Known as the ‘Duchess of Excess,’ Sarah Ferguson’s relentless pursuit of funds led her to accept a £15,000 loan from notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Recently, the Mail on Sunday uncovered that Epstein had been secretly supporting Sarah financially for as long as 15 years, suggesting his contributions were significantly more substantial than she previously disclosed.

This financial reliance on Epstein isn’t just a reflection of their unsavory relationship; it underscores a long-standing pattern of imprudent spending by Ferguson.

For over four decades in the public eye, one major scandal has persistently hovered over the former Duchess: her overwhelming debt.

During her marriage, she reportedly splurged on staff, vacations, parties, and flowers, seemingly indifferent to the mounting bills.

Her impulsive spending habits allegedly left her with debts exceeding £5 million by 1995, and she became infamous for amassing large bills in high-end stores like Harrods without settling them.

Royal biographer Andrew Lownie, who spent four years researching the first joint-biography of the former Duke and Duchess of York, Entitled, revealed that despite her eye-watering debts, Fergie was certain that there would be ‘a deal around the corner’ and she had several ‘ways and means of getting around her financial restrictions’. 

Her debts had become so great that even the late Queen had been forced to intervene – helping Fergie on ‘several’ occasions that involved six-figure cash sums. 

But after the Palace released a statement that declared that ‘the Duchess’s financial affairs are no longer Her Majesty’s concern’, Fergie was forced to look elsewhere for financial support. 

In March 2011, revelations that Epstein had given Fergie a £15,000 loan first emerged, amid mounting pressure over the links both she and ex-husband Prince Andrew had to the paedophile.

In an interview in the London Evening Standard with its then editor, Geordie Greig, she said that accepting Epstein’s money was ‘a gigantic error of judgement… I am just so contrite I cannot say’.

Then, new emails seen by The Mail on Sunday showed that Fergie had begged to borrow $50,000 to $100,000 to help with ‘small bills’, while also asking the sex offender if she could visit his private island, joking whether her financial woes made it ‘unavailable to bankrupts?’

The emails also showed that Epstein had paid off debts that the former Duchess owed a former employee but had become angry when she failed to pay him back as promised.

A well-placed source told The Mail: ‘Sarah and Prince Andrew have always maintained they distanced themselves from Epstein after his conviction for child prostitution. In fact, it was Epstein who ended up dumping them. He got sick and tired of Sarah constantly asking him for money.

‘She borrowed far more money off him than has ever come out. In public she said one thing but in private she was always holding out the begging bowl.’

But Epstein wasn’t the only person who had lent Fergie money in order to fund her extravagant lifestyle. 

Lily Mahtani, a close friend of the former Duchess who in August 1994 had lent her £100,000 to fund a holiday in the South of France, was eventually forced to threaten to sue her former friend at the High Court after she only paid back a mere £5,000. Fergie claimed that she had believed that the rest was a gift.

Explaining the significant degree of debt the former Royal found herself embroiled in, Lownie said: ‘It was believed that she had £750 interest accruing each day and that she owed her hairdresser £40 for hair done the previous autumn. 

‘It was said she spent £14,000 in one month with a particular London wine merchant. 

‘It was reported that she had given dozens of £300 keyrings from a top London jeweler to charity workers who helped Children in Crisis with fundraising, each with her personal crest’. 

The former Duchess’ income was estimated to be a total of £315,000, but with outgoings of £72,000 of rent on her luxury Surrey home in Kingsbourne, £384,000 on staff wages and £80,000 on clothing and gifts.

But Fergie did not hold back in her spending, particularly when it came to travel.

In the year prior, she had travelled to places that included Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Poland, alongside embarking on four separate trips to America, where she resided in the luxury Carlyle Hotel.  

No stranger to the luxury jetsetter lifestyle – the former Duchess even became the Royal Family’s most frequent flyer. In the year to July 1995, she covered an incredible sum of 204,990 miles, amounting to eight circumnavigations of the globe.

Indeed, even the most intricate of details were accounted for. Outlining the extent of her extravagance, Lownie wrote: ‘On a three-day visit to New York, she had one car to take her to the airport and another for her ten suitcases, all tissue-lined, with more outfits than she could hope to wear’.

As her debts continued to accumulate, the finances of the former Duchess’s American charity Chances for Children were scrutinised.

While as a non-profit organisation it did not have to pay tax, there were concerns that the charity was also being used as the US branch of her private office, with its staff required to locate her favourite perfume and fix meetings with fortune tellers, diet doctors, hair stylists and manicurists.

