“Spare” won’t officially be released until Jan. 10, but excerpts from Prince Harry’s memoir prove the Duke of Sussex is unafraid to discuss the innerworkings of the royal family. In an excerpt obtained by Us Weekly, Harry became the first member of the royal family to address the sexual assault allegations against his uncle, Prince Andrew, Duke of York. (Andrew has denied all allegations against him.)
In “Spare,” Harry recounts how he told Meghan Markle that the royal family wouldn’t remove their security detail after what happened to his mother, Princess Diana. After all, he noted that even Andrew’s security detail remained intact after he became embroiled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which involved Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell operating a sex trafficking ring. POPSUGAR reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment on Harry’s comments about his uncle in “Spare,” but did not receive an immediate response.
“Never. Not in this climate of hate. Not after what happened to my mother [Princess Diana]. Also, not in the wake of my Uncle Andrew,” Harry writes in “Spare” as he recounts telling Markle their security detail would remain in place after they stepped down as working members of the royal family. “He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman and no one had so much suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, sex crimes weren’t on the list.”
Markle and Harry did lose their security detail after they moved to North America in 2020. In their 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex discussed how difficult it was to maintain a sense of security for their family after their move when they no longer had the protection they had come to expect. As the prince writes in “Spare,” his father, King Charles III, cut him off financially after a lifetime of Harry being dependent on the royal family for money. He described his father as “my boss, my banker, my auditor and the administrator of my money throughout my whole adult life.”
Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Andrew of is HRH title and military titles in January 2022 after Virginia Giuffre filed a sexual assault suit against him. The Duke of York settled the case out of court, and maintains his innocence. Despite no longer being a working royal, he has not lost his security detail.
