Sarah Ferguson, there’s a special place in hell for women like you. As Andrew is arrested, CAROLINE BULLOCK eviscerates his ex

It’s time to put the nostalgic 2016 revival trend on pause.

Let’s instead revisit 2015 and an edition of The Meredith Vieira Show in which the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, brands Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent victim Virginia Giuffre a ‘salacious liar’.

Still with a royal title, tone-deaf judgment and blind loyalty to her meal-ticket ex, Fergie was responding to claims Giuffre had been forced to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, still then glorying in his title of the Duke of York. Giuffre’s claims had been filed in a Florida court weeks earlier.

‘I don’t understand how people can make salacious lies up,’ she told the host, describing her reaction to the accusations as ‘total fury’.

She added: ‘Shockingly accusatory lies which… I won’t stand by and let anybody believe. I have to shut it down right now.’

Where is she now that Andrew has been arrested and held on suspicion of misconduct in public office? Perhaps wondering what it all means for her because that, after all, is what Fergie has always worried about most.

That much was clear from that clip which, as they say, hasn’t aged well. More than that it shows this mother of two girls committing the most egregious breach of what might in a lighter moment be known as ‘girl-code’, but in this instance falls firmly into the territory of victim shaming and blaming.

She went on to describe her ex-husband, since stripped of his titles, as her ‘best friend’ and praise him as ‘one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life’ – which only makes one question yet further the company she keeps.

Well, there’s nothing like standing by your (ex) man. At the time of the chat show Fergie and Andrew had been divorced for close to two decades.

But then, in Fergie’s case her unswerving devotion has always gone hand-in-hand with both a limpet-like grip on royal status and greed that has seen her lurch from one scandal to another.

And now over a decade on and the Yorks’ ‘truth’ seems as loose as Andrew’s turkey neck.

This week an unredacted email from 2015, released as part of the Epstein files, stated that Andrew had consensual sex with Giuffre, who had been allegedly sex-trafficked by the pedophile financier in the early 2000s.

Epstein did not correct the journalist who stated as a fact that the former prince slept with the trafficking victim, who took her own life last year.

Andrew for his part has always strenuously denied any impropriety with Giuffre, who he has repeatedly stated he has no recollection of even meeting. 

Fergie’s indignant display on American TV in 2015 – ostensibly to plug her role as WeightWatchers ambassador – came seven years after Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in a Florida jail for pedophilia in 2011.

She maintained contact with him until after his release in 2011 and after she had publicly described her association with him as a ‘gigantic error of judgment’.

Clearly, two very different versions of the Fergie/Epstein relationship ran in parallel; one was the Duchess’s skin-saving PR spiel full of regret and condemnations. The other was her behind-the-scenes groveling to maintain a relationship and keep the financier’s handouts including $27,521 for rent.

I’m not sure what’s worse, her desperation to be bankrolled by the convicted pedophile – or her ‘marry me’ pleas which were probably far from a joke.

Not to mention the particularly unsavory email exchange in which she told Epstein her then-teenage daughter Eugenie was on a ‘shagging weekend’ – odd, misfiring humor or targeted titillation? Who knows.

In truth, by 2015, Fergie was a gaffe-prone grifter who had already clocked up decades of clangers and indignities. Yet her sanctimonious and dismissive response towards the accusations on US TV that year was a familiar approach.

Like many prominent women associated with tawdry scandals and cushioned by power and privilege they just never seem to see judgment day coming.

Instead, they brazen it out in a bid to maintain their gilded lives, defending their other halves while condemning younger, vulnerable women easy to deride as being ‘on the make’ or unhinged fantasists.

What about Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of husband Bill’s affair with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky that dominated headlines throughout 1998 and led to his eventual impeachment?

She may have been a woman scorned but her priority was to fight against his impeachment and appear on NBC’s Today show, denying that her husband had an inappropriate affair and instead arguing that he was the victim of a politically motivated attack by his opponents.

Her husband famously said, ‘I did not have sexual relations with THAT woman’, and reduced Lewinsky – 27 years his junior – to little more than a distraction from the pressures of the office work life.

It was an ungallant but useful narrative and one which, it could be argued, Hillary supported, reportedly calling the younger woman a ‘narcissistic loony tune’ according to private notes taken by her friend and aide, Diane Blair, at the time of the scandal and released many years later.

When asked about it in an interview with People magazine Hillary wouldn’t be drawn, saying simply: ‘I’m not going to comment on what did or didn’t happen.’

Yes, for all the brains and pantsuits, is it any surprise that Hillary never really did convince as a potential president?

Inevitably, the much-vaunted female empowerment rhetoric always sat uneasily with her actions when it came to her cheat husband. Was her dogged mission to be America’s first female president ultimately undone in part because of her wifely loyalty?

As for Fergie, how she must be hankering for the good old days when she was just a laughable mess of fashion faux pas and weight struggles. When the least of her worries was being photographed having her toes sucked by her ‘financial adviser’ and lover, Texan millionaire John Bryan, in 1992 or being embroiled in a tabloid sting trying to sell access to Andrew.

Desperate for a proper return to public royal life, Sarah Ferguson played a very long game convinced dogged loyalty to Andrew would ultimately pay off. 

It almost did. But, for now at least, it seems her undoing.