Defending himself after years of public scrutiny in two bombshell interviews Sunday evening, Prince Harry detailed his decades of devastating grief over the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and deteriorating relationship with the British royal family.
The Duke of Sussex took part in the two interviews, one with ITV’s Tom Bradby in Britain, the other with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes in the United States, to promote his highly anticipated book, Spare, which hits stores on Tuesday. Both conversations covered similar ground, breaking down how Diana’s 1997 death traumatized the then-12-year-old prince in ways that would affect him for decades, what happened between him, his father King Charles III, his older brother Prince William, and his stepmother Camilla in the years after his mother’s passing, and Harry’s response to criticism for addressing family disputes in public.
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Looking at video footage of the two young princes greeting mourners outside Kensington Palace the day before Diana’s funeral and recalling how he felt at the time, Harry told Cooper: “I think it’s bizarre because I see William and me smiling. I remember the guilt that I felt.”
That guilt, he explained, stemmed from not being able to cry while processing the shock of his mother’s sudden death and seeing others express such grief in public. It made the young prince worry if he was feeling less emotion than people who never knew her personally. Harry eventually said he cried for the first time after seeing his mother’s coffin go into the ground.
The prince said that he and William spent years believing their mother was still alive and in hiding and that he would “often” wake up hoping that today would be the day his mother would reappear. That hope, Harry said, manifested into anger in his young adulthood, with the prince turning to drugs and alcohol.
“I had a lot of anger inside of me that, luckily, I never expressed to anybody,” Harry explained. “But I resorted to drinking heavily. Because I wanted to numb the feeling, or I wanted to distract myself from whatever I was thinking. And I would, you know, resort to drugs as well.”
“There was this weight on my chest that I felt for so many years that I was never able to cry,” he continued. “So I was constantly trying to find a way to cry.”
It wasn’t until he served in combat with the British Army in Afghanistan that he found a sense of normalcy, the prince remarked, telling Cooper: “My military career saved me in many regards.”
“It felt like I was turning pain into a purpose,” he explained. “I didn’t have the awareness at the time that I was living my life in adrenaline, and that was the case from age 12, from the moment that I was told that my mom had died.”
Harry also went into detail about his relationship with Charles, Camilla, the queen consort, and William, which he alleges broke down over strains caused by his marriage to Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex. The two resigned as senior members of the royal family and left Britain in January 2020.
“At the moment, I don’t recognize them, as they don’t recognize me,” Harry said of his immediate family members to Bradby.
Despite making multiple scandalous allegations about each of them in the book and interviews, Harry told Cooper that his public approach to communicating with his family was not intended to cause harm.
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“None of anything that I’ve written, anything I’ve included is ever intended to hurt my family,” he explained. “But it does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.”
“And every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife. You know, the family motto is ‘never complain, never explain.’ But it’s just a motto. And it doesn’t really hold.”
