Prince Harry detailed a moment where he was left heartbroken and betrayed
Prince Harry admitted he felt heartbroken during a shocking moment when his brother, Prince William, finally took his side.
The Duke of Sussex detailed an incident that left him reeling and struggling to cope as he turned to his brother for support. Harry recounted how a seven-page newspaper article accusing him of substance abuse left him devastated.
In his memoir Spare, Harry described the moment from January 2002 when he made front-page news under the headline Harry’s Drugs Shame. He branded the article as “lies,” explaining how the story not only portrayed him as a habitual drug user but also claimed he had recently been to rehab. Harry emphasized, “Rehab!”
Harry also revealed that the editor had obtained photos of him and his friend Marko visiting a suburban rehab center months earlier. He explained that the visit was “a typical part of my princely charitable work,” but the journalist had repurposed the photos to support her libellous fiction.
The dismayed Prince said that he had then “gazed at the photos and read the story in shock.” He explained: “I felt sickened, horrified, I imagined everyone, all my countrymen and countrywomen, reading these things, believing them.”
Harry also expressed that it made him internally “hear people all across the Commonwealth gossiping about me.”
He then went on to express that his father, Charles, and stepmother, Camilla, may have been a part of the story leaving him “heartbroken at the idea that this had been partly the work of my own family, my own father and future stepmother.”
Harry mused how they had “abetted this nonsense. For what? To make their own lives a bit easier?” He then detailed how he “phoned Willy, I couldn’t speak. He couldn’t either. He was sympathetic, and more.”
Harry elaborated on the conversation further as he added: “At moments he was even angrier about the whole thing than I was, because he was privy to more details about the spin doctor and the backroom dealings that had led to this public sacrifice of the Spare.”
However, Harry admitted that William also played down his distress as he told him nothing could change what had happened. He continued: “And yet, in the same breath, he assured me that there was nothing to be done. This was Pa. This was Camilla. This was royal life.”
The brothers have since become embroiled in a bitter feud and are thought to have not spoken for months, maybe even years.
