Sarah Ferguson has claimed she was trying to protect Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie when she sent an email apologising to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The Duchess of York has been dropped as patron from seven charities, including the Teenage Cancer Trust and British Heart Foundation, after a fawning email from 2011 to her 'supreme friend' was leaked to the Mail on Sunday.
As pressure mounts on the duchess, she was forced to come out and claim she was being threatened and was trying to appease him out of fear over what he might do to her family.
Her spokesman James Henderson said yesterday that the late sex offender threatened to destroy the York's family in a 'chilling' phone call after she gave an interview publicly disowning him.
Epstein was apparently raging when she called him a paedophile in public and cited accepting £15,000 from him to settle her debts as a 'terrible, terrible error of judgment'.
