Due to his rank and his family history, Prince Harry has paid the price for ill-intentioned photographers and magazines. His whole life has been punctuated by the crackling of flashes and tabloid headlines. If today seems to live happily far from his native England, surrounded by his wife and children, the Duke of Sussex has not always known this soothing calm. As a teenager, the son of Lady Diana and Prince Charles was pursued by paparazzi and private detectives, fond of scoops and embarrassing photos. Gavin Burrows is one of those who watched Prince Harry’s actions in the 2000s.
In the documentary The Princes and The Press broadcast on November 22 on the BBC, and which pissed off the royal family so much, this investigator apologized: “I was just part of a group of people who robbed him of his normal teenage years.”, he said facing the camera, as reported People. The private detective, who worked for the daily News of the World, even went further: he confessed to having stolen confidential information about Chelsea Davy, who was dating Prince Harry at the time, and to have followed the young couple for 6 years.
“There were a lot of voicemail hacks, her phones and communications were heavily guarded. Chelsy was bragging to her friends that she was going to see Prince Harry.”, said Gavin Burrows, who thought “sorry” of these abuses. “I was greedy, I took cocaine, and I lived in a kind of madness of grandeur”, he said. This relentlessness on Prince Harry’s sentimental life was such that the media saw him as the “new Diana” who, let’s remember, died in a car accident, trying to escape the paparazzi.
He was afraid it would escape him …
Prince Harry’s girlfriends have all seen their pasts and their private lives taken apart. A necessary step that few people would like to undergo. “When you are dating or considering marrying a member of the royal family, the scrutiny you endure is enormous. None of them wanted to endure this level of media scrutiny “, explains Roya Nikkhah of Sunday Times in the documentary. She adds : “By the time he was in their thirties, many of Prince Harry’s friends were getting married and starting families. He was worried that it would escape him as he might not be able to find someone who could handle the media pressure.”.
Fortunately, in 2016, through mutual friends, Prince Harry met American actress Meghan Markle. But the latter has also suffered greatly from the media pressure, to the point of having suicidal thoughts … Finally, after leaving the British monarchy in 2020, the parents of Archie and Lilibet (2 years and 5 months) seem to have finally found happiness in California.