PRINCE Andrew cosied up to Jeffrey Epstein at a creepy Eyes Wide Shut style party – where the female staff “looked very young”, a book claims.
US television host Katie Couric says she was also a guest at the 2010 dinner at Epstein’s £57million townhouse in Manhattan – dubbed “paedo mansion” after he raped underage girls there.
Couric’s memoir describes the setting as “Eyes Wide Shut with a twist – creepy chandeliers and body-part art”, reports DailyMail.com.
Guests ate lasagne out of shallow bowls and Epstein “held court” in front of the fireplace with Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Rose.
On the way home, Couric’s boyfriend Brooks Perlin remarked to her how young the women who took their coats were, she recalls.
She also writes: “I couldn’t imagine what Epstein and Andrew were up to, apart from trying to cultivate friends in the media.
“Which, in retrospect, they must have figured they’d need.”
A friend of the Duke told The Celeb Report: “The fact that Katie Couric attended a dinner party at Epstein’s house only demonstrates how many of New York’s high society and media revolved in Epstein’s orbit.”
The 2010 dinner party came months after the disgraced financier had been released from jail.
Epstein was convicted of child sex crimes in 2008 but served only 13 months as part of a “sweetheart deal” with prosecutors in Florida.
Read our Royal Family live blog for the latest updates
The Duke of York has previously admitted he stayed with Epstein in New York in December 2010, when they were pictured walking together in Central Park.
He told the BBC’s Newsnight he went there to tell Epstein face to face they could no longer be friends, and only slept at his Manhattan home because it was “a convenient place to stay”.
Epstein was arrested again in 2019 and killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Andrew is said to have been a visitor a number of times to Epstein’s New York home – which was decorated with 150 creepy eyeballs.
A lawsuit filed in the US claims the Duke groped a young masseuse’s breast with a Spitting Image puppet of himself.
And fresh lawsuit by Virginia Roberts Giuffre claims Andrew forced her to have sex when she was 17.
He strongly denies the allegations or that he was aware of any wrongdoing by Epstein and others.
PARTY PRINCE
In her book, out next month, former NBC Today host Couric also claims Prince Harry stank of cigarettes and booze when she met him.
She interviewed him at a polo match in Brazil in 2012 – during what she called Harry’s “wild-oats sowing phase”.
Couric recalls the smell of fags and alcohol seemed to “ooze from every pore” in his body.
Harry, 37, has admitted turning to drugs to cope with his mum’s death.
And he said he would regularly drink “a week’s worth of alcohol in one day”.
He opened up about his struggles with his mental well-being and the trauma that haunts him in recent doc The Me You Can’t See.
“I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling,” he said.
“But I slowly became aware that, OK, I wasn’t drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night.
“And I would find myself drinking, not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something.”
When he was 17, Harry was reportedly sent to rehab by Prince Charles after he was caught smoking cannabis.
St James’s Palace later confirmed that Harry had “experimented with the drug on several occasions” but said he was not a “regular” user.
