Key Highlights
- A separate picture shows Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street. One image shows Mountbatten-Windsor reclining across the legs of five people, whose faces have been redacted, with his head near a woman’s lap.
- In this image, Maxwell appears to peer down and smile at him. Sky News reported on Saturday that the photograph was taken at Sandringham, the late Queen Elizabeth’s Norfolk estate, where King Charles and members of his family will spend Christmas.
- The broadcaster said it had cross-referenced the picture with other images taken there. Another picture, understood to have been taken in 2002, shows Maxwell posing in Winston Churchill’s war rooms, the secret underground meeting place for the British cabinet during the second world war, with a group that includes the former US president Bill Clinton and the actor Kevin Spacey. A trove of documents relating to Epstein, a convicted child sex offender who died in jail in 2019, was uploaded on Friday night to the US justice department website, which held users in a queue as it experienced an “extremely high volume of search requests”. The data release came after the US deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said “several hundred thousand” documents from the “Epstein files” would be released before a legal deadline.
- He said the need to protect Epstein’s victims meant thousands more would be released in the coming weeks. The US justice department was legally required to make all files related to the investigation into Epstein public by midnight on Friday after the passing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The images released on Friday, which also contain images of Mounbatten-Windsor’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson, help illustrate how he gave Epstein and Maxwell access to the upper echelons of British life. Many of the images are undated, but it is understood that Epstein and Maxwell were invited to ladies day at Ascot on 22 June 2000 by Mountbatten-Windsor.
- Although the event was also attended by the late queen and the queen mother, Mounbatten-Windsor has previously said Epstein and Maxwell were his guests. Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in Manhattan, New York, as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
