Charlotte Griffiths article is very long and detailed. It’s in the paid Mail Plus section and I don’t know how to archive. This is the final few paragraphs.
”Under cross-examination, Harry seemed to deal with all these awkward facts by suggesting I was some sort of imposter.
So it was that earlier this year I was forced to endure a torrid session in the witness box with Harry’s dreadful barrister David Sherborne claiming I was some sort of fantasist who had been ‘deliberately overplaying’ my friendship with Harry.
This, he repeatedly implied, was to conceal the fact that I had been using illegal practices to obtain stories. Furthermore, he said, I had completely ‘invented’ the anecdote in my witness statement about Prince William and his wife’s morning sickness.
If the latter was true, it would follow that I was guilty of perjury, for which the maximum sentence is seven years imprisonment. To be falsely accused of such a serious crime, in a very public arena, was deeply upsetting and I remain appalled to this day that the prince chose to participate in this grotesque charade.
In fact, I neither embellished nor downplayed what had happened. My job was simply to set out the facts, as required by both his lawyers and mine.
What is even more galling, given Sherborne’s line of attack, is that in the months leading up to my court appearance, Harry’s circle had been very ‘leaky’ indeed.
I can now reveal that, during the summer of 2025, a close adviser to Harry and Meghan had contacted me out of the blue and invited me to lunch at the Ivy restaurant in London.
As a result of information given to me at that lunch meeting, I placed a series of stories in The Mail on Sunday that portrayed the couple in a positive light. This included a front-page article, which ran in July, suggesting that Harry and Meghan were attempting to rebuild their relationship with King Charles. It revolved around the fact that Liam Maguire and Meredith Maines, Harry and Meghan’s US PR chiefs, were to hold clear-the-air talks with the monarch’s aide Tobyn Andreae in London.
Secret meeting between Head of Comms for the King, Tobyn Andreae and Meridith Maines, Head of Comms for The Sussexes, 2025
I was duly tipped off about the meeting, which was held at the Royal Over-Seas League near Clarence House. The attendees settled themselves on a balcony plainly visible from the public park below. The Mail on Sunday arranged for a photographer to capture the cosy but very embarrassing scene.
In a development which speaks volumes for their integrity, ‘sources close to the Sussexes’ then briefed the Daily Telegraph that they were ‘very frustrated’ that the pictures of the Royal Over-Seas League gathering had ended up in The Mail on Sunday – suggesting, quite falsely, that the Palace was responsible for a grotesque betrayal of trust.
Now, just six months later, the prince was impugning my integrity, while swearing that his people never leaked and that stories that ended up in my newspaper must have been obtained illegally.
Prince Harry’s efforts to discredit me had another unintended consequence: My enforced sharing of those ten Facebook messages we’d exchanged over that seven-week period after the shooting weekend in 2011 when we'd first met.
In court, the prince had said under oath that he’d met me just once. He added that he’d then cut me off when he’d learned of what I did for a living.
Harry’s Facebook messages, sent from an account he’d maintained under the username ‘Spike Wells’, indicated otherwise.
We’d actually corresponded from December 4 until January 22, 2012. And it was me, rather than Harry, who brought our Facebook conversation to an end: I’d failed to respond to a message in which he suggested he’d be coming to London the next month:
“I’ve been seriously busy since I last saw u but plan on getting back in the mix for Feb! U best be around.”
Or, to use social media parlance describing someone who fails to respond to a message, it was me who had ‘ghosted’ the prince.
But all these revelations came at a cost: Publication of the messages turned me into a global internet news story.
Today, I am a happily married 42-year-old mother of three with a wonderful husband. My years of partying until dawn are long gone and I have no particular desire to relive them.
But suddenly those messages, in which I had spoken about the ‘fun weekend of naughtiness’ and Harry had recalled our ‘movie snuggles’, were interpreted as evidence of some sort of romantic liaison.
In fact, we’d merely shared a blanket during a film screening in a sitting room with other people present on a Sunday afternoon. The ‘naughtiness’ referred to excessive alcohol consumption.
A reference by Harry to a ‘Cinderella’s shoe’ in a separate message inspired further misleading headlines suggesting we had been intimate. In fact, the shoe was one of those brogues which had disappeared after I borrowed them in order to head outside for a cigarette. The truth was, in other words, rather less exciting than headlines suggested.
As a journalist, I should stress that I have absolutely no problem with being written about. People who hold others to account for a living shouldn’t complain when they are scrutinised.
That said, I was saddened, if not entirely surprised, that in the sewers of social media, where women are routinely abused and objectified, I was bombarded with tens of thousands of messages, dubbing me a ‘harlot’ and a ‘slut’ and worse. At one point Lady Colin Campbell, the sensationalist royal commentator, saw fit to call me a ‘drunkard’. The hatred and bile was sickening.
And the prince? The truth is, I rather liked what I briefly knew of the old Harry. He could be mischievous, irreverent and occasionally exasperating, but he was also funny company.
The man he has become is someone I barely recognise and someone for whom I have lost all respect.
After all, it was Harry’s PR machine which during the court case attempted to paint him as the victim of a predatory siren.
At one point, Maguire provided hostile reporters with a deeply misogynistic briefing that I deliberately went to the house party to seduce Prince Harry in a ‘honeytrap’ operation.
Such claims were all nonsense (what sort of ‘honeytrap’ stays silent for 15 years?) As are suggestions that Harry and I were ever intimately involved.
In truth, I would have taken details of our relationship to my grave, had I not been dragged to court to be casually smeared by a royal whose arrogance and sense of entitlement has now rotted whatever moral compass he once possessed.
This is the same Harry who stands on stages pontificating about the evils of social media while fronting gooey campaigns about online bullying. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Before he dragged me into court, I’d almost forgotten about our brief friendship. Now I rather wish I could erase it altogether.”