A provocative art intervention at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday brought renewed international attention to the legal troubles of Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor, the former Duke of York, after a well-known activist group momentarily displayed a framed image of his post-arrest departure from police custody inside the institution.
The episode, which lasted only minutes before museum staff removed the image, was staged by British campaigners seeking to underscore ongoing controversy surrounding the senior royal’s recent detention.
Members of the UK-based anti-billionaire collective “Everyone Hates Elon” affixed the now-familiar photograph — showing Mountbatten-Windsor slumped in the back of a car after leaving a Norfolk police station — to a wall in the museum’s gallery space on Sunday, beneath a printed caption reading “He’s Sweating Now – 2026”.
The phrase was intended as a pointed reference to a 2019 interview in which the ex-prince claimed he could not sweat and therefore accuser Virginia Giuffre was lying about seeing him perspire at a nightclub, a comment widely criticised at the time.
Speaking about the action, the group said it wanted to show “how the world will remember” Mountbatten-Windsor, adding that their aim was to highlight demands for accountability over allegations tied to his connection with convicted financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“They say ‘hang it in the Louvre’. So we did,” the activists said in an Instagram video shared during the stunt.
Museum personnel took down the display roughly 15 minutes later, but not before visitors photographed and filmed the installation.
Mountbatten-Windsor had been detained on suspicion of misconduct in public office following the release of millions of pages of US files linked to Epstein, with police questioning him for around 11 hours before releasing him under investigation. The image was widely distributed by international news outlets and became the first arrest of a senior British royal in more than three and a half centuries.
Mountbatten-Windsor, who is eighth in line to the British throne, continues to deny any wrongdoing. British authorities have remained tight-lipped about the specifics of the ongoing investigation, although it centres on alleged improper sharing of official documents during his tenure as the UK’s trade envoy.
