Sophie Chandauka, the boss of Prince Harry’s charity, Sentebale, fell out with Harry and Meghan Markle after she refused a request by the couple to tell the media that Markle hadn’t been “mean” to her at a charity polo match, the Daily Telegraph revealed Saturday.
Harry quit the charity in a blaze of recriminations this week.
The awkward encounter at a Sentebale polo match has been shared thousands of times on social media in recent days.
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Damningly, it shows Markle telling Chandauka—the CEO of the charity and a globally respected lawyer who has worked in-house for Meta and JP Morgan, among others—to move away from Harry during photographs. Chandauka is then forced to duck under the trophy to the place of Markle’s choosing so that only Markle would be pictured by Harry’s side.
The Daily Telegraph on Saturday cited a “well-placed” but anonymous source as saying: “Ultimately, it comes down to that polo match and the awkward moment with Markle moving her out the way. Harry then demanded that she make a statement to the press, basically saying ‘Meghan wasn’t mean to me’, and she refused to do that.”
The account will do little to rehabilitate Markle’s image of being a nightmare boss.
It would be easy to dismiss the claims were it not for the fact that Chandauka gave an astonishing on-the-record interview to the Financial Times saying almost the same thing.
The FT said that Chandauka was asked by Harry to defend Markle in the media.
Chandauka said she replied, “I said no, we’re not setting a precedent by which we become an extension of the Sussex PR machine.”
Chandauka took no prisoners in her FT interview, making it clear that she was glad Harry departed the organization: “The number one risk for this organization was the toxicity of its lead patron’s brand.”
She added that public sentiment around Prince Harry had been “volatile” since he moved to the United States and trashed his family in a series of films, interviews, and his memoir.
“When you start to interview people, they’re asking questions about, well, these mixed messages around the patron,” she said.
She also doubled down on claims of racism that she made in her initial statement, saying the board felt “a loss of power and control and influence ... ‘Oh my goodness, the Africans are taking over.‘”
Harry donated over $1.5 million from the sale of his book Spare to the charity. His team told the FT he had never sought to engineer its collapse. The Daily Beast has reached out for further comment.
