Finding Freedom

by Omid Scobie

  Harry refused to accept this either. The press wasn’t Harry’s only source of confrontation about Meghan’s being biracial. When he first started seeing her, Harry, sensitive to even the slightest hint of prejudice, had fallouts within his own tight circle. When some questioned his new relationship, and whether she was suitable, he would wonder, “Is this about race? Is it snobbery?”

  An old friend of Harry’s spent an afternoon gossiping about Meghan, making disparaging remarks about her Hollywood background. Word got back to Harry, and the prince immediately cut him off.

  If he was willing to confront those close to him, when it came to the media, Harry was poised for outright war.

  The international media frenzy around Meghan, which attracted daily clicks and newspaper sales in the high millions, reopened old childhood wounds. “Because she’s been attacked so publicly, there must be a part of him that is reliving what happened to his mother at the hands of the tabloid press,” a former senior courtier said.

  The pain of the paparazzi’s involvement in their mother’s death hadn’t diminished over the years for either prince.

  “One of the hardest things to come to terms with is the fact that the people that chased her into the tunnel were the same people that were taking photographs of her while she was still dying in the back seat of the car,” Harry said in a documentary released shortly before the twentieth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. “She’d had a quite severe head injury, but she was very much still alive in the back seat. And those people that that caused the accident, instead of helping, were taking photographs of her dying in the back seat, and those photographs may have made their way back to news desks in this country.”

  Both Harry and his brother had a constant reminder of what their mother went through because of the daily intrusion in their own lives by the press. As a former senior courtier said, “They’re seeing it play out again and again.”

  Harry, the source said, would do anything to defend Meghan’s reputation and protect her privacy, but he was “frustrated by the limits to his ability.”

  While he hadn’t been able to do much to protect his previous girlfriends from the press, whom he credited with contributing to the ends of those relationships, Harry was determined that this relationship not meet the same fate.

  To figure out just what he should do, Harry reached out to the only person he knew who would understand the complexity of his situation—his brother.

  Meghan first met William at Kensington Palace in early November 2016. As she walked up the seven freshly jet-washed concrete steps to Apartment 1A with Harry, she wasn’t thinking about the future king of England but her boyfriend’s older brother, and one famously protective of his younger one, who had experienced more than his fair share of emotional wounds. Meghan thought that William would no doubt want to know everything about her—and her intentions. She was self-aware enough to understand that the brothers were wary of women who were more interested in their titles than their well-being. And she couldn’t have come from a more different world than that of William, his wife, and most of their friends. Because of all this, she had thought the entire meeting through, as she told a friend. “She prepared herself for a grilling,” a confidant said.

  But she needn’t have worried. As soon as William opened the black double doors to welcome Meghan into his home, he said, “I was looking forward to meeting the girl who has put that silly grin on my brother’s face.”

  On the console tables in the foyer, Meghan took in the framed photos of the brothers with their late mother, Diana, family moments with the Queen, and cute snaps of George and Charlotte. Although she had never met the people in the photos before, she had heard a lot about them from Harry. The three of them walked straight past the drawing room, with its neutral color palette accented by important antiques and artwork, and straight to the rear of the first floor and the heart of the Cambridge family home: the kitchen. No fuss, no servants, just the three of them and the tea they were about to drink.

  Meghan was disappointed she didn’t get to meet Kate, who was with the children at Anmer Hall, the couple’s Norfolk estate home near Sandringham. But having gotten along so well with Harry’s brother, she didn’t think much more about that. William made his feelings known to his brother when he shared how he was happy to see Harry smiling.

  Now seeing his brother in so much pain, William agreed that things had gone too far. There was no doubt in Harry’s mind that he needed to act, but how they should proceed remained a question.

  The press had no intent of letting up, since Meghan got a lot of clicks online and was a guaranteed boost to newspaper sales.

  On the front cover of the country’s highest selling tabloid, The Sun, a headline screamed “Harry’s Girl on Pornhub.” A shocking claim, it was simply based on the fact that a user had uploaded a love scene from Suits to the pornographic website alongside movie and TV clips of other Hollywood stars, including Nicole Kidman and Jessica Biel. “Meghan felt sick to her stomach when she saw that,” a friend said. “She wanted to cry. She wanted to shout . . . She was upset and angry.”

  Doria was under constant siege in her own home. When a tabloid published a set of unflattering photos showing her on her way to the laundromat, pushing the narrative of a struggling African American woman in a rough part of LA, Meghan remained silent publicly. But behind the scenes she was in tears. Within the confines of Nottingham Cottage, Harry tried to console her. Worried he might lose Meghan, he frantically wanted to protect her.

  On Monday, November 7, as he ventured out of his cottage, the thirty-nine-degree crisp chill in the air did nothing to dull Harry’s already heightened anger as he made the short walk to his mother’s old apartment in Kensington Palace, the current location of the household offices. He had been accused in the past of being impetuous, wearing his heart on his sleeve. But this was too much.

