime minister. When a figure like that breaks with institutional deference to demand a criminal investigation of a member of the royal family, the underlying facts must be extraordinary. And they are.
Police in the UK said they were continuing to assess allegations of Epstein having sent a second woman to the UK for sex with Andrew in Windsor in 2010. "We are assessing the information and following established procedures to seek further information with law enforcement partners in the United States," a Thames Valley Police spokesperson said.
Thames Valley Police are already consulting with the Crown Prosecution Service over allegations that Andrew shared confidential reports with Epstein during his tenure as a UK trade envoy. That's a separate matter — the suggestion that a member of the royal family may have leaked sensitive government material to a convicted sex offender. Two tracks. Both leading back to the same man.
The Met previously said it was made aware in 2015 of allegations around non-recent trafficking for sexual exploitation, including in central London in 2001. But in 2016, it concluded that because the investigation would largely focus on activities and relationships outside the UK, the Met was not the appropriate authority to conduct the inquiries. The decision was reviewed in August 2019, but confirmed unchanged.
That rationale looks thinner by the day. The new files place women inside the UK — at Windsor, at Buckingham Palace, arriving through Stansted. These aren't activities "outside the UK." They are activities the UK chose not to see.
Two House lawmakers who reviewed the files — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ro Khanna of California — said the redactions they initially encountered appeared to include one "high up" official from a foreign government and other prominent individuals. "There are six men, some of them with their photographs, that have been redacted, and there's no explanation why those people were redacted," Massie said.
Andrew is facing renewed criticism after US lawmakers said he has not responded to official letters seeking answers about his ties to Epstein. According to Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, the panel has repeatedly tried to contact Andrew for testimony but has not received a reply.
Andrew won't talk. Documents that name him are being scrubbed. British police spent years declining to investigate on jurisdictional grounds while women were flown through British airports, housed in British palaces, and — if the allegations bear out — assaulted on British soil. The pattern isn't complicated. It's protection masquerading as procedure.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act requires the Justice Department to release all unclassified records related to Epstein and his associates and bars redactions made on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity. Retroactively scrubbing documents that name a specific individual — after those documents were already public — would seem to collide head-on with that statute's purpose.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has long been dogged by his links to Epstein. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, but stepped back from royal duties. King Charles III stripped Andrew of his royal titles, including the right to be called a prince, as he tried to insulate the monarchy from a steady stream of stories about his younger brother's relationship with Epstein.
The denials continue. The titles are gone. The documents are disappearing. But the questions — who ordered the redactions, and why — remain unanswered.
Someone in the machinery of government decided that what the public already knew, the public should un-know. The survivors noticed. A former prime minister noticed. Congress noticed. The only people who haven't seemed to notice are the ones with the power to stop it.
