Prince Harry has slammed the “damaging” rumour James Hewitt is his real father.
For years, there’s been speculation that Princess Diana’s former lover James could be the 38-year-old’s true father, and not King Charles.
In a court testimony amid his phone hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspaper Limited, the Duke of Sussex admitted the rumour has caused him great pain over the years.
In a written statement obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday, the father-of-two hit out at MGN’s publications for perpetuating the rumour in several articles.
He wrote: “At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother [Princess Diana] just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me.”
“They were hurtful, mean and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories. Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so that I might be ousted from the Royal Family?”
Harry then accused the writer of a PEOPLE article called “Plot to rob the DNA of Harry” of having a long history of using “unlawful information gathering techniques”.
The Duke claimed that, for this particular story, the journalist wrote about a “plot” to steal his hair to test his “parentage”.
He also alleged that the write pursued this story already knowing that it was not possible for James to be his father because of the timeline of his relationship with the late Princess Diana.
Harry wrote: “At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasn’t actually aware that my mother hadn’t met Major Hewitt until after I was born.”
“The timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014, although I now understand this was common knowledge amongst the Defendants’ journalists.”
The 38-year-old also addressed the rumour in his bombshell memoire SPARE, which was published earlier this year.
Harry claimed King Charles used to poke fun at the paternity claims, writing: “Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire.”
The Prince claimed Charles used to joke: “‘Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father? Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!’”
He recalled how Charles would “laugh and laugh,” but admitted he thought it was “a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumour circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt.”
“One cause of this rumour was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism,” Harry continued.
“Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles. They couldn’t get enough of this ‘joke,’ for some reason. Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable.”
Setting the record straight once and for all, Harry added: “Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born, the story was simply too good to drop.”
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