A newly released book about Prince Andrew has been revised to remove a controversial claim that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald Trump to his wife, First Lady Melania Trump. The first 60,000 copies of Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, released on August 14, contained the allegation. However, future print editions, as well as the e-book and audiobook versions, will not include the claim.
The decision followed a series of high-profile denials and legal warnings. During an August 5 interview with Andrew Callaghan on YouTube, Hunter Biden repeated biographer Michael Wolff’s claim that Epstein had introduced the Trumps. Lownie’s book included a similar allegation, which has now been removed.
A spokesperson for HarperCollins UK told The Telegraph that the passages were cut after discussions between the publisher and Lownie, 64. Although HarperCollins publishes the book in the U.K., it is self-published in the United States.
The move came after Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, sent a letter to Biden on August 6 demanding a full retraction of his interview comments. The first lady, 55, and Brito called the statements “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory.”
“Indeed, the video has since been re-published by various media outlets, journalists, and political commentators with millions of social media followers that have disseminated the false and defamatory statements therein to tens of millions of people worldwide,” Brito wrote.
The letter warned that if Biden did not comply by August 7, Melania would sue him for $1 billion to recover “the overwhelming financial and reputational harm that you have caused her to suffer.” The demands included both a retraction of the video and a public apology.
Shortly afterward, Donald Trump addressed the issue in an August 12 interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, saying he supported his wife’s decision to act. “I told her, ‘Let’s go ahead and do it,’” Trump said. “I let her use my lawyers.” “Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,” Trump added.
“It was another person, actually… but it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein.” Despite the denials, Biden doubled down days later on August 14, again citing Wolff during another appearance on Callaghan’s show. Wolff himself had been cited in a July Daily Beast article making similar claims before the story was deleted under legal threat.
Political analyst James Carville also issued an apology to Melania after making comparable remarks on his August 7 podcast. The controversy comes as renewed calls mount for the Trump administration to release files related to Epstein. Donald Trump acknowledged he was once friends with Epstein but said their relationship ended in the mid-2000s, years before Epstein’s death in 2019.