Prince Harry's War of Words with Tina Brown

0:01Prince Harry takes a swipe at Tina Brown over Prince Archie Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is 2025's biggest loser and Meghan Markle still has not won back America. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Now, Prince Harry has been in a public war of words with the former magazine editor and royal biographer, Tina Brown. So I assume probably most people who subscribe to this podcast will know who Tina Brown is. But in case you don't, she wrote a book called The Palace Papers, which was like a tome of a book about the royal soap opera, basically all the different kind of interpersonal family relationships, the rift between Harry and Meghan and William and Kate, but like everything else as well.

0:46And she's been writing about the royals for decades, literally since the Diana era, even. And once an editor of the Daily Beast and also further back than that, an editor of Newsweek. So that's who she is. And she is a respected voice on the monarchy. She was also a friend of Jane Goodall, like Prince Harry. Prince Harry was a very good friend of Jane Goodall, the prenatologist, which is an expert on apes. And a naturalist, not a naturist. But let's have a talk about what actually got said. So basically, what's happened is Tina Brown went on Katie Couric's podcast, her YouTube show, and in an off-the-cuff way, quite throwaway fashion, made this quite extraordinary claim about Harry, which Harry's then come out and denied through a spokesperson.

1:36So this is, I'm going to start with what Tina Brown actually said on the podcast, and then I'll go straight into Harry's retort. So she said, Jane Goodall, before she died, I had lunch with her, and she said that she went to see, she was one of the only people outside the family that went to see Archie when he was born. And Harry said, this is my little African child. It's going to be my child, who essentially, you know, wild child, essentially. They were going to have this time together, living a life off the grid, as it were. She said she was absolutely stunned when he chose the life that he did.

2:10So the point, this is a really important context, the point that Tina Brown was trying to make underneath it all was that Harry was suggesting that Archie was not going to be kind of born into the celebrity lifestyle that Harry and Meghan now find themselves living, and that Harry would have preferred it, certainly at that stage, this is back in 2019, if Archie had been brought up more like the life that Harry and William lived when they visited Africa, which Harry talks about a lot in his book Spare. But obviously, she has attributed to him a direct quote that kind of does sound quite racially insensitive in the sense that it is appropriating what it means to be African.

2:53So that is essentially, I think, why a lot of people on social media got very upset about what Harry said and leading, therefore, to Harry then clapping back at Tina Brown. So obviously, you know, it's worth a little bit of contextual background. Meghan did some genealogical testing which showed that she is part Nigerian. We don't know whether Harry knew that at the point that he met, because we do know that Harry met Jane Goodall in the months after Archie was born. They've talked about it and there were actually pictures of the two of them at an event together, not with Archie. So we know that the meeting took place.

3:29We don't know whether at that point Harry knew that Meghan was part Nigerian, but his spokesperson has denied these remarks anyway. So that is probably the more pertinent point. So this is the statement from Harry's spokesperson. The Duke of Sussex has never said anything remotely resembling what is being claimed. And Tina Brown knows exactly what she's doing by inventing these words and attributing them to a highly respected woman who is deceased and unable to correct the record. So obviously that is a strong statement from Harry's team coming back and basically shooting it down. It was given to Newsweek.

4:06When we first reported this story, we approached them and initially they declined to comment. but they pivoted, which, you know, it might be down to time zones are difficult to work in the Sussex operation, but also no doubt, I'm sure they would have seen some of the reaction that the statement got. Now, it's a valid point. Jane Goodall is not alive to clarify whether, you know, she might even, because this is the difficult thing is sometimes people, when one person quotes another person in a context where they expect that quote to remain private, they don't necessarily always quote it religiously accurately and what's inflammatory about the quote that's attributed to harry is the wording of it and so if jane goodall kind of quoted the wording loosely and harry didn't actually say that exact thing then it could be um that you know the the reality of whatever harry might have said um was not inflammatory because it was if it was worded slightly differently.

5:07But anyway, Tina Brown hit back and she released a statement to Tom Sykes, who runs the very engaging Royalist Substack blog. And he is the Daily Beast Royal correspondent. And this is what she said to him. On Katie Couric's podcast on Wednesday the 17th, I recounted what Jane Goodall said to me in June of this year about Prince Harry. She remembered affectionately Harry saying, when Archie was born, I want you to come and meet my African child. She actually said Africa child. But I was speaking too quickly. Aside from that inadvertent mistake, everything else in Ms. Goodall's conversation with me, I rendered accurately.