  He climbed the elaborate white wooden staircase—the walls adorned with old masters’ paintings and elaborate crown moldings—to his mother’s former home. At the top of the landing to the right was Diana’s old study, where she kept her famous desk in front of two large picture windows that allowed her to gaze out at the cherry blossoms where Harry’s Nottingham Cottage sits.

  Directly ahead was her sitting room, which overlooked a cobbled courtyard. An antique mahogany dining table from the Palace’s extensive Royal Collection archives sat in the room that backed up to a kitchen used by staff for cups of tea. Beyond those two rooms, which served as reception spaces for events, were the press offices at Kensington Palace that looked after William, Kate, and Harry.

  The princes first got their own office back in 2008. With growing profiles, both in their military careers and charitable endeavors, the Queen and Prince Charles agreed that it was time. Up until that point, the young men’s affairs were handled at St. James’s Palace by Charles’s trusted communications secretary Paddy Harverson, who for more than ten years had guided William and Harry.

  Miguel Head—the smart thirty-year-old Ministry of Defence press officer who had engineered the press strategy with General Richard Dannatt during Harry’s tour in Afghanistan—was plucked from the MOD to serve as the brothers’ first press secretary. The office also included former SAS major Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, their former principal private secretary who had agreed to remain available as a sounding board to the brothers, alongside office manager and personal assistant Helen Asprey, who ensured every detail in their lives ran smoothly. The Queen also appointed one of her most trusted diplomats, Sir David Manning, who had served Her Majesty’s Government as British ambassador to the United States, to join as an advisor and intervene when necessary as the young princes started to take increasingly more high-profile roles both at home and abroad.

  Several years later, William and Harry had made the decision to move their offices into the home they had shared with their mother. It was a difficult one that the brothers did not take lightly. The place evoked many memories, to be certa
in, but at the same time inspired them to carry on their mother’s charitable work.

  The princes’ office was a communal space Harry frequented often, popping by sometimes just to have a chat with Jason Knauf, his capable press head. On this early November day, however, the meeting was far less casual.

  Jason—who had navigated William and Kate’s media efforts for family privacy and been instrumental in crafting the royal trio’s highly successful Heads Together campaign in May 2016—had often given Harry good advice. And it didn’t hurt that he was also American, with an understanding of the press on both sides of the Atlantic. The Texas-born head of communications was approachable, liked by the royal press pack, and savvy to the ways of social media.

  Harry would also periodically seek out the guidance of Paddy Harverson on privacy issues. Harverson, who oversaw communications for the Prince of Wales from 2004 through 2013 (Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005), was widely credited with the growth of Charles and Camilla’s popularity. Although he founded Milltown Partners, a strategic communications and reputation management firm, after leaving Clarence House, Paddy remained close to both William and Harry and was well equipped to advise when the media had run amok.

  Sitting down in his mother’s old apartment, Harry said, “I’m not in my twenties anymore. I’m thirty-two, and this is a woman I could marry one day.”

  The prince wanted to directly address the racism and sexism directed toward Meghan in the press. As a general rule, however, Palace courtiers loathed aggressive, harshly worded statements to the press. They also rarely commented on the personal lives of family members, never engaged on security matters, and were cautious when issuing any type of quote.

  Typically, statements from Buckingham Palace or Clarence House were a few sentences in length—and for the more controversial subjects, the royal household would elect not to respond at all.

  While not the norm, the kind of aggressive stance Harry was suggesting did have a precedent.

  Just a year earlier, William and Kate had contended with outrageous tactics by paparazzi following Prince George. One photographer had gone so far as to hide in the trunk of a car as the boy played in a park. The threatening behavior raised alarm bells, and lawyers quickly got involved. William and Harry detected a worrying pattern with the press, who had backed off for a while after Diana’s death but were now reverting to their old mercenary ways. At William and Kate’s direction, Jason issued a harshly worded statement in August 2015 condemning the paparazzi targeting Prince George.

  “In recent months, there have been an increasing number of incidents of paparazzi harassment of Prince George,” the statement read. “And the tactics being used are increasingly dangerous.”

  The document, distributed to media outlets around the world, recounted the methods used to get images of George, including stalking the two-year-old heir, monitoring movements of other members of the royal family, and chasing cars.

  In some ways, Kensington Palace’s more modern, forceful strategy suited the shifting media landscape driven by a hunger for 24/7 digital content. But courtiers at both Clarence House and Buckingham Palace were not all in agreement that this more vocal approach was the most effective way to move forward.

  William and Kate were concerned only with the welfare of their children. And the same went for Harry’s concern for Meghan when he, along with his aides and brother, decided to issue an equally forthright statement.

  The only stumbling block was Prince Charles. On an important three-nation diplomatic tour in the Middle East, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall had just arrived in Bahrain to meet the country’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. It was a critical moment in history that had been in the works for months. A statement from Kensington Palace condemning the press and, in the same breath, confirming Harry’s new girlfriend would all but eliminate coverage of Prince Charles’s tour of the Gulf.

