It is time for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to come clean about everything he knows

I can’t stop thinking about the black squares where a young woman’s face should be.

And there he is, crouched on all fours over a female’s tensed body, smirking straight into the camera as he paws at her: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The squares are there to protect the victims. But while the men remain visible, named and analysed in microscopic detail, the young women are reduced to anonymous bodies beside them. Their identities removed. Their personhood stripped away yet again. Abuse followed by erasure. That is the pattern.

For anyone who has either survived sexual abuse themselves or worked with survivors, the details hit like a gut punch. In one image, the young woman’s fist is slightly clenched. She’s enduring, not enjoying.

More than 1,000 survivors – that we know of – were caught in Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking network. Yet the public conversation still circles the men. The famous faces. Musk. Gates. Clinton. Mountbatten-Windsor. Powerful, smiling men, leaning into the frame, arms around girls. How often was this billionaire mentioned? Which powerful figure met whom? The scandal is treated as a kind of abuse-as-smut gossip. And in that, we are all complicit.

The former Prince Andrew is not an abstract figure in a foreign scandal. He belongs to our national story. The monarchy is woven into British identity, whether we embrace it or not. Seeing these latest images felt like discovering stinking rot inside something we were taught to trust. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t look away.

Our revulsion matters. Because it exposes a truth that trafficking survivors have always known. Exploitation is not run by monsters hiding in shadows. It is sustained by men who move easily through the world. Men with reputations to protect. Men buffered by institutions. Men with families who love them. Respectable men.

I have reported on trafficking and women and children’s rights long enough to recognise the pattern. The men at the centre often belong to the systems meant to stop abuse. Exploitation persists not because no one sees it, but because those responsible are protected by status and social standing. That is what allows the abuse to continue.

Mountbatten-Windsor has spent years claiming he remembers nothing that connects him to wrongdoing. He told BBC’s Newsnight he could not recall meeting Virginia Giuffre despite the photograph of his arm around the then-teenager. He remained a friend of Epstein long after Epstein’s conviction for child sex offences. With each new document released, the distance between the stark evidence and Mountbatten-Windsor’s claimed amnesia grows harder to defend.

Virginia Giuffre, by contrast, remembered everything. She spoke publicly and absorbed the consequences. She forfeited privacy and safety to tell her story. Mountbatten-Windsor remained protected by privilege. In the end, it cost her life.

That imbalance is not accidental. It is the structure that allows exploitation to survive.

This week, flying into Japan, Sir Keir Starmer said what should never have needed saying: anyone with information has a duty to testify. You cannot claim to stand with victims while refusing to assist in the search for truth. It is a simple moral proposition. The fact that it feels radical tells you how distorted the conversation now is. Because the alternative is a world where power becomes its own defence.

According to the International Labour Organisation, an estimated 50 million people worldwide are trapped in modern slavery, and sexual exploitation generates the largest share of an illegal trade worth roughly $236bn a year. Behind those numbers are girls promised opportunity and delivered into sexual slavery.

I have interviewed survivors who learned early that the men who hurt them assumed they would never face consequences – and the world quietly confirmed it.

The Epstein files show women discussed as commodities: exchanged and circulated among men confident in their insulation from scrutiny. Mountbatten-Windsor’s refusal to account for his role does not sit outside that culture. It reinforces it. Silence from the powerful is not neutrality. It signals permission.

Testifying is not generosity. It is the bare minimum owed in a system that claims to recognise harm. Survivors are asked to relive their trauma in courtrooms and interviews. They are cross-examined, doubted, dissected. Expecting the same exposure from a one-time prince is not persecution. It is long-overdue parity.

The women in those photographs are living with permanent consequences. They will never see the justice they deserve. The very least the world can do is insist that the men connected to their abuse face some temporary discomfort in the name of truth.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s choice is no longer his. It is ours as a nation. It is a test of what Britain is willing to tolerate when power is accused of harm. If a former prince can refuse accountability in the face of this evidence, then every trafficker on earth receives the same message that power is a shield and their victims expendable. A society that tolerates that hierarchy is complicit in the harm that follows. And a country that accepts that bargain forfeits the right to call itself a just one.

But it is high time that Mountbatten-Windsor, along with every Musk or Mandelson – names that have some degree of association with Epstein, even though not accused of any sexual or abuse-related allegations – be pulled in for questioning to tell us everything they know.

And as long as those black squares remain where the girls’ faces should be, the obligation does not end.