OPINION: Harley Street Consultant Psychiatrist Raj Persaud reveals clues in newly-released image of the three men and suggests a sinister plot

09:23, Sun, Mar 15, 2026 Updated: 09:24, Sun, Mar 15, 2026

Epstein files

The new images of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson (Image: PA / US Department of Justice)

The discovery in the Epstein files of a photograph – placing Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson together – has, unsurprisingly, gone viral globally. The image was apparently snapped around 1999 at the island of Lady de Rothschild, in Martha’s Vineyard, a famously ritzy US hangout. It appears an extremely mundane scene, so why would this warrant recording for posterity?

And therein lies its dark secret. A close inspection reveals reflections in the photographer’s lens, so this was apparently shot through a window glass of some kind. Attempting a picture from behind a window suggests a certain reticence. The three subjects know their images are being recorded; they turn to the lens, as if instructed. But they don’t shuffle nearer to each other, as friends might usually do for better framing. The two whose destiny is to be, decades later, undone by scenes like this, remain gawkily distant, mustering awkward expressions.

Did Epstein identify and exploit social discomfort in his targets, providing intimate company on tap for those unable to attract it normally? The master manipulator remains furthest away, and most indistinct (he was not the focus of the photographer) and Andrew’s face betrays misgivings, while Mandelson grins sheepishly.

Andrew and Peter sport bathrobes, yet Epstein doesn’t – therefore actively distancing himself from whatever is about to occur, or has just happened. A pre-planned signal is being broadcast, that Epstein was not party to whatever Andrew and Peter are implicated in by their towelling robes.

Shooting through glass suggests the person behind this camera doesn’t feel part of the same high-status social circle in the picture, hence, perhaps, the reticence to get close.

Was it even taken by someone who might have been involved in providing whatever service requires bathrobes? That might explain Peter’s and Andrew’s embarrassed expressions. Are we, looking out, from the photographer's perspective, even from the very room where the ‘service’ was provided?

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It’s such an apparently pointless picture, do Andrew and Mandelson not realise what is actually happening? Are they being ‘softened up’, given how early in Epstein’s relationship with both of them this instant is captured, to even get used to more images that, as we now know, have later helped to destroy them?

Are we witnessing the beginning of the grooming of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, by the later-convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein? Is there a lot more to this picture than meets the eye? To my mind, the answer is yes.

  • Dr Raj Persaud is a Harley Street Consultant Psychiatrist and author of The Mental Vaccine for Covid-19, published by Amberley Publishing