  The Palace decided to go ahead with the statement nonetheless, much of which was drafted by Harry himself. Charles learned of the statement just twenty minutes before it went out. Sure enough, as soon as Harry put out his declaration, the statement dominated the news cycle. The team at Clarence House, which had spent months putting together Prince Charles’s tour in the hopes that it would be covered significantly, was crushed. While disappointed that his son didn’t wait for him to come back, Charles also understood intimately that the situation with Meghan had reached a tipping point. Harry had felt the need to prioritize the woman he loved over duty to the greater royal family. The personal and professional were often in conflict for members of the monarchy. In this case, however, Charles recognized that Harry wanted to protect the loved ones in his life. His son had already lost the person he had once loved the most—his mother.

  Harry’s statement lambasted sections of the press for the “abuse and harassment” of the American actress, making particular note of the “racial undertones” of some coverage. “Prince Harry is worried about Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her,” the statement read. “It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms. Markle should be subjected to such a storm.”

  Meghan was scared of opening a Pandora’s box by trying to take on the press. “Shouldn’t we just ignore it?” she asked. But Harry had made up his mind.

  In the unprecedented release, Harry not only officially confirmed his relationship with Meghan but also made it clear that he was the one behind this bold protest, “in the hopes that those in the press who have been driving this story can pause and reflect before any further damage is done.”

  6

  Culture Shock

  On November 27, 2016, Prince William released his own statement in order to put rumors to rest: “The Duke of Cambridge absolutely understands the situation concerning privacy and supports the need for Prince Harry to support those closest to him.”

  Though the purpose of William’s follow-up statement was to make it clear that he supported his brother’s relationship with Meghan, two weeks later, the press reported on tensions between the princes over Harry’s decision to speak out. Behind the scenes, courtiers and some members of the royal family had questioned whether Harry’s statement was too strong. Staffers, who thought what Harry was doing was irrational and hotheaded, fed the news cycle on background. On the record, however, Kensington Palace quickly debunked any suggestion that the Duke of Cambridge wasn’t in full agreement with his brother’s actions. It would not have been a good look. And while he had in fact privately voiced concerns to aides about the speed at which Harry’s relationship was developing with a Hollywood actress he hadn’t known for long, William did worry about press intrusion and wanted his brother to feel supported on that issue.

  Meghan was hurt and stunned by the reactions in the press and online. In conversations with friends, she admitted that while thankful to be with someone as protective and understanding as Harry, she was “emotionally drained.”

  Making matters worse, Harry’s royal duties meant the couple were apart in the immediate aftermath of his statement defending Meghan. Days after its release, Harry took on a fourteen-day, seven-country tour of the Caribbean to celebrate the Queen’s ninetieth birthday. Youth empowerment, sports for social development, and conservation were the areas of focus during the prince’s itinerary, which included the Commonwealth Realms of Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and Barbados, as well as a visit to Guyana on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

  Even though it meant being apart from Meghan when she needed him most, it was a tour that established Harry as a force within the royal family. (Trips like this are planned six months to a year in advance, and there was no way he could have seen this coming.) From assisting in the release of baby turtles to the sea for the Nevis Turtle Group to handing out honors while sailing on RFA Wave Knight to St. Lucia (a job usually reserved for the Queen, Prince C
harles, and Prince William), he won over the people of each country he visited. The prince’s easy rapport with children made #HarryWithKids a trending hashtag on Twitter. Pictures of Harry meeting a wheelchair-bound seven-year-old named Tye while learning about the work of the Child Development and Guidance Centre in St. Lucia melted hearts around the world.

  He found that at most places he went, people wanted to talk about Meghan. When he visited Kingstown’s Botanic Gardens to see the national bird, the Vincey Parrot, trainers attempted to get the bird to say Meghan’s name for the prince—without success. On the first day of the tour, Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, teased Harry, “I believe we are expecting a new princess soon.

  “I want you to know that you are very welcome to come on your honeymoon here,” the politician pitched the prince. “We have been voted consistently as the best honeymoon destination in the Caribbean, and one of the best in the world, so there will be nowhere in the world as special to spend your honeymoon, when that day arrives.”

  Throughout the tour Harry and Meghan, who was in Toronto working and dodging paparazzi, spoke almost every day via FaceTime. No matter how hard things were for her, Meghan understood the importance of Harry’s mission, best exemplified in his visit to Guyana and Barbados to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s independence.

  It was in Barbados that he and the singer Rihanna took HIV tests in a clinic in the country’s capital, Bridgetown, on World AIDS Day.

  “I want to say to everyone who hasn’t been tested—get tested, regardless of who you are, your background, culture, or religion,” said Harry, who, like his mother before him, has long campaigned to end the stigma of HIV. In the 1980s, when many were afraid of those infected with the disease, Princess Diana made headlines for being the first member of the royal family to have direct contact with people suffering with AIDS.