Originally published 2020-08-12.
Royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell provoked widespread anger when she argued on ITV's Good Morning Britain that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and friend of Prince Andrew, should not be called a paedophile. Her case rested on a distinction between a "minor" and a "child". Presenter Piers Morgan dismissed the argument as nonsense on air, and the clip spread rapidly across social media, circulating again in August 2020 as attention returned to the Epstein case.
Her comments came as Andrew faced allegations, which he has always denied, that he had sexual contact with Virginia Giuffre when she was 17 and being trafficked by Epstein. This article explains what was said, why the argument was so widely rejected, and how the story developed in the years that followed.
What Lady Colin Campbell said
Lady Colin Campbell, the Jamaican-born writer Georgia Arianna Ziadie, is the author of several books on the royal family, including Diana in Private and The Queen's Marriage. According to her Wikipedia biography, she first made this defence on the programme in November 2019, shortly after Andrew's widely criticised BBC interview, and repeated it on other occasions.
Her point was that the offence for which Epstein was jailed in 2008 involved soliciting prostitution from minors, which she insisted was not the same as paedophilia. In her words: "That is not the same thing as pedophilia." When pressed, she said she suspected there was a difference between a minor and a child, and added that she was not justifying Epstein.
The underlying idea is a clinical one. In psychiatry, paedophilia refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children, while attraction to adolescents is sometimes called hebephilia or ephebophilia. Campbell used this terminology to suggest that the label was being misapplied.
Piers Morgan's response
Morgan, then co-presenting the show, rejected the argument immediately. "If you solicited a 14-year-old for prostitution, you're a pedophile," he told her, adding that procuring an underage girl for sex was exactly what Epstein had been convicted of.
Here is the exchange as it was shared online:
Viewers and child-protection campaigners largely sided with Morgan. Whatever the clinical vocabulary, the law in Britain and the United States treats anyone under 18 involved in prostitution as a victim of exploitation, not as a consenting participant. A label in a psychiatric manual does not change that, and it has no bearing on whether a particular allegation is true.
Fact check: what was Epstein convicted of?
Both sides of the argument simplified the record. In 2005 police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein after a woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been paid to give him a massage at his mansion. Investigators went on to identify dozens of girls with similar accounts.
In 2008, under a controversial deal, Epstein pleaded guilty in a Florida state court to soliciting prostitution and to procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months, served about 13 with generous work release, and registered as a sex offender. A non-prosecution agreement shielded him from federal charges at the time, a deal that was later heavily criticised.
So Campbell was correct that the formal conviction was for solicitation offences, but the police case behind it involved girls as young as 14. In July 2019 federal prosecutors charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors. He died in his jail cell in Manhattan on 10 August 2019, in what was ruled a suicide, before he could be tried.
Andrew's Newsnight interview
The debate followed Andrew's interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight in November 2019, which he gave in an attempt to address his friendship with Epstein. It was widely judged a disaster. Two of his explanations drew particular ridicule.
First, Giuffre had said Andrew was sweating heavily when they danced at a London nightclub in 2001. Andrew replied that he had been unable to sweat at the time, a condition he linked to his service in the Falklands War. Second, he said that on the date in question he had taken his daughter Beatrice to a party at a Pizza Express in Woking, describing it as a very unusual outing for him that he remembered "weirdly distinctly".
He also said he had no recollection of meeting Giuffre, despite a widely published photograph showing him with his arm around her waist.
Within days of the broadcast, on 20 November 2019, Buckingham Palace announced that Andrew was stepping back from public duties, and he gave up his patronages soon afterwards. He was not seen in the official photographs from Princess Beatrice's private wedding in July 2020.
What happened next
The case did not fade. The key developments since this story first appeared:
- July 2020: Epstein's longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire.
- August 2021: Virginia Giuffre sued Andrew for sexual abuse in a federal court in New York.
- December 2021: Maxwell was convicted on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor. In June 2022 she was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal in October 2025.
- January 2022: After a judge refused to dismiss Giuffre's lawsuit, Andrew's military affiliations and royal patronages were returned to the Queen.
- February 2022: Andrew settled the lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed sum, without admitting liability, and made a donation to Giuffre's charity for abuse survivors.
- April 2025: Giuffre's family reported that she had died at her farm in Australia.
- November 2025: King Charles III removed his brother's style of Royal Highness and the title of prince. He is now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and later left his home at Royal Lodge, Windsor.
Why the wording matters
Campbell's argument is a useful example of how a technical distinction can be used to shrink a serious issue. Whether a crime is described with one clinical label or another makes no difference to the harm done to a teenager who is paid or pressured into sex by an adult. The more useful questions are the ones courts and investigators ask: what happened, who was involved, and who enabled it.
Lady Colin Campbell later sued the Daily Mirror over an article that accused her of defending Epstein's abuse of children; the case was settled with a public apology from the paper. That outcome concerned how her words were characterised, not the substance of the Epstein case, which continues to produce court documents and released files years after his death.
Sources: Wikipedia, Lady Colin Campbell; Wikipedia, Jeffrey Epstein; Wikipedia, Ghislaine Maxwell; Wikipedia, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor; original report via ZeroHedge.
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