Inside Prince Harry’s Hateful Relationship With The Media

To a casual observer, Prince Harry appears to have had an idyllic early childhood. By his own admission, his mother, Princess Diana, was affectionate and fun-loving and did her best to offer her sons as normal a childhood as possible. Unfortunately, neither she nor then-Prince Charles could hide the rapid deterioration of their marriage from their young sons. 

“We didn’t understand what was going on with her and Pa, certainly, but we intuited enough, we sensed the presence of the Other Woman, because we suffered the downstream effects,” Prince Harry recounted in his memoir “Spare.”

Among these downstream effects was the frenzied, salacious media coverage of Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, which no doubt stressed the already fraught royal marriage even further. Diana’s tragic death in 1997 brought another onslaught of media coverage and forced Harry and his brother unwillingly into the public spotlight. While they were high-ranking royals, they were also traumatized children struggling with their mother’s death — and forced to mourn on camera, a media imposition Harry still resents. “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television,” he said in a 2017 interview with Newsweek. “I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances.”