Prince Harry Writes of Physical Attack by His Brother, According to Report

Prince Harry has accused his brother, Prince William, of throwing him to the ground during a furious argument over Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle. according to a Thursday report in The Guardianwho said he had obtained a copy of the young prince’s memoirs almost a week before it was due to be published.

The physical assault, said to have taken place at Harry’s cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace in 2019, is one of a series of revelations in the prince’s book, titled “Spare”, due out on Tuesday.

The book has been awaited with trepidation by the royal family and with anticipation by millions of people captivated by the House of Windsor soap opera. In recent days, Harry has recounted ugly details of his breakup with William and other family members to pique interest.

“Willy, I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” Harry told his brother, handing him a glass of water, after William appeared at their cabin and criticized Meghan, an American-born actress, for being “difficult,” rude” and “abrasive”, according to the Guardian article.

“He left the water, called me by another name, and then came over to me,” Harry wrote, according to the report. “It all happened so fast. Very fast. He grabbed me by the neck, ripped my collar and threw me to the ground. I landed in the dog bowl, which snapped under my back, bits cutting me. I just stood there for a moment , stunned, then I stood up and told him to come out.

William urged Harry to hit him back, according to the account, but he refused. William then told Harry, “You don’t need to tell Meg about this.”

Harry replied, “You mean you attacked me?”

“I didn’t attack you, Harold,” William insisted.

Harry wrote that his first phone call after the altercation was to his therapist, the report added.

That King Charles III’s sons call each other Willy and Harold was a delicious morsel amid the seemingly lavish banquet of revelations in the book. The Guardian said the memoir goes into harrowing detail about the rift between the brothers, which deepened after Harry and Meghan stepped back from royal duties and moved to southern California.

The publisher, Penguin Random House, has tried to keep the book under wraps, embargoing the content and shipping it to bookstores only just before its scheduled release. But The Guardian said it had obtained a copy nearly a week before publication, effectively anticipating a release that includes two television interviews with Harry next Sunday, with ITV in Britain and CBS’s “60 Minutes” show in the United States. .

Martin Pengelly, the New York-based Guardian reporter who wrote the story, has a track record of breaking news on closely guarded books, including some on former President Donald J. Trump, often several days before they are published.

Mr. Pengelly did not provide an exhaustive description of the book in his article. But he reported that Harry recalled a tense meeting with William and Charles after Prince Philip’s funeral in 2021, during which his father pleaded: “Please, boys, don’t make my later years a misery.”

Representatives for King Charles and Prince William declined to comment on the allegations on Thursday, which came on the heels of several other allegations by Harry and Meghan made in a six-part Netflix documentary that aired last month.

Buckingham Palace did not comment on Harry’s claims in the documentary that he refused to defend Meghan from a spate of negative coverage by London tabloids, and in some cases even fed it leaks damaging to journalists. .

Despite his litany of grievances, Harry has insisted that he wants to reconcile with William and Charles. “I would like to get my father back; I would like my brother back,” he said in a clip from the interview with ITV. “They have shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile.”

On Tuesday, a person with ties to Buckingham Palace questioned whether Harry had made any peace proposals. The person requested anonymity to reveal private information about the family. The last time the brothers appeared together was after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September, when they, along with her wives, took a public walk before her funeral.

Any approach seems unlikely as a result of the accusations in “Spare”. The book’s title is a pun on the phrase “heir and replacement”, referring to Harry’s diminished status as the younger brother in a monarchy where succession is governed by primogeniture.

Early in the book, The Guardian reports, Harry recalled hearing a story about how, when his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, gave birth to him, a delighted Charles told her: “Wonderful! Now you have given me an heir and a spare: my work is done. the article does it does not clarify how the story was told to Harry, or by whom.

The public disintegration of Harry’s relationship with his family has played out in a series of highly promoted scenes. In March 2021, Harry and Meghan sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an interview in which Meghan, who is biracial, claimed that a member of the royal family had raised concerns about her unborn baby’s skin color. . The couple have never identified the relative; Winfrey said that she had not been the queen or the queen’s husband, Philip.

Meghan also told Mrs Winfrey that she had been so isolated and emotionally devastated inside the palace that she once considered committing suicide.

The Guardian did not say in its report whether Harry’s book repeated allegations about racism in the royal family. The couple did not allude to that in the Netflix documentary, with William saying in 2021: “We are not a racist family at all.”