Princess Kate was subject to frenzied paparazzi harassment for six years in which she did not have police protection because she was yet to marry Prince William.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have regularly spoken about their mistreatment at the hands of Britain’s tabloid press, though less attention has been paid to a particularly difficult period in Kate’s pre-royal life.
For example, Meghan said during her Oprah Winfrey interview in March 2021 that the media were “rude” to Kate but that this was less bad than her own experiences of racism.
Meghan’s experiences may have been bad indeed, but Kate’s may at the same time also have gone significantly beyond rudeness. In fact, if a recently disclosed filing in Prince Harry’s latest lawsuit against the Daily Mail is to be believed, it could even have involved the unlawful breach of her privacy by private detectives, though the newspaper has denied Harry’s allegations.
It may be that measuring Kate’s experiences of harassment against Meghan’s is ill advised for both sides, but needless to say, Kate endured the searing heat of press intrusion without police protection for longer than her sister-in-law’s entire royal career.
That time period does not diminish Meghan’s experiences, but rather it highlights that Kate’s own story will contain many difficult moments she has never, and likely will never, discuss.
The Princess of Wales was an unprotected target for the paparazzi from 2005 when she graduated university to 2011 when she married and finally got her own police bodyguards. And private detectives were allegedly providing newspapers with information about her longer ago even than that.
Meghan was in the same position for two years from the announcement of her relationship to Harry in 2016 through to their wedding in 2018. She then had two years as a working royal before quitting the palace in 2020 after a breakdown in royal relations and relentlessly negative coverage in the U.K. media.
What Meghan Markle Said About Princess Kate
Meghan told Oprah Winfrey: “Kate was called Waity Katie, waiting to marry William. While I imagine that was really hard, and I do, I can’t picture what that felt like … this is not the same.”
“And if a member of his [Harry’s] family will comfortably say we’ve all had to deal with things that are rude,” she continued. “Rude and racist are not the same.”
The Duchess of Sussex was arguing at the time for greater support from the royals and some may well think she should have got it.
That issue aside, however, it is worth noting that Meghan’s account of Kate’s tough experiences with the press barely scratched the surface.
Kate’s long wait to marry William carried far greater significance than Meghan suggested because during that period she was not afforded a police protection team, since she was not yet a working royal.
And the latest sign of just how hard that pre-royal phase was has in fact come from a recent filing by Harry’s own legal team.
The prince’s phone hacking lawsuit against the Daily Mail references invoices suggesting the tabloid paid a private detective to provide information on Kate. The Mail said in a May statement: “The claims are preposterous and without foundation.”
That included her cell phone number, obtained from a “friends and family list,” of the numbers frequently called from a landline phone, presumably at her family home.
There was also documentary evidence suggesting the investigator “converted” her cell, a practice in which a phone number is used to trace an address. No date was given in court for when the investigation was conducted but it was attributed to a private detective whose operation was shutdown by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2003.
The filing said the Mail “commissioned [private investigator Steve] Whittamore to provide: (1) A mobile phone conversion related to [Harry’s] Associate, Catherine Middleton, now the Princess of Wales.
“(2) Two occupancy searches relating to the Ms Middleton’s family address, and (3) Ten phone numbers from a ‘Family and friends’ list, in which Mr Whittamore identified the Ms Middleton’s mobile phone number.”
Harry’s legal team say these were potentially unlawful invasions of Harry’s privacy as Kate was an “associate” of his at the time, though it is of course implicit in such an argument that her privacy would also have been breached.
And the reverse is true. William and Harry were both victims of phone hacking by the News of the World during this period, and Kate’s private information may well have been contained in her then boyfriend’s answer phone messages.
And all of that is before consideration of Kate’s experience with paparazzi photographers.
Princess Kate’s Long Courtship and Media Harassment
Kate and William forged their romance while at university, when the palace negotiated a deal with the media in the hope of being left alone.
Yet, after leaving university in 2005, Kate was at the mercy of the tabloids and only had police protection while she was with William. This went on until they married, when she was 29, in April 2011.
“In William’s company, she danced at the trendiest clubs and enjoyed the VIP treatment that came with dating a prince,” author Robert Jobson wrote in his book Catherine, The Princess of Wales. “Any intrusive paparazzi were swiftly dealt with by his armed Scotland Yard protection officers, ensuring minimal fuss.”
“When her royal boyfriend was not at her side, however, it was a different story,” Jobson said. “She no longer had William’s bodyguards around to watch over her, yet the media harassment intensified. It unnerved her and her family to such an extent that they decided to act.
“The situation also forced the prince to show his mettle. He did not want the woman he loved to face the unacceptable level of paparazzi intrusion that his late mother had experienced.
“After talking it over with Catherine and her parents, he stepped in. Catherine’s parents instructed lawyers to contact national newspaper editors, urging them to give Catherine and her family privacy.
“They argued forcefully that photographers had followed her almost every day and night since she had left university and, according to the code of conduct, they should not be persistently pursuing her. The level of unacceptable intrusion, they said, had reached breaking point.
“But with speculation about a possible royal marriage reaching fever pitch, the paparazzi refused to back down. When the Mail on Sunday’s diary editor (and later royal author) Katie Nicholl wrote that palace courtiers had started making ‘contingency plans’ for a wedding, it added fuel on the flames, heaping even more pressure on William to formalize the relationship.”
And the saga put pressure on their romance: “He knew he loved Catherine, but equally he was struggling with committing himself fully to her, as he felt he was too young to wed. Was it, he feared, a case of the right girl at the wrong time? It certainly seemed that way.”
Jobson told Newsweek: “I just think Kate was a more together person than anybody else that’s been around. She understood things about normal life, she went to work on the bus when she worked [as an accessories buyer at clothes shop] Jigsaw.
“She always smiled her way through it until it got too much. I think she just put on a brave face and got on with it.”
Do you have a question about King Charles III and Queen Camilla, William and Kate, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email royals@newsweek.com. We’d love to hear from you.
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