Former Prince Andrew’s arrest and reason
It wasn’t the sexual allegations that ultimately led to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s surprising arrest.
Skye Roberts remembers her older sister Virginia protecting her when she was a child.
The brothers grew up with their parents among cypress trees and grassy horse fields in a rural area outside of West Palm Beach. She was in kindergarten when he was born.
Virginia called him Skydy Bump, or simply Skydy. He was named after their father.
His crib was in her room, and Virginia, who later became a key voice in bringing the world’s attention to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking allegations, later wrote, “I felt as if he were my baby.” When he woke up in the middle of the night, she comforted him.
They looked out for each other.
She carried him as his parents walked around with beer cans in hand.
Then one day, as Skye and Virginia were playing in the sandbox in the backyard, her brother pulled her T-shirt and pointed at a snake. She grabbed him and ran home.
Her mother said she saved his life. Those were deadly water moccasins.
Now, Skye Roberts is doing everything she can for her sister. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who later wrote a memoir, said she was trafficked for sex with Prince Andrew as a teenager. Prince Andrew has now been stripped of his title by the royal family. She later became one of the most outspoken people to report being sexually abused by Epstein and his longtime friend, the former Duke of York, Andrew.
more: Jeffrey Epstein victimized 1,000 women and children. His survivors are passing on a message.
It’s hard to hide the pride Skye Roberts feels in her sister, a day after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, was arrested on charges of misconduct in public office.
“We see her as a truth teller, and I’m glad the world recognizes that,” Roberts said in a Feb. 19 interview with CBS. “This shows we still have a lot of work to do.”
In her memoir Nobody’s Girl, Roberts Giuffre describes how she was Epstein’s de facto sex slave for two years and how she was raped by the then-prince when she was 17. The book was published in October 2025, six months after she died by suicide. Mountbatten-Windsor was not charged with any related sex crimes, and Epstein died awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
But the book is also the story of a childhood in South Florida. A homemade bike ramp, a treehouse, a pond with a snapping turtle and a goat named Cordelius, and love for her brother, who called her “Sissy.”
Five years older than him, she covered his ears when his parents fought and protected him from his father’s abuse.
Skye Roberts later defended Prince Andrew, who was once second in line to the throne, when he accused her of abuse. He supported his sister in telling her story again and again, even when people belittled and despised her.
Since her death, he has stood with other Epstein accusers to testify before Congress in 2025. Giuffre Roberts has become a lightning rod for many people who claim they were abused and trafficked by Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Andrew was stripped of his title in 2025 and settled a civil suit with Giuffre Roberts in 2022, but he has not admitted wrongdoing and has not been arrested for any sex crimes. The former prince’s arrest came after he came under intense scrutiny over his friendship with Epstein. Previous reports have suggested that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor may have inappropriately shared government documents with a convicted sex offender.
In light of all this, Skye Roberts told CBS News: “It shows that we still have a lot of work to do. ”
“No one is above the law, even royalty.”
Skye Roberts woke up at 3 a.m. on February 19 to a phone call.
His first thought was, “Bad news.”
“I always get worried when I get a call that early in the morning,” he told NPR on Feb. 19.
It was Dini von Mueffling, one of my sister’s best friends and a publicist.
Andrew had been arrested.
Skye told his wife, Amanda Roberts, who jumped out of bed.
“It was a great moment,” Amanda Roberts told NPR. “It was a moment of celebration of victory.”
By 5 a.m., the couple had given their first television interview.
And at breakfast, Roberts broke down in tears.
“I just cried and cried,” he told NPR. “It’s so important that we don’t forget how hard these survivors and the sisters of survivors have worked. Without Virginia, we wouldn’t be here today.”
By 8 a.m., Skye, his wife, and his brothers Danny and Lanette Wilson released a statement.
“Finally. Today, our broken hearts are lifted with the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty. On behalf of our sister, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, we would like to thank Britain’s Thames Valley Police for their investigation and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He was never a prince. For survivors around the world, Virginia did this for you.”
more: Epstein pulled the strings and paid tuition for the children of powerful people around the world
Skye and his wife spent the day sharing their thoughts with reporters from CNN, CBS News, the BBC and NBC. They wore blue and silver butterfly pins, a symbol adopted by Epstein’s accusers to represent hope, resilience and support for victims.
They told how they woke up from bed and how they experienced different emotions.
