Shitty British rag the Telegraph reports that future editions of a new book “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York” by historian Andrew Lownie have been edited to remove a passage claiming that dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein introduced future Third Lady Melania Knavs to Epstein’s best bud Donald Trump. The passage appears in a chapter about Jeff’s other pal Prince Andrew, the rapey black sheep of the family, in a book for which 60,000 physical print copies have already been sold and can’t exactly be recalled like a 2022 Kia Sorrento with potentially faulty brake calipers.

“We can confirm that several passages from Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie have been removed in consultation with the author. Entitled is published in the UK by HarperCollins. In the US, the book is self-published by Mr Lownie,” said a spokesperson for HaperCollins and lol this is too goddamned good given that none other than Rupert Murdoch, who owns the publishing house, is already on Donald’s vexatious litigation shitlist for the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on other mid-2000s Trump-Epstein friendship-related matters.

Now while the edit is obviously to avoid the same threats that have led to retractions from the Daily Beast, James Carville, and a non-retraction from Hunter Biden on the same matter, it’s not clear where Lownie himself stands on the self-published US editions of his tome. But unlike Hunter, Carville, and the Beast, the assertion seems to be completely independent of the one by not-terribly reliable narrator Michael Wolff. The Telegraph writes that Lownie’s book quotes “allegations said to have been made by Epstein to an unidentified author in 2007” somewhere around where it describes Prince Andrew as “easy prey for a rattlesnake like Epstein” and that the dead sex trafficker “played Andrew. The prince was a useful idiot who gave him respectability, access to political leaders and business opportunities. He found him easy to exploit.” Sounds like someone else we know, right?