The Duchess of Delusion: The Duchess Who Refused to Take Responsibility — How Fergie Fooled Everyone

Sarah Ferguson, better known as Fergie, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, is no stranger to scandal following a high-profile divorce, poor financial decisions and the infamous cash-for-access proposition.

But this week, the Duchess may have found herself embroiled in potentially her most damaging controversy to date.

In newly uncovered emails, revealed by the Mail on Sunday, the Duchess apologised to prolific paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein in April 2011, less than two months after telling journalists: ‘I will never have anything to do with (Epstein) again.’

Addressing her ‘supreme friend’ in an email ‘from the truth of my heart’, she ‘humbly apologised’ to the convicted sex offender for letting him down, adding that she had been told to speak out if she wanted to save her career as a children’s author.

Following the bombshell revelation, she has since been dropped as a patron from seven charities, including the Teenage Cancer Trust and British Heart Foundation.

Then, as pressure mounted, she attempted to defend her apologetic email by insisting that she was seeking to appease Epstein out of fear over what he might do to her family.

But previous analysis of the Duchess has suggested she may have ‘never been prepared to take responsibility for her actions’, a New York Times review of her 2011 six-part reality series, Finding Sarah, asserted.

The Oprah Winfrey Network programme, commissioned for $300,000, granted cameras never-before-seen access into the Duchess’ life and was subtitled ‘Going on a journey to find myself again’.

A desperate attempt at redeeming her public image, the programme also enabled the Duchess to pay off her hefty debts, as revealed in Andrew Lownie’s bombshell biography about Prince Andrew – Entitled.

Over the course of the show, the Duchess was hypnotised, visited a horse whisperer and shaman in the Arizonian desert, walked around a garden – in an attempt to find a ‘path for life’ – and even trekked 26 miles through Canada’s Arctic region.

However, while the reality series was designed, according to the Duchess herself, ‘to rebuild the brand Sarah’ following a litany of scandals, a New York Times review suggested that it merely indicated her failure to ‘take responsibility’ for past mistakes.

The review claimed that the series showcased her ‘people-pleasing addiction’ and an ‘over-generous nature’, adding that it had been a mere attempt at ‘cashing in on her pariah status’.

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, was also critical of the Duchess for denying that she had sold access to Andrew, reporting at the time: ‘To her, the crisis simply opened up a business opportunity, one that she is now exploiting.’

Almost a year before her email to Epstein, in May 2010, she had been filmed by the now-closed News of the World newspaper offering access to Prince Andrew for £500,000 to an undercover reporter posing as an Indian businessman.

According to the paper, Fergie would ‘lure’ businessmen to ‘make money from Andrew’s unpaid role as the Government UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment’ and through that she would help set up meetings.

Lownie said that a source told the paper at the time: ‘As long as Sarah thinks you are rich she will be all over you like a rash.’

The Duchess’ inability to take personal accountability came under further scrutiny after she infamously stormed out of a car-crash 60 Minutes Australia TV interview while being quizzed about her ‘cash-for-access’ scandal.

Shortly after questions about the News of the World sting operation began, the Duchess stormed out of the interview, before returning to finish the heated discussion.

During the explosive interview in 2011, she was asked by journalist and presenter Michael Usher: ‘Did you take the money? At one point you had $4,000 cash sitting in front of you, did you take that.’

The Duchess, in response, stated: ‘Absolutely yes, it was given to me and I got it in the car and then returned it straight away.’

Mr Usher then replied: ‘Once the scandal broke?’

To which the Duchess, who began to look frustrated, added: ‘As soon as I knew it was a scandal, not once it broke Michael. Don’t try and trick me now because I am not going to play this game.

‘Delete that bit. I don’t want to go down this route.’

She then turned around to her Australian agent John, who was off screen, and expressed that she didn’t want to continue with that line of questioning.

After being pressed by the presenter to continue the interview, she said ‘OK, thanks moving onto the next question.’

When asked if the scandal helped her ‘review her life’, the Duchess said: ‘I was very grateful for being in that position in a way, because when I hit rock bottom it woke me up.’

She then looked off camera again at her agent and said ‘remember, remember, Cindy, yeah.. I am going to take five minutes.’

In a dramatic turn of events, the Duchess then stood up and walked out of the interview. She returned later but appeared to remain frosty with the host.

Following the scandalous interview, Mr Usher described the Duchess as icier than ‘the wilds of the Arctic’ and branded the interview ‘the largest train wreck I have ever done’.

In December 2024, he provided a more detailed insight on the pair’s interaction on radio station Nova 96.9’s Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie, revealing: ‘I had to call her Duchess. She wouldn’t let me call her Sarah, lots and lots of airs and graces.’

‘But she was fine, and she was relatively sweet. But then there was just this moment… she turned and getting her back into the chair, was crazy.

‘She came back and she continued the interview, and then it was like a different personality again,’ he added.

The reporter then claimed that after the awkward interview, him and his crew were walking outside when she came running after them.

‘We walked outside, and the Duchess came running up behind me. She chucked her heels off and she’s in her stockings on the lawn. Going “Michael, how was that?”‘ he recalled.

‘By that stage, I just said, “Sarah, if I were you, I’d be asking to go back into the room and do that interview all over again, because I don’t know what happened.”

‘Then she goes, “Oh, well, anyway, who wants to sign some books? I’ll sign your book for you. And now, what are your kids names?” And off she went from there.’

