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JAMES PATTERSON

Prince Andrew had long since sold the home, which he and Sarah had received as a gift after their 1986 wedding. He got into hot water when it was revealed that the buyer, a Kazakh billionaire named Timur Kulibayev, had paid three million pounds more than the home's asking price.

For her part, Sarah Ferguson announced that she was moving into a thirteen-million-pound ski chalet in Switzerland.

It was a fitting end to the long, sometimes sordid story of the prince's marriage. But it was not the end of the scandals that seemed always to be swirling around the prince.

On January 2, 2015, Virginia Roberts's allegations about her relationship with the prince—and the photo of him with his arm around Roberts's waist—appeared in the press. Prince Andrew was forced to cut short a skiing holiday to confer with his mother, the queen, and to issue a statement denying Roberts's allegations—a step that was widely seen as being without precedent for a member of the royal family.

That same month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the prince was again forced to "reiterate and to reaffirm" the repeated denials made by Buckingham Palace that he had any sort of sexual relationship with Roberts, who had announced in papers filed at the start of the year that Prince Andrew has a "sexual interest in feet."

"My focus is on my work," Prince Andrew said at the time.

Asked by a reporter, "Will you be making a statement?" the prince refused to answer.

A few days later, Virginia Roberts signed a sworn statement in which she said, "I did have sexual contact with him as I have described here—under oath. Given what he knows and has seen, I was hoping that he would simply voluntarily tell the truth about

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