“At that moment, a little shock hits you,” Amanda Roberts told CBS News. “We celebrated the moment and just felt a sense of awe. Normally, I would have been able to call (Roberts Giuffre) and jump up and down and tell her how proud I was of her tenacity and courage.”
What’s important now is that people “recognize survivors and what they went through,” Skye Roberts told NPR.
stop abuse
Skye Roberts always knew her sister was taking care of her.
She carried him even though his infant legs were dangling next to hers.
by age 6 she said, Their father started abusing her and came to her room in the middle of the night. In a statement included in her memoir, he denies any abuse.
“He told me I was his special girl, his favorite, and that this was his way of giving me special love,” she wrote in her memoir.
she pushed back. Her father threatened to take away her horse Alice, she wrote.
Soon, her father sent her to a friend’s house, where she also suffered abuse from the friend, she wrote.
Roberts Giuffre wrote that her mother seemed jealous of her closeness with her father. When her parents fought, Roberts Giuffre would lean on her brother and cover his ears. She was 11 years old and he was 6.
Her mother sent her to live with an aunt in California and then to a facility for troubled teens. When she returned, she wrote, it wasn’t her parents that she missed.
“I remember Skydy running out the back door, the screen slamming shut as he threw himself into my arms,” she wrote of arriving home.
Book recalls threatening to harm Epstein’s brother
When Roberts Giuffre was 16, she took a job as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, a nearby resort where her father was a maintenance worker.
Just before she turned 17, she met Epstein and Maxwell. Maxwell was later sentenced to prison for sex trafficking. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on similar charges.
She wrote that she did not tell her family when Epstein began abusing her.
She wrote in her memoir that the abuse began during an interview for a job as a masseuse. “My body couldn’t escape from this room, but my mind couldn’t bear to stay there and went into a kind of autopilot, obedient and determined to survive.”
She wrote that the massage led to sex with Epstein and the men he trafficked her to.
She thought about leaving. That’s when Epstein handed her a grainy photo, she wrote.
“He was definitely my younger brother. Skydy.”
“We know where your brother goes to school,” Epstein told her. “You must never tell anyone what’s going on in this house.”
Her brother was 12 years old.
“I had no choice, I believed, but I had to accept it and make the best of it. If not for myself, then for Skydy’s sake.”
“Please don’t ever leave with your children again.”
Roberts didn’t realize how protective her sister was until she was an adult.
He and his then-wife-turned-girlfriend lived in Florida in 2013 with Roberts-Giuffre, her husband, and their three young children.
He still called her “Sissy.”
Within a year, she, Roberts, and her eldest brother Danny Wilson, whose mother was from a previous relationship, were all living nearby.
All the brothers had children, among them three little girls. Roberts Giuffre made sure her daughter didn’t spend any time alone with her father.
She decided she needed to tell her brothers why.
“My brothers did not know to take such precautions because my father did not tell them what he had done to me,” she wrote.
At first, she wrote, her siblings also refused to believe her.
“By the end of the night we were all in tears,” she wrote.
Wilson confronted his stepfather.
Roberts then confronted her father, who had taken his daughter to a Tampa Buccaneers game by herself.
“Don’t ever leave with your children again,” he told her, according to Roberts Giuffre’s memoir. “And you know why, right?” he said to his father.
“Only one of us can tell the truth.”
Roberts saw how hard her sister tried, even though no one seemed to believe her.
Robert Giuffre used to say, “He knows what he did. I know what he did, but there’s only one of us who’s telling the truth, and I know that’s me.”
Her brother still holds it.
He remembers how, despite her struggles, she was able to build a beautiful life with her three children.
Now, he says, we need to move beyond gratitude for survivors.
“We need to see what the Justice Department does,” he told NPR. “I think what we’re asking is that this administration needs to stop protecting predators and pedophiles.”
As Roberts prepares to comment to the media after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address scheduled for February 24, he wants to remind people that this is not about politics. He and his wife will be among the guests of Democratic congressmen Jamie Raskin and Suhas Subramanyam to honor Robert Giuffre’s work in exposing Epstein’s crimes.
“This is a human issue. Our laws are broken, so we have to move politics. For survivors of sexual abuse, the laws are broken,” Roberts told CBS. “This generation deserves better.”
Laura Trujillo is a national columnist focused on health and wellness. She is the author of “Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter’s Search for Truth and Renewal” and can be reached at ltrujillo@usatoday.com.
