Sarah Ferguson’s wealthy former lover has died at 88, leaving behind fresh questions about what he may have known about the royal family’s tangled history with Jeffrey Epstein.
Paddy McNally, a multimillionaire businessman who dated Ferguson years before she married Prince Andrew, reportedly died only months after the former Duchess of York stayed at his lavish ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland.
McNally was never publicly accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and there is no evidence he was directly involved in the disgraced financier’s crimes.
But his long relationship with Ferguson has fueled speculation over whether he may have been privy to private details about the York family and their connections to Epstein.
Private investigator Ed Opperman told RadarOnline that McNally’s death raises another unanswered question surrounding people who moved in overlapping social circles with Epstein.
“There were a lot of people entrapped and entangled through Epstein’s web, and many of those people are gone now — dead,” Opperman said.
McNally’s death comes as scrutiny of Epstein’s contacts continues following the release of millions of pages of investigative material by the Justice Department.
Ferguson, 66, has faced renewed attention over her own past contact with Epstein.
Emails made public in connection with the case reportedly showed that she continued communicating with Epstein after his 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
Ferguson has previously said some of her flattering messages to Epstein were sent because she feared he could damage her family’s reputation.
Her former husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has faced far greater fallout over his friendship with Epstein.
Andrew was stripped of royal titles and duties following years of controversy surrounding the relationship. He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing connected to Epstein.
Ferguson and Andrew continued living together at Royal Lodge for years despite divorcing in 1996, but their royal living arrangements later came under intense pressure.
McNally, meanwhile, had known Ferguson long before her royal marriage.
The two reportedly began a three-year romance when Ferguson was 23 and working as a nanny for McNally’s children. She later married Andrew in 1986.
Reports have also suggested Ferguson could potentially benefit from McNally’s enormous estate, which has been valued at roughly $800 million, although any inheritance has not been publicly confirmed.
McNally owned an extravagant chalet in the Swiss Alps reportedly worth around $19 million, where Ferguson is said to have stayed after leaving Royal Lodge.
His death follows that of several other people who had documented connections to Epstein, including French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found dead in a Paris jail cell in 2022 while awaiting trial on sexual assault charges.
However, claims describing these deaths as part of an “Epstein body count” remain speculation, and authorities have not established that the deaths were connected.
Still, McNally’s decades-long access to Ferguson is likely to keep one question alive.
How much did he know about the private world surrounding the Yorks — and did he take those secrets with him to the grave?