The Duchess’ representation in Australia, John Scott, claimed at the time that the footage was cynically taken out of context and demanded that the network withdraw its advertising of the programme and delete scenes from the interview.

He told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper: ‘We had gone through all the questions and subject matter beforehand and filmed all the walking in the park footage before we sat down.

‘She did walk out when she was ambushed – no, it was entrapment – but after cooling down she said to me, “F*** them, let’s do this”, and she did, but it was a banal interview and her demeanour reflected that.’

In a bid to rebuild her personal image, the Duchess’ reality series sought to showcase the Duchess in a more personable manner by providing a direct insight into some of her most troubled times.

During the programme, she made a shocking admission to to psychotherapist Dr Phil McGraw, claiming that her mother, Susan Barrantes, had cruelly abused her during her childhood.

In her own words, Fergie said: ‘When she used to hit me, because I didn’t sit on my potty or wouldn’t eat, a little vein would come up on the centre of my head near my red hair’.

It was this vein, Lownie explains, that the Duchess’ mother nicknamed the ‘sign of the devil’, attempting to beat it out of her.

But the Duchess’ sister has said that she could not recall any instances of abuse.

Lownie also reveals that a friend of the Duchess remembered Susan as both ‘very charming’ and ‘very beautiful’, adding that while she ‘was also immensely selfish, eccentric and rather childish’, she was ‘not intentionally cruel’.

Susan died in 1998 aged 61 after being killed by a truck, with the Daily Mail reporting at the time that the tragedy was the ‘Darkest day for Fergie’.

She was driving at over 100 miles per hour when the fatal collision occurred. The lorry driver – who was wearing his seatbelt – suffered a broken ankle but Susan was killed.

 Prior to her tragic death, Susan had spent the last two decades living in Argentina after marrying her Argentine polo player Hector Barrantes who she left Sarah’s father – Ronald Ferguson – to be with.

The dramatic move to South America exemplified Susan’s complex life. This included an alleged affair with Prince Philip – as revealed by Lownie.

In My Story, published in 1996, the Duchess described her mother as ‘simply the most brilliant, zestful person I have ever met’.

But in the years since her death, Fergie has revealed feelings and experiences which appeared to ‘completely contradict’ the previous descriptions of her mother made in her first memoir.

The reality television series also forced Fergie to uncover the lasting impacts that the breakdown of her parents’ marriage had on her life. In particular, the personal blame she felt for their separation.

Susan, the granddaughter of the 8th Viscount Powerscourt, married Eton educated Polo manager Ronald in 1956, with the Duchess born three years later.

But their marriage was far from a happy one. According to Lownie, Susan was ‘exasperated by her husband’s philandering, which she believed had begun in 1961 and included one of her bridesmaids’, prompting an alleged affair with Prince Philip.

Susan called it quits on her marriage to Ronald in 1972 when she ‘fell in love’ with Hector, with Lownie describing the separation as ‘the end of Sarah’s childhood’.

He continued: ‘Susan leaving the family home had a profound effect on Sarah, who blamed herself for the divorce, took to comfort eating and put on weight.

‘Henceforth, she would later claim, she suffered from insecurity, a feeling of worthlessness, a need to please others, and found it hard to establish stable relationships.

‘She also had mixed feelings about her mother abandoning the family to move to London and then Argentina ostensibly because she did not want to disrupt the children’s education.’

Fergie, who described their love affair as an ‘obsession’, added: ‘She couldn’t stop herself. I was angry. I wanted to tell her I loved her and missed her desperately, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want her to worry about me.

‘She’d just found her love and I didn’t want to hurt her because she was so happy, and I’d seen her unhappy, so I just ate my emotions. I ate my feelings – which is why I had weight problems from the age of 12.’

The mother and daughter pair would not reconnect until the summer of 1976 when, having finished her O-Levels, she travelled to Argentina to learn Spanish and spend time with her mother.

Fergie’s mother and her step-father attended the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York alongside the Royals and the other Fergusons. It was during this time that Susan was reunited with the Duke of Edinburgh 20 years after their alleged affair.

In November, the Duchess is due to publish Kindness Along The Way, the second book in her new series of Flora & Fern picture books.

She announced the first book of the series last year with a post on Instagram in which she appeared to be standing on the balcony of a luxury Alpine chalet or hotel.

However, Lownie has suggested that the latest revelations could lead to publishers and even more charities severing their ties with the Duchess.

Her former husband, Andrew, has long been tarnished by his associations with Epstein, especially the notorious 2001 photograph of him with his arm around 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who accused the billionaire of trafficking her.

The Duchess is believed to have first met Epstein in the 1990s having been introduced by American-British businesswoman Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the widow of banking tycoon Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, once one of Britain’s richest men.

In a testimony published last month, Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite jailed for 20 years for sex trafficking, described the Duchess as a ‘frenemy’ who lusted after Epstein.

Maxwell said of the Duchess: ‘She had a thing for him… and I thought that Sarah was trying to put the moves on Jeffrey.’

Epstein accuser Ms Giuffre died by suicide, aged 41, at her farm home near Perth in Australia.

She had previously told how Epstein and Maxwell kept her as a sex slave while flying her around the world and offering her to their powerful associates ‘like a platter of fruit’.

She alleged that the pair trafficked her to the Duke of York when she was 17 and was three times sexually assaulted by him – a claim which Prince Andrew has denied.

The prince, who reached an out-of-court settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, has strongly denied her allegations and insisted that he has no recollection of ever meeting her.