Oh, the grand old Duchess of York, she had 10,000 gaffes. Sarah Ferguson, also known as Fergie, is one of the world’s most incident-prone royals.
During her early years as a royal, she was given a rough ride by the press for her behaviour and, perhaps cruelly, her looks. She was dubbed “The Duchess of Pork” and “Furious Fergie” while also being constantly compared to Princess Diana, who joined the royal family five years before Fergie.
Ferguson’s reputation had been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years, with her 2023 double cancer diagnosis prompting worldwide sympathy. That same year, the duchess was present at the Sandringham Christmas Day service for the first time in over 30 years. Her presence at the highly publicised family event led many to believe she had been welcomed back in “from the cold” by the royal family.
But the tide always turns. This summer, the first rumblings of a downfall began with the release of Andrew Lownie’s biography, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. It paints a vivid picture of Ferguson as a binge spender, deal maker and freebie grabber. It delves heavily into her money troubles, yet explains that she still employed a butler, chauffeur, cook and secretary, and spent £16,000 a year on phone bills, even while deep in the red. The book also dissects Andrew’s relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which already looked set to tar Ferguson by association.
Then came the final nail in the coffin. This week, a grovelling email has been leaked showing correspondence between Ferguson and Epstein — three years after his first conviction for sex offences. In the 2011 email, Ferguson called Epstein her “supreme friend” and appeared to regret her public denunciation of him after his arrest.
Speaking to this newspaper in an exclusive interview at the time, Fergie had labelled her friendship with Epstein a "gigantic error of judgement" and said: “What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.” She also apologised for accepting a £15,000 loan from the financier to cover some of her debts.
However, her private email from 2011 showed that she “humbly apologised” to Epstein, where she also said “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me”.
As a result, Fergie has been unceremoniously dropped from many of her charity positions since the leak, including Julia's House, a children's hospice, The Teenage Cancer Trust, Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Children's Literacy Charity, National Foundation for Retired Service Animals and Prevent Breast Cancer.
Could Ferguson’s email to Epstein be her true undoing? Or will she bounce back like she did in 2023, after nearly 40 years of royal gaffes? Here, we detail some of her most controversial moments.
Leaving baby Beatrice behind when she went to Australia
Not long after Princess Beatrice was born in August 1988, Fergie accompanied Andrew on a royal tour to Australia — leaving their six-week-old daughter behind in the UK.
The decision, which Ferguson later explained was so she could have alone time with her husband, attracted fierce condemnation from the press. In an interview with Barbara Walters two years later, Fergie claimed: “After nine months of looking enormous and big and your poor husband has had to look at you like that... It was his turn. Just to make sure that he knew he was very important. People might be a bit tired of my putting my husband first.”
That toe-sucking incident
Fergie’s first big scandal came in 1992, amid her separation from Prince Andrew, which they announced in March. Six months later, British tabloid the Daily Mirror published paparazzi photographs of John Bryan, an American financial manager, sucking on Sarah's toes as she sunbathed topless in St Tropez. In response, she was ostracised by the royal family and told by Princess Margaret: “You have done more to bring shame on the family than could ever have been imagined.”
Cash for access scandal
In a sting by the now-defunct News of the World, Ferguson was filmed offering Mazher Mahmood, an undercover reporter posing as a businessman (aka the “Fake Sheikh”), access to Prince Andrew for a fee of £500,000. In the video, she could be seen taking away a briefcase containing £40,000 in cash. “That opens up everything you would ever wish for,” she's heard saying on the tape. “I can open any door you want, and I will for you. Look after me and he'll look after you... you'll get it back tenfold.”
Ferguson later attempted to sue News Group Newspapers, owned by Rupert Murdoch, for “distress” and loss of earnings, but she appeared to abandon the lawsuit sometime after 2018.
Storming out of an interview
Say what you like about Prince Andrew, but he managed to weather the entirety of Emily Maitlis’ forensic questioning during his BBC dressing down in 2019 (however poorly). The same cannot be said for Sarah Ferguson, who stormed out of a 2011 interview with 60 Minutes Australia after she was questioned about the cash for access scandal. At one point, she told the interviewer to “delete that bit” and “move onto the next question”.
When pressed, Ferguson admitted: “I was very grateful for being in that position in a way, because when I hit rock bottom it woke me up.” But then she walked off after claiming she was going to “take five minutes”.
Money troubles
If you’re noticing a through line in Fergie’s scandals, you’d be on the money. Literally. The Duchess has encountered numerous financial troubles over the course of her public life and Lownie’s book claims she had amassed debts totaling £3.7 million by November 1995, three years after her separation from Andrew. It was revealed around this time that Queen Elizabeth II had paid her daughter-in-law's debts on “several” occasions. When Fergie’s divorce from Prince Andrew was finalised, the Queen announced in a statement that she would not take responsibility for Sarah's debts and even reportedly confided in then Prime Minister David Cameron about her frustrations.
In 2010, she looked set to become the first bankrupt royal, with a source telling The Guardian she was doing “everything she can” to avoid filing for bankruptcy. However, Entitled reportedly shines a light on the duchess’s wild spending habits, including her daily demand for a side of beef, leg of lamb and a roast chicken at every dinner and her ability to spend £25,000 in Bloomingdale’s in just 60 minutes.
Nursing home fraud scandal
In 1995, the Duchess of York backed a project launched by bankrupt businessman Clive Garrad to open a nursing home named after her. She withdrew her support a few months before Jarrad was jailed for VAT fraud. The scandal has been largely forgotten about and is barely present online, save for its mention in an article about Ferguson on The Independent from 1996 entitled “Can we face any more?” The first line reads: “Idle, extravagant and indulged, she failed to be royal.”
Out of touch TV appearances
After taking a lot of flack for her weight gain during pregnancy (oh the Nineties), Fergie rebranded as a fitness influencer (before the term even existed) in the 2000s when she lost a great deal of weight. As part of this rebrand, she appeared on the TV programme The Duchess in Hull, where she was filmed advising a family of six how to live more healthily on a budget of £80 a week. It was suggested that getting Fergie giving financial advice — as a royal with widely reported money troubles — was perhaps a little out of touch.
