Seven charities have dropped the Duchess of York as a patron or ambassador after an email from 2011 revealed that she called sex offender Jeffrey Epstein her 'supreme friend' and seemed to apologise for her public criticism of him.
Julia's House, a children's hospice, was the first to remove Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew's ex-wife, saying it was 'inappropriate' for her to continue in the role.
The Teenage Cancer Trust, Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Children's Literacy Charity, National Foundation for Retired Service Animals and Prevent Breast Cancer also announced they had dropped the duchess as patron.
The British Heart Foundation stated she would no longer be its ambassador.
A spokesperson for the duchess said she was not commenting on the charities' decisions to end their links with her.
It comes after the Mail on Sunday and Sun newspapers published a 2011 email from the duchess to Epstein, which appears to have been sent after she had publicly claimed to have broken off contact with him.
In the email, she appeared to privately apologise for her public rejection of Epstein, saying: You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.
That seemed to contradict her public denunciation of Epstein in an interview from a few weeks earlier, in which she had said her involvement with him, including borrowing money, had been a gigantic error of judgement and that: What he did was wrong and for which he was rightly jailed.
The duchess had said she would have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again, only for the later email to say she humbly apologised to him and know you feel hellaciously let down by me.
A spokesperson for the duchess said her subsequent email to Epstein, describing him as a friend, was written to counter a threat from him to sue her for defamation - and that she still really regretted any association with him.
That included the Teenage Cancer Trust, where she had been patron for 35 years.
Supportive messages from Peter Mandelson to Epstein saw him sacked as Britain's ambassador to the US earlier this month.
The response to the emergence of the email - sent several years after Epstein's jailing for sex offences in 2008 - was for a series of charities to cut their links with the duchess.
The avalanche of charities cutting ties will have been deeply embarrassing for the duchess, when much of her remaining public profile has been about such philanthropy and particularly causes involving children.
The charities deemed her no longer 'appropriate' to be their representative, suggesting how badly her brand has been damaged by her connections with Epstein.
Those links to Epstein are like a tanker slowly leaking out toxic pollution and tarnishing those it touches.
And there will be close attention paid to anything more about Prince Andrew's links to Epstein that might emerge from any new caches of documents being released in the US.
