Jeffrey Epstein tried to set up Prince Andrew to extort his mom, Queen Elizabeth II, according to the disgraced prince’s most unlikely adviser — the love rival once caught sucking his wife’s toes.
John Bryan, 67, told the Daily Mail on Sunday how he was summoned to a series of “cloak-and-dagger” meetings to help Andrew in November 2019, just days after he’d been dumped from royal duties.
Bryan was “stunned” to get the invite from Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, given that lurid photos of their affair were largely blamed for the end of her royal marriage in 1992, the Queen’s “annus horribilis.”
Still, he produced a five-page plan on how to handle his one-time love rival’s Epstein crisis — and left convinced that “Andrew is innocent,” he said.
“It was just an extortion plot,” Bryan said of Epstein’s friendship with the 62-year-old royal long nicknamed “Randy Andy.”
Epstein “blackmailed rich men and then made them pay to avoid scandal,” making “hundreds of millions of dollars,” Bryan told the UK paper.
“Epstein tried to lure Andrew into his web, but I believe his ultimate mark was the Queen,” he said of the UK’s longest-serving monarch, who died in September at 96.
“Andrew has never had any money. The Queen was the one with money.
“I truly believe Epstein was going after [the Queen] but Andrew never gave him the ammunition to do so,” he said of the multimillionaire pedophile who killed himself in his Manhattan lockup in August 2019.
Bryan told the UK paper that he had been “communicating a lot” with Fergie, who still lives with Andrew, describing their chats as “the normal things you say to an ex.”
“She invited me to come over,” he said of the days after Andrew’s “catastrophic” BBC interview, in which he justified palling around with Epstein and denied knowing his own sex accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
Fergie “was desperate. She told me that Andrew was in terrible shape,” he said.
“He was distraught. They were distraught,” he recalled of the crisis months after Epstein’s arrest and death.
Bryan detailed being picked up by Andrew’s driver in a Range Rover with blacked-out windows and being taken to his royal residence through a secret entrance.
“I walked into the house and there was Sarah. We hugged. It was really sweet. I think she cried and I did too,” he said of their first reunion.
He came back the next day, this time meeting Andrew and his children, he said, calling it “cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“When I saw Andrew again, he gave me a handshake and a hug,” he recalled, saying there was no love lost despite their earlier scandals.
“When I was with Sarah, he knew I was good to his girls. We always liked each other,” he said, calling himself “the outsider on the inside.”
Still, Andrew “looked tired and downcast” and was “very upset,” shouting about “being treated unfairly,” Bryan said.
Andrew’s then-31-year-old daughter Princess Beatrice was also “hugely distressed,” blaming her dad, shouting that he’d “hurt our family,” he said.
“I sat there with the whole family over lunch and told them, ‘You are in the middle of a catastrophe and from here it gets a million times worse,’” he told the Mail.
“Andrew was so distressed, he wasn’t able to focus for more than 40 minutes. I was blown away by how much pain he was in. And how much suffering he was enduring. It was very real,” he said.
Bryan drew up a crisis strategy dubbed the “House of Kroy” — reversing the “York” in Andrew’s Duke of York title — centered on him displaying sympathy for Epstein’s many victims.
However, Andrew did not follow his suggestions, and instead “was distracted back into the system which has often failed him and so many others,” Bryan said of the spectacular fall from grace.
Still, Bryan maintains that there “was never a hint” of Andrew hiding anything untoward.
“Let me be the first outsider to say that I believe Prince Andrew — and I don’t say it lightly,” he told the UK paper.
“This outsider has a lot of inside knowledge,” he stressed.
Original Article: Jeffrey Epstein ‘tried to lure’ Prince Andrew to extort the queen: adviser (nypost.com)
