Prince Harry is defending himself going public with allegations against the royal family ahead of his book release this month.
The 38-year-old British royal family member sat down with Anderson Cooper for an interview with “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday, January 8. Harry said he tried to keep conversations and family drama private, but claims that, ultimately, he was forced to go public to protect his reputation.
“Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” Harry told Cooper. “You know, the family motto is never complain, never explain, but it’s just a motto.”
“There’s a lot of complaining and a lot of explaining … being done through leaks,” Cooper replied.
“They will feed or have a conversation with the correspondent,” the Duke of Sussex went on. “And that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story. And at the bottom of it they will say that they’ve reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment.”
“But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting. So when we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you.’ But you do it for other members of the family. It becomes — there becomes a point when silence is betrayal,” Harry said.
The former working royal’s highly anticipated memoir, “Spare,” will be available on January 10.
Harry and his wife, former actress Meghan Markle, said they left their jobs as working royals in 2020 to pursue a more private life after claiming the British press was harassing them. After this, they moved to California and later inked a deal with Netflix.
The limited series “Harry & Meghan” was another attempt to justify their actions and explain themselves, but it earned mixed reviews from fans and critics.
“So far, this is a well-filmed, comprehensive and deeply tedious wallow in narcissism,” a review from The Spectator said of the series. “The kindest thing that you can say is that the couple seem very much in love, although the levels of artifice involved here make such a judgment tricky.”
“What I mainly took away was the sense of a couple so in love with themselves that they had lost any semblance of self-awareness,” a Times reviewer shared.
Now royal followers are eager to see what Prince Harry will say in his memoir, which is rumored to be especially brutal toward Harry’s older brother, Prince William.