One investigation found that less than half of the £110,000 donated to the charity was going to sick children. Tax records showed that over a six-month period wages and expenses came to £58,500, with only £40,000 being charitable donations. 

When the findings went public, the former Duchess was holidaying in the Bahamas with her daughters.

Some of her declared charities received nothing at all. The Sarah Ferguson Foundation claimed to help the Littlest Lamb orphanage with a ‘substantial donation’ to build a kids’ home in Cairo, but its director Mira Riad revealed that this had never been fulfilled. 

Meanwhile, she continued to live beyond her means, even employing a cook, driver, maid, butler, dresser, nanny, three secretaries, a personal assistant, lady-in-waiting, two gardeners, flower arranger and dog walker.

An accountant brought in to cut costs asked one member of staff what he did to which they responded: ‘I pick up the dog poo.’ ‘And you?’ he asked, pointing to the person beside him. ‘I help him.’

In an anxious bid to maintain her lavish lifestyle, the former Duchess has embarked on a number of business ventures designed to bring in funds.

These included £1.4million to set up a trust fund for Beatrice and Eugenie, £500,000 from the Queen to buy a new house for her and her children and £350,000 in cash.

Other money-making projects included turning her hand to writing children’s books, releasing her 1996 debut novel Budgie the Little Helicopter, followed by Budgie at Bendick’s Point. 

Selling 100,000 copies, the novel netted Fergie more than £140,000 in US serialisation rights and a newspaper deal.

Given a reported £4.2million overdraft at royal bankers Coutts & Co at the time of her divorce, Fergie needed money fast and so chose to release an autobiography in 1996, My Story, which was co-authored by New Yorker writer Jeff Coplon.

In January 1997, she advertised Ocean Spray cranberry juice for a fee of £50,000 – which reportedly took more than 100 takes for the two 30-second shots.

‘The following month, for £100,000, she accepted an invitation from an Austrian building magnate, Richard Lugner, to open a shopping precinct in Vienna,’ wrote Lownie.

She also did a book signing and, like Joan Collins, Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch before her, accompanied Lugner to the Vienna Opera Ball – a calendar highlight.

‘By February, it appeared she had paid off her debts – though she still had a £1.6million tax bill to clear – helped by the advance on memoirs, the Weight Watchers income, the advertisement, the six interviews with Paris Match and £300,000 for two children’s books,’ Lownie added.

‘In April, she began writing a column for the New York Times syndication section, which was sold to 75 US newspapers and syndicated worldwide, helped by Jeff Coplon, who had ghosted her memoir, for which each was paid £5,000 an article.

‘The same month, OK! Magazine paid her £200,000 for an interview in which she said she was “trying to leave the Duchess of York behind and develop Sarah’s potential”.

‘In May, she undertook a ten-day American lecture tour, garnering another £200,000.

‘She met golfer Tiger Woods, taking a 1,500-mile flight to see him and inviting him to join her at McNally’s villa that summer.’

Perhaps one of the greatest indications of Fergie’s frivolous spending habits was Sunninghill Park – a lavish, 5,000 acre-mansion ‘surrounded by eight-foot walls’ that contained its ‘own helicopter landing pad, a cinema, pool room and swimming pool, and 20 rooms of staff quarters’.

Deemed a ‘huge expense’ for both the former Duke and Duchess of York, Sunninghill took four years to complete, having been initially gifted to the royal couple by the late Queen as a present for their 1986 wedding.

Indeed, the 12-bedroom mansion, which, in a twist on JR’s Dallas ranch Southfork, became known as SouthYork, even contained a marble bathtub dubbed ‘HMS Fergie’ by builders due to its incredibly vast size. 

Towels, flannels, hand soaps and even toilet paper were said to have been ’embossed with the initials A & S’ while, according to Lownie, the annual cost of guarding the house alone came to a whopping £300,000.

However, while the 18th-century home’s extensive renovations were eventually completed, according to Talk TV’s Royal Editor Sarah Hewson, they had begun to spiral out of control after Fergie’s extravagant spending broke the couple’s budget and eventually forced the Palace to withhold funding.

Work had begun on the newbuild, the first royal newbuild since Bagshot Park in 1879, however it immediately sparked controversy over its design, by architect Dunbar Naismith.

Ms Hewson explained: ‘They tweaked and reshaped the designs over and over again, much to the frustration of their architect.

