A fresh round of scrutiny has fallen on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after his former girlfriend, Lady Victoria Hervey, claimed that a newly released photograph showing him leaning over a woman on the floor was likely taken during a CPR training course. The image emerged in the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein material published by the US Department of Justice, which said on 30 January that it had released more than three million additional pages, along with over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The photograph itself appears to show Andrew, wearing a white polo shirt and jeans, kneeling over an unidentified woman and touching her stomach. The context of the image has not been established publicly. LADbible reported that there was no suggestion of wrongdoing inherent in the photograph itself and that its inclusion in the files did not, on its own, indicate criminal conduct. Even so, the picture has gained attention because it arrived in a document release tied to Epstein, the late convicted sex offender whose long association with Andrew has shadowed the royal for years. Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein and has said he regretted the friendship.
Hervey, a British socialite and model who briefly dated Andrew in 1999, offered her explanation during an appearance on Dan Wootton’s Outspoken podcast. According to LADbible’s account of the interview, she said: “I messaged Leah, who’s Ghislaine’s lawyer, and Ghislaine is a trained emergency medical technician.” When asked if she believed the image showed Andrew learning CPR, she replied: “Yeah, it’s part of the course.” She also claimed the woman in the picture was “an assistant of Jeffrey’s” and was “overage”. Those remarks were presented as Hervey’s personal interpretation of the image, not as an independently verified account of when, where or why it was taken.
The claim fits with a broader pattern in which Hervey has publicly defended Andrew as the Epstein scandal has repeatedly resurfaced. LADbible noted that in 2019, after Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview, Hervey told Good Morning Britain: “I watched it and I thought, there is no way, if he is guilty, that he would go onto television and do an interview like that. There’s no way.” More recently, LBC reported that she also argued the notorious 2001 image of Andrew with Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell had been staged, saying she believed Epstein and Giuffre had “worked together on setting up Andrew with the fake photo”.
That position cuts directly against other material now in the public domain. LBC reported in February that newly released records indicated Maxwell had privately admitted the well-known photograph of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre was real. RNZ and People also reported on documents said to include a 2015 email attributed to Maxwell that appeared to support the authenticity of that image, contradicting years of public doubt cast over it. Giuffre had long alleged that she was trafficked by Epstein and forced to have sex with Andrew when she was 17. Andrew denied those allegations and in 2022 reached a settlement with Giuffre in a US civil lawsuit without admitting wrongdoing.
The latest file release has also revived attention on Andrew’s contact with Epstein well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida. AFP reported that the January release included not only the image of Andrew over an unidentified woman but also material concerning Epstein’s proposal in 2010 that Andrew meet a Russian woman. ITV News later reported that one woman connected to those communications said she was finding the renewed attention “extremely hard”, while her lawyer, Brad Edwards, said he was considering a civil claim on behalf of a client who alleged she had been sent by Epstein to Andrew’s Royal Lodge residence for a sexual encounter. ITV said it was not yet clear whether the woman it interviewed was the same person at the centre of that potential claim. Andrew did not answer ITV’s questions and has previously denied wrongdoing.
Hervey’s intervention has therefore landed in an already charged atmosphere, where every newly released image or email is being placed alongside years of allegations, denials and damaging disclosures. She has remained one of Andrew’s most outspoken defenders. LBC reported that she told Tom Swarbrick that anyone not named in the Epstein files was “a bit of a loser”, adding that Epstein “knew everybody who was very powerful”. That interview also featured her claim that Epstein might not be dead, which LADbible described as an outlandish theory. Those comments have kept Hervey in the public conversation, but they have also underscored how much of the debate around Andrew is now being driven by competing narratives, speculation and public attempts to reinterpret old evidence.
Andrew’s own fall from grace has been severe and prolonged. Reuters reported that he stepped back from royal duties in 2019 as the Epstein scandal deepened, and later lost his military links, patronages and use of “His Royal Highness”. A House of Commons Library briefing published in February said that Buckingham Palace announced in October 2025 that King Charles had initiated a formal process to remove Andrew’s style, titles and honours, after Andrew had already said he would no longer use the Duke of York title. Reuters also reported that the king later stripped him of his prince title and forced him from his Windsor home.
That background is why Hervey’s CPR explanation has drawn such interest. On its face, it is a simple claim about a single photograph. In practice, it is an attempt to supply an innocent reading to an image that surfaced from one of the most scrutinised document dumps in recent years. No official description released with the picture has publicly confirmed Hervey’s account, and the known context of the photo remains unresolved. But the episode shows how Andrew’s history with Epstein continues to be argued not only in court filings, police reviews and document releases, but also in the public arena through interviews, podcasts and television appearances, where allies and critics alike are trying to define what the world is seeing.
For Andrew, that means even an undated image with no publicly established backstory can become a fresh test of credibility. For Hervey, it has meant stepping forward once again to defend a man she briefly dated more than a quarter of a century ago. And for a scandal that has already spanned lawsuits, leaked emails, disputed photographs and repeated denials, the latest controversy is another reminder that the release of documents alone rarely settles anything. It often opens a new fight over meaning, motive and memory, especially when the people involved have spent years telling sharply different versions of the same story.
