Royal.uk deleted Prince Harry’s statement protecting then-Meghan Markle

In the days after Halloween 2016, the British media revealed that Prince Harry was dating an American actress named Meghan Markle. Within a matter of days, every British outlet was doing a deep dive on Meghan’s romantic, professional, financial and personal history. It was never straight reporting either – outlets like the Sun, the Mail and the Mirror were giddy with racism and sexism as they created blaring headlines about how Meghan was “straight out of Compton” and her various love scenes were on p0rn sites. Prince Harry was furious and he released a statement bitching out the media and trying to, in some way, shield Meghan. Harry’s father and brother were furious about the statement at the time and so much of that weeks-long moment set the tone for everything that came after. Well, according to Newsweek, royal.uk recently deleted Harry’s statement from their online archives.

Prince Harry’s statement admonishing the British media for the “racial undertones of comment pieces” about Meghan Markle has been taken down from the royal family’s official website, Newsweek can reveal.

Harry instructed then Kensington Palace communications secretary Jason Knauf to issue a public broadside against the press in November 2016, just days after the Duke of Sussex’s relationship with Meghan became public knowledge.

For more than seven years, that lengthy and strongly worded statement was recorded for posterity on the royal.uk website, where the monarchy posts press releases, profiles, and official announcements.

Now, though, the link has stopped working, and the internet archive site Wayback Machine last successfully recorded a functioning version of it on December 3, 2023. A further attempt to archive the page on December 10 was unsuccessful, suggesting it was deleted some time in between.

It was a major moment in Harry’s life, as it was the first definitive indication of his now well-established desire to fight the press over its coverage of both himself and Meghan. And in his book Spare, Harry said it left King Charles III and Prince William “furious,” because it made them look bad for not defending their own wives in the same way.

The now-deleted statement came days after an article in The Mail on Sunday proclaiming: “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed—so will he be dropping by for tea?”

[From Newsweek]

I’m going to suggest something especially wild: maybe it’s not important or significant that the royal webmasters deleted the statement? Those people have shown themselves to be really incompetent, in general, and they’ve spent much of the past two years updating royal.uk in various ways which make little to no sense. This statement was deleted, much of Harry and Meghan’s bios were deleted, and there are still parts of the site which still reference QEII as still living. I have no doubt that many royal stories can be attributed to malice, but let’s not forget that incompetence plays a big part too, I’m just saying. Now, they can delete the statement and try to pretend like it never existed, but it really doesn’t work that way at this point. Harry has created his own historical record repeatedly, from Spare to his many lawsuits to the records everyone has kept about the abuse directed at Harry and Meghan.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.