The poolside shenanigans were even recreated on The Crown (Picture: Alpha)

The American businessman photographed sucking the toes of Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson says the moment was ‘beautiful’.

Speaking on ITV’s Lorraine this morning, John Bryan said the photos were taken at a very ‘discreet’ location at Fergie’s St Tropez villa in the south of France in 1992.

Her financial advisor at the time, the photos of him with his lips around the Duchess of York’s toes rocked the royals so much even The Crown recreated it.

Fergie’s ex told Lorraine Kelley the toe-sucking took place as part of a ‘fun child’s game’ with her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie.

He said: ‘We were playing games and one of the games wound up being like, Cinderalla, Cinderalla with the shoes and the toes and everything else that took place was just a fun child’s game.’

Recalling the moment he found out about the photos, he told Kelley: ‘I got a phone call, I got back home, 20 minutes after I arrive at the house I got a phone call from the editor of The Sun – I won’t use his name.’

John Bryan said he was playing ‘Cinderalla’ with Fergie and the kids (Picture: ITV)

‘He said, “well there’s photos and The Sun has lost the bidding of 12 million dollars”, and I thought to myself, “what in the world could be 12 million dollars worth of photos?”‘

In the end, when Bryan’s secretary brought the pictures to him, he thought it was nothing to worry about.

‘Wow, they’re beautiful,’ he recalled saying.

Decades on, and Bryan said he doesn’t regret kissing the arch and sucking on the toes of Fergie.

‘I don’t think I have any regrets except I wish I had been a little more experienced in media at the time,’ he said.

‘I would have loved to have a little more guidance in that but I think the system in the royal family is not very unified.’

Fergie and Bryan were together while she was separated from Prince Andrew (Picture: Malcolm Clarke)

Fergie started seeing Bryan after she separated from Prince Andrew in early 1992.

The Duke of York has been accused of raping a teenager in 2001 – allegations he has long denied but led to his military titles and royal patronages being stripped.

In 2019, he appeared in front of a BBC camera to discuss his associations with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein

He once again dismissed accusations by Virginia Roberts Giuffre that he had sex with her when she was 17 and had been offered to him by Epstein.

The interview, Bryan said, was a ‘catastrophe’.

‘We [Andrew, Sarah and himself] were together to try and really come up with a strategy for how to recover from such a terrible interview,’ he told Kelley.

‘It was very difficult for him and he was feeling very unfairly treated. I did a lot of due diligence and a lot of studying of what happened, and I came to the conclusion that I felt that Andrew had been unfairly treated as well in this process.”

‘My whole opinion was that these victims come first,’ he added, ‘they come first now and they came first then, and what they went through was just unbelievable.

‘The whole process is just one abuse after another for them.’

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He said they were playing ‘Cinderella’ when the toe-sucking took place.