Welcome to the free Sunday Newsletter, where we really have to talk about how, for months, nobody could find Sarah Ferguson, but this week, she has been found.
But first, I want to share this amazing Meghan in Australia edit that I first saw on Reddit (hat tip to Saint Meghan Markle.) It’s from the hospital visit.
I refer you to Exhibit A, my 2024 story in The Daily Beast of former staffers telling me she was a demon boss.
Anyway, we will get into that clip next week. So much to say, eh, ???
Back to Sarah.
She left Royal Lodge when her husband, Andrew, was evicted at the beginning of February, slipping away from the Windsor estate that had been her home for decades, and … vanished.
The rumor mill went into overdrive. She was in Australia. No, Argentina, where her late mother, Susan Barrantes, had lived. Actually, she was sofa-surfing on Priscilla Presley’s couch in Los Angeles. Maybe Dubai. Maybe Verbier, staying with her old flame, Paddy McNally. None of it was true.
Now she has been found, by U.K. tabloid The Sun, at the Mayrlife Medical Health Resort in Altaussee, a sleepy Austrian village of 1,800 people on the shores of a glassy Alpine lake, surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
(Those of a trusting disposition might be interested to watch ▶this video by which lays out why, despite the blurry focus, some suspect the photographs were staged.)
The resort is the kind of kooky-luxe place where Russian oligarchs block-book suites for their families and bodyguards, where Nicole Kidman and Rebel Wilson come to cleanse their guts and realign their chakras, and where a two-week “recuperative stay” will set you back tens of thousands.
The rack rate for Ferguson’s room is £2,000 ($2,700) per night, but The Royalist can’t be alone in suspecting that Fergie, queen of the freebie, ain’t paying retail.
The Sun reported this weekend that Sarah was residing in Room 101. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Room 101 is the torture chamber where prisoners are sent to confront their deepest fears.
For Fergie, the torture is of a more modern variety—the knowledge that no amount of goat-butter wraps, cryotherapy sessions, or “nasal reflex zone therapy” can make the Epstein problem go away.
The contours of this vanishing act highlight some of the key Sarah Ferguson messaging points: an addiction to luxury and a change of scenery, and a woman whose defining trait has always been a deep and corrosive insecurity, a conviction that something is wrong with her that can be fixed.
According to sources close to her cited by The Daily Mail and The Sun, Ferguson has barely left her two-bedroom chalet since checking in. She orders her meals via room service — bresaola ham with mozzarella is a favorite, along with chicken breast. She has not been seen on the resort’s walking trails, its private pier on the lake, or its clay tennis courts. A hairdresser visited on March 24.
Fergie is avoiding her disgraced ex-husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, but has kept in touch with their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
I have been told that she speaks frequently with Princess Beatrice by phone, and Beatrice has been “extremely supportive”, even as her mother’s situation grows more precarious by the week. Eugenie, too, has stayed in touch.
The question everyone will now ask, of course, is: who is paying?
The trail of unpaid bills that has followed Ferguson through adult life is one of the great recurring themes in her biographer Andrew Lownie’s work.
There was the infamous case of Johnny O’Sullivan, her long-serving personal assistant, who waited years for wages that ultimately materialized only after an intervention by Jeffrey Epstein. There were endless debts, questionable commercial ventures, and a famous cash-for-access sting.
The idea that she is financing an Austrian spa break out of her own pocket strains credulity.
Friends insist she has “no shortage of rich supporters” who have rallied around. The big rumor doing the rounds in literary circles, however, is that Ferguson has secured a substantial book deal, a tell-all, or at least a tell-some, memoir that would represent a monster payday.
If true, it would explain the cash. It would also terrify the palace.
Before Austria, she is understood to have spent some time in Ireland, where she has family, lying low.
Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, was a pillar of the British royal horse-and-hunting set, playing polo with Prince Philip and later managing Prince Charles’s polo team, but her mother, Susan Mary Wright—later Susan Barrantes—came from an older, more raffish line of Irish aristocrats.
Susan’s mother was a Wingfield, a sister of the 9th Viscount Powerscourt; the family seat, Powerscourt in Co. Wicklow, was one of the great Irish estates.
Susan married Ronald Ferguson as a debutante in the 1950s, but quickly found country-house life in England stifling. Lownie would claim in his book Entitled that Susan had an affair with Prince Philip. This allegation has never been substantiated, but reignited gossip about their long friendship.
In 1972, Susie “bolted,” running off to Argentina with polo player Héctor Barrantes and leaving her husband and young daughters behind.
Susie and Héctor built a life at El Pucará, a ranch in Tres Lomas, where Susan immersed herself in polo, horses, and a high-octane outdoor existence until Héctor’s death from cancer in 1990. Susie died in a car crash in 1998.
Friends who knew Susie describe a woman who adored risk, who loved hunting and the thrill of the chase.
That wild, indulgent streak seems to have passed to her younger daughter.
Ferguson has always sought out sanctuaries in times of crisis. After the “fake sheikh” cash-for-access sting in 2010, she decamped to a wellness retreat on Ko Samui, Thailand.
The Austrian Alps are simply the latest bolthole, and one she already knew well. She stayed at Mayrlife in 2023, after a melanoma diagnosis, and recorded a promotional video calling it “a safe place, a sanctuary” and “probably one of the only places in the world where I can just be Sarah.”
Ferguson has been badly damaged by material in the Epstein files, which revealed a relationship with the convicted sex offender that went well beyond casual acquaintance. In emails from 2010, two years after Epstein was jailed for procuring minors for prostitution, Ferguson called him “a legend” and told him she was “at your service.”
US Congressman Suhas Subramanyam has written to her demanding her cooperation with the congressional investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operations. Nine UK police forces and the National Crime Agency are examining the files. She has not responded to any of it.
The vanishing act, as a strategy, has now reached its limit.
The Epstein investigation is not going to blow over. Congress is not going to lose interest. The British police are not going to close their files.
Sooner or later, Ferguson is going to have to come out of Room 101 and face the music, and the questions that are piling up outside her door.
