According to multiple reports, the former Prince Andrew has been arrested by authorities in the United Kingdom for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
France24 noted that, before the man now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was reportedly taken into custody Thursday for suspicion of misconduct in public office, Thames Valley Police said they were “assessing” reports that, in his position as the U.K. trade envoy, he passed reports to Epstein in 2010.
“Local media said six unmarked police cars and around eight plain clothed officers arrived at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, eastern England, where the king’s brother now lives,” the outlet reported.
Mountbatten-Windsor was already stripped of his titles and residence last year after new revelations in a book by Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who claimed she was trafficked to the royal while she was underage.
BBC correspondent Lucy Manning said her “understanding is that there’s been a very significant development in the investigation into the Epstein files” that had to do with “documents from when he was a trade envoy, that are alleged to have been passed to Epstein.”
“My understanding is that this arrest is just about the misconduct in public office and obviously a very significant moment that the former prince has been arrested,” she added.
However, a lot was still unknown as of roughly 6 a.m. Eastern Time — 11 a.m. U.K. time — including what precisely he was being held for and what prompted Thames Valley Police to arrest Mountbatten-Windsor in the first place.
The arrest came on the royal’s 66th birthday.
Andrew is arrested on his birthday in police raid on Sandringham home https://t.co/nn8mExHyCZ
— Erin Anderson (@ELAnderson1111) February 19, 2026
The charges came as the former prince’s connections to Epstein led to a slow unraveling of his life.
While Andrew had known the financier as early as the late 1990s and celebrated his release from prison in 2009 with Epstein in New York, it wasn’t until tabloid photos taken in 2010 that the British media began to put the arrest and Andrew’s involvement with Epstein and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, together.
Andrew’s role as the U.K.’s special trade envoy was terminated the next year, with the royal conceding he’d made a mistake.
In 2015, court documents from Giuffre’s lawsuit against Epstein revealed that she was allegedly trafficked to Giuffre while underaged. Epstein’s light sentence for sex crimes became an issue again after Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, was criticized for lenient sentencing of the financier while a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
Epstein died, allegedly from committed suicide, shortly after his May 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges. Later that year, Mountbatten-Windsor gave a widely criticized interview to BBC’s “Newsnight” in which he claimed Giuffre’s allegations could not be true because he was visiting a Pizza Express restaurant in a London suburb on a day where a picture of the two of them together was reportedly taken.
“On the date that’s being suggested I was at home with the children… I’d taken Beatrice to Pizza Express in Woking.”
Prince Andrew tells @maitlis he was elsewhere the night it has been claimed he had his photo taken with a woman who says they had sex
#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/XoDEALx5MJ— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 16, 2019
He also claimed he could not sweat from a psychosomatic condition he developed during his time serving in the Falklands War, at odds with Giuffre’s depiction of him as being sweaty during their encounter:
Prince Andrew is “in torment” this Christmas because his name will likely be released in the new year in the list of 170 Epstein associates.
Here is Prince Andrew failing miserably while trying to defend himself.
“There’s a slight problem with, with, with, with, with the… pic.twitter.com/pFT7cLEEi0
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 25, 2023
This led to the then-Duke of York saying that he was “stepping back from public duties for the foreseeable future.”
In 2022, after he settled a court case with Giuffre, his royal status was downgraded. Then, in 2025, Giuffre passed away — but not before leaving a memoir in which she said she had sex with Andrew multiple times while underaged and that the royal guessed she was 17 when it happened.
King Charles III subsequently stripped Andrew of all of his royal titles and forced him to leave the Royal Lodge. The publication of the Epstein files provided further headaches for Andrew.
The BBC reported that in cases like Mountbatten-Windsor’s, under U.K. law, “suspects are held for 12 or 24 hours and are then either charged or released pending further investigation.”
It added that “the absolute longest the former prince can be held for is 96 hours – but this would require multiple extensions from senior police officers and a Magistrate’s Court.”
Danny Shaw, a policing commentator, told the British broadcaster that he would be held in “a cell in a custody suite” with “a bed and a toilet” until he was interviewed by police.
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