Over the weekend, we discussed the bizarre rumor/report that Sarah Ferguson had a friends-with-benefits situation with Sean Combs. Allegedly, this was in the early-to-mid aughts, when Combs was one of the most famous artist/producers in the world and most people didn’t know about his predatory behavior. This story comes via Andrew Lownie’s paperback edition of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. Lownie has already gotten a lot of stuff wrong, but because he’s detailing Prince Andrew and Sarah’s decades of terrible behavior, people want to believe that he’s gotten everything correct (he has not). Well, Lownie has more about Sarah and how she genuinely wanted to marry Jeffrey Epstein, how she slept with financial benefactors and how she’s always been a constant stream of TMI.
Sarah was so desperate for money she offered to work as a house assistant to [Jeffrey Epstein], calling him a ‘legend’. ‘I am at your service,’ she said. ‘Just marry me.’
A Palace source emphasised that Sarah always gravitated to being with the bad boy: ‘Look at her long history; every man she dated or associated with had a controversial past – they all have sleazy and chequered pasts. She likes to live on the edge. She can’t settle down with a good man. It would bore her to tears.’
‘Fergie made no secret how she wanted to marry someone in the US who was wealthy and powerful,’ a Palm Beach friend of Epstein said. ‘If Jeffrey popped the question, she would have said yes. Even after… he was convicted of being a sex offender. She had a reputation for being an opportunist and for sleeping with wealthy men.’
One of Sarah’s long-serving personal assistants confirmed that Sarah tended to sleep not just with her fantasy figures but with her financial benefactors.
Life with the duchess was ‘chaotic’, said the assistant, who in common with other staff members had problems getting paid. They often had to buy things using their own credit cards. Sarah herself drew on Beatrice’s credit card constantly and paid one psychic in cigarettes. She rarely paid for anything, expecting to be given products for free or be entertained by friends.
In spite of that, the money poured out. Sarah maintained an apartment on the Upper East Side in New York. Personal trainers waited on call but were never used and one person was employed just to organise all the tablets Sarah took.
Sarah talked endlessly about having messed up her relationship with Diana and about her love of the Queen – she hated Philip and Edward – and her parents. The assistant was struck by her immaturity. ‘She had this constant need to be wanted, with the result that she had no boundaries.’
She has talked up her relationship with the Queen but according to a royal source, the monarch ‘repeatedly trashed Fergie’ behind the scenes.
The source said: ‘Several people, notably the Queen, ex-Prince Andrew and Prince Charles, were aware of her activities for years but turned a blind eye to protect the family from more scandal.’
While I hate it when the British tabloids draw endless comparisons between Andrew and Fergie and the Sussexes, I’d just like to point out that *this* is what they always had planned for Prince Harry and Meghan. They wanted and expected to always be able to control Harry and Meghan financially, and to have them connected to various sleazy, compromised figures. As much as the Windsors are wringing their hands over “what to do about the Yorks,” the Windsors largely facilitated Andrew and Fergie’s “bad behavior” because it made them easier to control, and because the Yorks’ bad behavior made the rest of the Windsors look better by comparison. As for the larger story of Sarah’s bad decision making… as I’ve said before, this feels less like “Sarah is just a bad person” and more like some kind of clinical problem. For decades, she’s pissed away a dozen fortunes and made loathsome decisions. It’s likely some kind of personality disorder, IMO. Which makes it especially jarring that Fergie had the remarkably smart inclination to get the hell out of the UK late last year.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.
