Disturbing new revelation about Prince Andrew raises one deeply uncomfortable question

News.com.au

2 days ago

Among a deluge of unsettling revelations in a new book charting the lives of Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson is one that stands out as particularly gross.
Citing 'a source close to Andrew', royal biographer Andrew Lownie relays an allegation that, when the Prince was just 11, a friend's father 'hired two escorts' for the boys at a hotel.
That was apparently Andrew's second 'sexual experience', the first having come when he was eight. By the age of 13, he had 'already slept with more than half a dozen girls'.
Mr Lownie suggests those early sexual experiences are the cause of Andrew's lifelong 'obsession' with women.
Andrew has been the villain in many stories throughout his life – the book reportedly examines his dodgy business dealings and links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, for example, in copious detail. He's a liar, a philanderer, a person who has repeatedly mistreated those around him. And, allegedly, worse things still.
In that one story above though, he's a victim. The villain is the adult, the extraordinarily deficient parent, who foisted sex on a pair of pre-teen boys, and likely warped their lives in ways that cannot be measured.
It raises a tricky question: should we judge the man that boy in the hotel room became less harshly? Is he less culpable for his flaws as a human being if they are rooted in what others did to him during his formative years?
Mr Lownie has hinted at that dilemma himself.
'I think he, in some ways, has been a victim. It does make him much more sympathetic, in a way,' the author told Britain's Telegraph newspaper.
Well, a bit more sympathetic maybe. We shouldn't go overboard here. Andrew's inadequacies have hurt other people, often in his own family, and for that he cannot be absolved.
But these revelations are a reminder that most of the world's screwed up old men were not born that way. Andrew didn't emerge from the royal womb with an insatiable appetite for sex and the entitlement complex of a minor Greek deity. To some extent, at least, these guys got screwed up by someone else.
You'll roll your eyes, but point them forward again and bear with me: Donald Trump is another stark example. He and Andrew have much more in common than their friendship with Epstein. They're both human beings who have, in some critical way, been broken.
It's a strange thing to say about someone rich, famous and powerful, with millions who adore him, years of comfort ahead of him and a long life of exploiting others behind. These are not sympathetic traits. Yet Mr Trump has always struck me as a deeply tragic person.
He's a son of privilege who feels forever hard done by. A 79-year-old man constitutionally incapable of controlling his emotions. A reflexively aggressive person, drowning in resentment, who sees enemies everywhere. An egotist with an appetite for the attention and approval of others that can never, ever be filled.
I have read many tomes about Mr Trump; one shudders to think how many precious minutes of life have been spent on that pursuit. The book that best illustrated the President's character was Rick Reilly's account of his serial, hilarious, ludicrously over-the-top cheating at golf.
The one that came closest to explaining why Mr Trump is the way he is, however, was written by his niece Mary, a professional psychologist.
How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man is not a kind account of Mr Trump's life. The author's dislike for her uncle is palpable. But he is not the true villain of the book. That is the President's father, Fred Trump, the original patriarch of the family's property empire, whom he has idolised for his entire life.
It was Fred who imbued Donald with his fundamental worldview: that the world is split into winners and losers, the strong and the weak, and a loser is the worst thing you can be.
We are not talking about a parent who merely wanted his children to be successful. That would be perfectly normal. But most parents have at least one higher priority: to ensure their kids become good people. If Fred Trump were still here he would laugh at the concept.
'In a way, you can't really blame Donald,' Mary writes in a book that describes the President as, among other things, a 'pathetic, petty little man'.
She diagnoses Fred as a 'high-functioning sociopath' who offered his own young children neglect and contempt.
'By engaging in behaviours that were biologically designed to trigger soothing, comforting responses from their parents, the little boys instead provoked his anger or indifference when they were most vulnerable,' she says.
'For Donald and (his brother) Robert, 'needing' became equated with humiliation, despair and hopelessness. Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.'
Mary's father and Fred's eldest son, Freddy, was relentlessly bullied. He eventually died at the age of 42 after struggling for years with debilitating alcoholism and his father's contempt.
In the author's words, Donald had 'plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate' his older brother.
'Fred destroyed Donald too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,' she writes.
'By limiting Donald's access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.'
Throughout much of Donald's childhood, his mother was in extremely poor health. Fred would habitually downplay it.
'Everything's great. Right, Toots?' he would say whenever the subject came up.
Mary describes this attitude as 'toxic positivity'. Fred also used it to shrug off Freddy's fatal addiction to alcohol, and Donald's reckless spending.
Acknowledging any of those problems would have risked an admission of weakness, so Fred pretended everything was OK instead.
You can see the echo of that every time the President refuses to acknowledge bad news. Like this week, when his reaction to a worryingly poor US jobs report was to call the numbers in it 'rigged', fire the head of the agency that compiled it, and insist the economy was fine.
You saw it during the Covid pandemic, when he repeatedly insisted the virus was under control and would soon go away.
You saw it after the 2020 election, when Mr Trump's deep-seated need to never be perceived as a loser led him to insist he had actually beaten Joe Biden.
A mature human being, with the basic emotional competence required to process a setback, would not have spent months – years, at this point – lying to his supporters and himself. There would have been no riot at the Capitol, no assault against police officers. Hundreds of Trump fans would never have been sent to jail. Ashli Babbitt would be alive.
Fred Trump did that to Donald. So we return to the same dilemma. Mr Trump is not solely to blame for who he is. Does that lessen his responsibility for a lifetime spent serially mistreating other human beings?
The answer has to be no, just as it is for Andrew, and so many other broken people littered throughout society. At some level, the choices you make must be yours to own. But each of these men is his own small tragedy.