Prince Harry Is Fighting U.S. Paparazzi Battles Royals Already Won in U.K.

Prince Harry is fighting a battle with the U.S. paparazzi that the British royals won in Britain "decades ago," as details emerged on Wednesday of a car chase that took place in New York between photographers and Harry, Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland.

Newsweek's chief royal correspondent Jack Royston discussed the incident with British broadcaster Kay Burley on Thursday, highlighting the issues the prince is trying to tackle with the U.S. media, as his spokesperson condemned news outlets running photos from the NYC chase.

Harry and Meghan were followed by photographers in cars on Tuesday night as they left the Ziegfeld Theatre in Midtown Manhattan, having attended an awards gala. A statement released by their team claimed that the ensuing chase had been "near-catastrophic" and lasted over two hours.

An NYPD statement regarding the incident read: "On Wednesday [sic] evening, May 16, the NYPD assisted the private security team protecting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. There were numerous photographers that made their transport challenging. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived at their destination and there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries, or arrests in regard."

"This is an extraordinary series of events," Royston told Burley on Sky News.

"It played out in several hours of very forensic reporting. It was a familiar format, I think, which was a very strong statement from Harry and Meghan to begin with and then some push back in the hours afterwards. The pendulum kind of swung away from them and they started to lose control of the narrative a little bit, but it's important not to lose the fact that something bad did happen here."

Soon after the incident became public knowledge, damning parallels were drawn between Harry and Meghan's experience and those endured by Princess Diana in the 1980s and 1990s. The princess was being chased in her car by paparazzi members in 1997 when it crashed in a Paris tunnel, leaving the royal with fatal injuries.

Royston explained that since the 1990s, the royals in Britain are safeguarded against similar chases as the U.K. press has stricter regulation when it comes to privacy, paparazzi and the publication of images acquired through unethical means.

"We do not tolerate this kind of conduct by paparazzi in Britain," he said. "Paparazzi are not allowed to follow celebrities here, even if it's entirely safe and nothing dangerous happens. You're not even under IPSO [Independent Press Standards Organization] press regulations, you're not allowed to persist in photographing somebody who has asked you to stop."

He continued: "What's actually happening here is that Harry in America is trying to refight battles that the British royal family won in Britain decades ago. But he's having to kind of reinvent the wheel and do it all again in America because there's a very different paparazzi culture there."

After the chase occurred, Harry's spokesperson said, per the BBC, that: "While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone's safety. Dissemination of these images, given the ways in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all in involved."

"Some of the pictures taken by these paparazzi were very briefly published by the Daily Mail and the Express in Britain," Royston noted. "But as soon as they realized the circumstances around them, they were pulled down. TMZ are still running that footage and still running those images, and my understanding is that the Sussexes viewed that as completely inexcusable."

Discussing the lasting concerns that will have arisen for Harry and Meghan as a result of their experience in NYC, Royston noted that it will be the publication of the images taken through such dangerous measures.

"I think what's going to cause the really prolonged upset is that he hasn't succeeded in forcing TMZ, a U.S. tabloid, to take these images down and there has actually been a whole spate of paparazzi photographs of Harry and Meghan in the last few months, including published on Page Six, TMZ, U.S. tabloid websites. So...you know, they've left Britain because they wanted a better relationship with the media and they have wound up in a version of Princess Diana's experience in the 1990s."

Though the U.K. press does have regulations in place to prevent dangerous media practices, Harry has raised concerns in the past about his treatment by photographers on British soil.

In court documents made public in 2022 during the prince's lawsuit over the government decision to remove his state funded bodyguards, it was claimed that the royal was chased by photographers after a charity event in July 2021. Photographs from the alleged incident were never published.

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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