After Carole Radziwill’s Husband Died, Ghislaine Maxwell Insisted on Arranging a Dinner for Her. The Guest Was Then-Prince Andrew
· Thought Catalog
Updated 9 minutes ago, October 14, 2026
More than two decades after the fact, Carole Radziwill is telling the story of how she ended up at dinner with Prince Andrew — an evening she says Ghislaine Maxwell engineered while Radziwill was grieving her late husband. The way she tells it, the whole thing moved fast, and Andrew was on the phone within half an hour.
Radziwill says the prince called her within about 30 minutes of her agreeing to a dinner Maxwell had pushed her to accept. She was alone in London during the holidays, months after her husband, Anthony Radziwill, died in August 1999.
The journalist, 63, recalled the encounter on the October 13 episode of Real Housewives of New York City. While vacationing on Moskito Island, she told her castmates her name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Asked about Maxwell, she said they were “friendly” but that she’d “never met” Epstein.
A mutual friend had told Maxwell that Radziwill was in London after losing her husband. Maxwell then called to offer condolences and arrange for friends to take her to dinner. Radziwill initially declined, but Maxwell kept pressing until she agreed. Soon afterward, Andrew called her Nokia phone.
Asked by castmate Daisy Toye whether anything romantic happened, Radziwill said: “We went to dinner, and that was it.” She described the evening as “kind of unmemorable.”
She and Maxwell shared a few mutual friends and eventually lost touch. Looking back, Radziwill believed her married name was what interested Maxwell in the first place.
“I knew, probably all along, that she would not ever be interested in Carol DiFalco,” she said, referring to her maiden name. “But she was very interested in Carole Radziwill. She was, like, a social climber, so if you had money, access to money, power, or, say, a very famous last name, she made it her business to know you.”
Carole and Anthony were married from 1994 until his death. His parents were Polish Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł and Caroline Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for child sex trafficking connected to Epstein. Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, lost his royal titles in October 2025. He’s repeatedly denied wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
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