Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Survive ‘Near Catastrophic’ Paparazzi Car Chase
Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and her mother, Doria Ragland, survived a dangerous car chase that involved paparazzi in New York on Tuesday. The pursuit occurred after the family attended an awards ceremony for the Ms. Foundation for Women, which recognized Markle’s work. The incident took place nearly 26 years after Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, died in a car crash while chased by paparazzi.
“Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi,” Harry’s spokesperson said in a statement. “This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers.”
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The couple have long been critical of media scrutiny on their private lives after British tabloids leaked a personal letter Markle had sent her father in 2019, and the couple sued a number of news outlets accusing them of hacking their phones that same year. They were also critical of paparazzi in their Netflix reality series, 2022’s Harry & Meghan, and Harry wrote about how paparazzi made him uneasy in his memoir, last year’s Spare. “They’d brush, smack, jostle, or just straight wallop me, hoping to get a rise, hoping I’d retaliate, because that would create a better photo, and thus more money in their pockets,” he wrote in the book. “A snap of me in 2007 fetched about thirty thousand pounds. Down payment on a flat. But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.”
Part of Harry’s wariness around paparazzi stems from the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who had been vocal about her criticism of paparazzi. She died in a car crash in Paris while being chased by photographers on Aug. 31, 1997. The collision also killed her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul. A 2006 investigation by British police ruled out foul play in the crash, calling it “a tragic accident.” Harry was 13 at the time.
“The pain and suffering of women marrying into this institution, this feeding frenzy … I was terrified,” Harry said in Harry & Meghan. “I didn’t want history to repeat itself.”
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