Pizza Express held investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's bizarre claim

An inquiry was conducted by Pizza Express after Andrew Mountbatten Windsor claimed he had been at one of its branches during his infamous Newsnight interview in 2019. The then prince sat down with Emily Maitlis and told her that he had been at a branch of the restaurant in Woking on the day he was alleged to have had sex with the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. Andrew has denied any wrongdoing. He said during the interview: "I'd taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking."

"This has all been worked out by my staff, who've looked at the diary and everything else," the late Queen Elizabeth II's second son added. "The duchess [Sarah Ferguson] was away, I think, United States somewhere. And we had a very simple rule: at that stage, the children had one or other of us for all, most of the, well, as often as we could manage.

"So if one of us was out, the other one was in. And then occasionally they would have both of us, and on this particular occasion, she was away, and I was at home."

Now the BBC has reported that in 2019, Pizza Express investigated the plausibility of Andrew's claim because its senior management team considered it a matter of public interest.

An internal inquiry included searching for contemporary records, which could not be found, and attempting to interview former staff members and local management.

But the manager who was in charge of the Woking branch in 2001 had since left the business, and was not spoken with, it is understood.

The chain ultimately concluded that it had found no evidence to suggest Andrew had visited the branch, nor anything to suggest he was not telling the truth.

During the Newsnight interview, Andrew also refuted a claim from Ms Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, that his sweat was "raining basically everywhere" while the pair danced at a nightclub.

Maitlis said: "She [Giuffre] was very specific about that night. She described dancing with you, and you profusely sweating."

Andrew said: “There’s a slight problem with the sweating. I have a peculiar medical condition, which is that I don’t sweat, or I didn’t sweat at the time.”

“I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at and it was almost impossible for me to sweat.

"And it’s only because I have done a number of things in the recent past that I am starting to be able to do that again.”