When Prince Philip, never one to mince his words, saw the plans, he described it as looking like a ‘tart’s bedroom’.

And Fergie was said to have caused an even greater uproar within the Firm after commissioning American designer Sister Parrish, who designed the White House, to decorate the property.

After receiving a quote of £1million, the late Queen complained that the cost was too high and forced the former Duchess to switch to British designer Nina Campbell.

She was reportedly given a budget of £250,000 – almost half a million today – to cater for the couple’s long list of demands, which included a panic room, cinema room, helipad, swimming pool and tennis courts.

‘By this stage, Sunninghill Park was proving to be a financial headache,’ added Hewson, ‘in particular, for the Queen, notoriously financially prudent who was having to foot the ever-escalating bills.’

Describing her decision to eventually cut off the purse strings, he added: ‘At that point, they hadn’t built the swimming pool and the tennis court, and who knows whether the helicopter pad was there then either.’ 

But Fergie’s lavish fantasy was to be short-lived.  After Prince Andrew and Fergie’s high-profile divorce in 1996, the Prince eventually moved out of the purpose-built mansion, while the former Duchess, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie remained living at Sunninghill until 2006.

Then, after spending five years on the market, the property was eventually purchased by Mr Kulibayev in 2007, who controversially paid £3million more than the asking price.

Despite the millions spent on its renovations, the property was eventually demolished in 2015, having fallen into a state of disrepair after lying completely empty for eight years.

Yet Fergie’s desired extravagant lifestyle continued, culminating in her scandalous acceptance of a payment from Epstein in 2011 to repay a loan from her former personal assistant, John O’Sullivan.

On January 20, 2011, Epstein told Prince Andrew he had made a payment to O’Sullivan, writing: ‘JS done.’ Andrew responded ‘Fantastic!!! Thank you. Thank you.’ The emails suggest Mr O’Sullivan was seeking another $60,000 in unpaid wages. In an email to Andrew on February 28, 2011, Epstein wrote: ‘I don’t trust him at all and a payment from me… if disclosed to the press, would look like a payoff for the little s***’.

Andrew asked Epstein, ‘So I could get it paid by someone else?’ to which the financier replied, ‘Yes’.

It remains unclear whether this payment was made – and if so by whom. 

Several months later – and after the Standard interview – an impatient Epstein asked Fergie for the money back, saying: ‘There is little reason to have me questioned on this again and again.’ 

Then, just weeks after she publicly disowned him, the former Duchess wrote Epstein a gushing private message, in which she called him  a ‘steadfast, generous and supreme friend’ – and admitting she only distanced herself from him to save her own reputation.

The former Duchess ‘humbly apologised’ to the convicted sex offender for letting him down, and said she had been told to speak out if she wanted to save her career as a children’s author.

She sent the grovelling message ‘from the truth of my heart’, less than two months after telling journalists: ‘I will never have anything to do with [Epstein] again.’

It comes as Prince Andrew could be set to become the first royal to be caught up in a criminal probe in more than 20 years. Scotland Yard has confirmed it is ‘actively’ probing claims he asked an officer to dig up dirt on Virginia Giuffre.

A bombshell email exposed how Andrew asked his taxpayer-funded police bodyguard to investigate Ms Giuffre, who he called a liar. The prince passed on her date of birth and social security number, presumably given to him by Epstein.

On October 17, Andrew relinquished his Duke title in the ongoing fallout of the Epstein scandal, with Sarah agreeing to also ditch her Duchess of York title as a result. 

As the former couple are currently holed up together in the lavish Royal Lodge in Windsor, an insider has told The Mail that Fergie could turn on her ex-husband to ‘save her own skin’ if they run out of money.

How the pair will manage pay the bills is going to become an increasing ‘source of tension’ now both have been cancelled and cut adrift by the King, they claimed. 

‘Fergie will say anything to save her own skin – but her fate is closely tied to that of her ex-husband’, the Daily Mail’s source said.

‘Her career as a children’s author looks to be going down the pan – how can someone who stayed friends with and was bankrolled by a paedophile be taken seriously as a voice for children? Other commercial opportunities may be lost because of the scandal.’

And for Lownie, the scandals surrounding Andrew and Fergie’s relationship with Epstein are merely the tip of the iceberg for their sensationalist downfall as former working Royals.

Making clear his belief that more damning revelations are bound to unravel, he said: ‘This is only the beginning for the York family’.