"Meghan is not overbearing," in the fiercest fight between William and Harry
June 2021: Harry and Meghan live in Montecito, California. They just welcomed their second daughter, named Lilibet Diana. The prince's last visit to Great Britain was for the funeral of his grandfather Philip. Touch and run, very few words exchanged with his brother William. The two would feel very little, now on different roads. Harry, he told Oprah, considers his brother "trapped" in a role, while he preferred to run away, seek happiness elsewhere.
William, as can be imagined, did not take the latest attacks well. Separate lives now.
But how did it get to this point? On May 18, 2018, the two brothers, one witness to the other, walked together and accomplices in Windsor. A new book traces the misunderstandings back to autumn 2018. According to Robert Lacey, author of Battle of the Brothers, it all started there, or at least that's where the gap between the two got really deep. In between, easy to imagine, Meghan Markle.
William allegedly alienated his family from Prince Harry's after a furious phone conversation, which ended with Harry knocking his brother down. The rift was allegedly triggered by an official email claiming that Meghan was "bullying the palace staff," sent by Jason Knauf, Cambridge and Sussex communications secretary, in October 2018. At the time. the court staff had already coined the hashtag #freeHarry - but then not so much.
William would have been informed of this email by Simon Case, his private secretary, recipient of the communication. At that point, the book claims, he would immediately pick up the phone to call his brother, but the conversation would eventually end with Harry slamming his phone.
The book states that William suspected that Meghan was "hostile to the royal system" and that perhaps she had planned to leave the monarchy from the start to return to America. Also according to the palace testimonies, collected by the author, "Meghan would have played the victim, but in reality she was the bully". It was she who treated the staff members badly, often yelling at her. Meghan and Harry have always denied allegations of bullying.
Meanwhile, William felt more and more hurt and betrayed by his brother's behavior. So much so that he would have confided to a friend that his wife Kate (Middleton) "had been suspicious of Meghan from the beginning". William felt that Meghan was "stealing her beloved brother of hers." Lacey also touched on the Sussex interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which Prince Harry claimed that the quarrel between the brothers began after their 2018 tour of Australia, when William saw how good and empathetic the Sussexes had been. , just like Lady Diana. According to this reconstruction, however, the brothers did not speak to each other since before Harry and Meghan left for Australia.
Accusations of bullying triggered the quarrel. Kensington Palace was usually known for keeping the same collaborators for a long time, but several staff members had resigned since Meghan's arrival. It is said that the assistants who left had formed an imaginary club: "the Sussex Survivors' Club". At that point, Knauf would have decided to write the email to William's personal secretary: "I am very worried that the Duchess has been able to get two PAs away from the family in the last year".
According to this email, Meghan's (alleged) way of treating the staff was defined as "totally unacceptable", and again she: "She seems willing to always have someone in her sights." Knauf would have collected several testimonies, such as that of an assistant to whom Meghan would have said: «It's not my job to pamper people». Another assistant would have said to a colleague "I can't stop shaking", in anticipation of a meeting with Meghan, while another would have accused her of "emotional cruelty and manipulation". Still another allegedly claimed to have suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after working for the Duchess.
The Sussexes would later brand all these charges as "defamatory". When William called, Harry would have reacted very badly, defending his wife with the sword. William, according to Lacey, at that point put the monarchy before his brother and stopped seeing it as his duty to always protect his younger brother. Harry, for his part, was furious that his brother could believe the allegations against his wife.
From there, the - later official - decision to separate their staff. The rest, we all know: the Megxit, the decision to move to America, the accusations fired on TV against the royal family. Harry on one side, William on the other. It's hard to say how it will end.
