Former Prince Andrew has been arrested following the revelations of the Epstein files, and it’s now looking a lot like he also shared official government information with the convicted sex offender.
The Righteous Gemstones, a show about a redonkulously wealthy Midwest televangelist dynasty that preaches righteousness while doing the opposite, is our perfect foil. In Season 1, Episode 6, Jesse Gemstone (fan favourite) tries to personally manage a scandal that threatens the empire. He improvises, enlists his friends and siblings, ignores any sort of sound advice or counsel, and makes everything dramatically worse. As is a hallmark of his character, Jesse does all this while being entirely convinced that he’s got it all under control.
Here we go again.
Let’s just start with Andrew’s 2019 BBC Newsnight interview, this is a key Jesse moment. Sitting down with Emily Maitlis to “clear his name,” he offered the world his “proof”, and delivered infallible evidence such ‘I couldn’t sweat due to a medical condition caused by the Falklands War’, and remembering a specific ‘Pizza Express visit in Woking’ as an alibi. Sure…
The interview was watched by millions, and you didn’t need to be a PR pro to figure out that it made things catastrophically worse. Jesse would have been proud.
The deeper Gemstones parallel here is institutional. The Gemstone patriarch Eli (played to perfection by John Goodman) eventually strips Jesse of his church roles to protect the kingdom. King Charles did the same by cutting Andrew loose, removing his titles, and issuing a “the law must take its course” statement. It read like a corporate press release distancing the company from a rogue director (I may have written a few of these myself).
The Gemstones works as satire because it understands that powerful institutions don’t protect people. They protect themselves! And when they’ve finally run out of ways to protect you as part of the institution, they throw you to the wolves and start writing a new narrative where you never really mattered to begin with.
PR ProTip
When a scandal breaks, the instinct to personally manage it, to explain, to clarify, to sit down with a journalist and just tell your side… is almost always the wrong move. A scandal requires crisis comms skills, but takes a very different approach to that of a traditional crisis such as an oil spill or helicopter crash.
As a special crisis subgenre, what a scandal absolutely does not need is your voice – fronting up carries outrageous risk. Scandals need distance, lawyers, and silence. The more you talk, the more headlines you are writing. Andrew didn’t need a Newsnight interview. He needed Eli Gemstone, a patriarch who understood that sometimes the best thing you can do for the family is to stop the worst member of it.