5:45So basically, Tina Brown is doubling down on her account of what Jane Goodall said. Now, obviously, Harry cannot deny, he's not in a position to deny that Jane Goodall said that to Tina Brown because he was not at the lunch that they had together. But he is absolutely in a position to deny having said it. There is a possibility that both sides are telling the truth here if Jane Goodall simply relayed the comment inaccurately to Tina Brown, never believing that it would become public. I mean, she probably should have believed that it would come public because she was talking to a journalist. And people, when they're talking to journalists, should always remember the possibility, especially not just journalists, but also, So, you know, people who write biographies should remember that those biographies need content.

6:32And there is always the possibility that remarks will become public. But needless to say, you know, Jane Goodall is not here to say whether she might have inadvertently, you know, mashed the quote a little bit or, you know, quoted loosely instead of rigorously accurately. But what does it all mean? Well, this is it's another bold statement from Harry trying to correct the record. So we are in 2025, we've had a much bolder Harry. So past years saw him file lawsuits. And that was, you know, as bold as it gets, really. And he's not been quite that bold. He's not filed a new lawsuit. In fact, since 2022, in 2026, he will wrap up his final lawsuit out of about nine or 10 filed between him and Meghan over the space of 2019 to 2022.

7:24but you know they are getting more confrontational with the media in a non-legal context although some legal threats and that begs the question will they start at some point filing lawsuits over these kinds of things now i don't think this one will result in litigation there's absolutely no indication to me whatsoever that it will um harry you know might be frustrated and angry with Tina Brown, she doesn't particularly fall into that category of being, you know, a lifelong nemesis. You know, some tabloid newspapers for Harry, they're like lifelong enemies. Since he was a child, he blames them for the death of his mother.

8:02Tina Brown does not fall into that category. But what is quite interesting about Tina Brown is that while she is a Brit, and I think Americans read her as a Brit, she's also kind of like American in the sense that she, her background as in the American media. And so she is a prominent voice on the royals in America. And British, though she may be, she forms part of that US ecosystem. And that is another step toward Harry kind of beefing up his attitude to US voices. So we had this earlier in the year. And it seems to be a growing trend that maybe Harry is starting to give the American sections of the media less of a free pass because US outlets used to be treated much better than the British tabloids who Harry has hated his whole life.

8:57So going back to my question, will Harry sue in general? I don't think he's going to sue Tina Brown, but we've had, I covered on the show last week, Doria, legal threats over Doria. There have been other legal threats this year. I could not in good conscience rule out Harry filing a lawsuit against somebody for libel at some point if it is an easy win with no risk of like really embarrassing disclosure. And it's really interesting at this moment to think about which way he's going to jump because he clearly does still feel that frustration. You know, like if this had been said about the king, it would be water off a duck's back.

9:43You know, I mean, who knows how he feels privately. Maybe he'd privately be livid. But there's no way he would get into a war of words with anybody. And that's partly because he's part of the institution of monarchy. And so he has to kind of behave in a way that protects the institution from reputational damage. So he wouldn't be as free as Harry is to try to set the record straight. But he also wouldn't bother trying. and so the question is what will this do to Harry's reputation will this help or hinder this long ongoing campaign he has to try to rebuild his public image and particularly in Britain and I could actually see a narrow corridor for this helping Harry but only if he can contain some of the instincts that derailed him in the past so in the past some of Harry's lawsuits they just got too unwieldy they were too 50-50 where it wasn't clear, you know, who was definitively at fault.

10:38Harry had to pull one of his libel cases against the mail, no doubt because of uncertain prospects he'd win. The letter that Meghan, you know, sent Thomas Markle that was published by the Mail on Sunday, legally Meghan definitively won, but there were also some major PR defeats along the way that damaged her reputation and reliability. So, you know, I think that I could see it happening, but if Harry wants it to be a success, he must, must, must learn the lessons of some of the mistakes he's made in the past. And it would be a case of cherry picking a single lawsuit that was super simple, that he would probably, he would settle out of court and just chalk it up as a win.

11:18And that is the most important thing. You have to, these things can give you momentum and create the framing that you are defeating an enemy if it's clean and it's simple and it's clear that you won both reputationally and legally. So if he is going to do it, he needs to keep those things in mind. But the other interesting thing about this whole saga was that it kind of overshadowed a major announcement by Harry and Meghan's charity, which is, well, it was Archwell Foundation, and now it's Archwell Philanthropies. So they rebranded, this is the statement they released, Archwell Philanthropies is home to the charitable work of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as they broaden their global philanthropic efforts for meaningful reach and maximum impact.

12:05After five beautiful years, the Archwell Foundation is becoming Archwell Philanthropies. This charitable entity allows the couple and their children to expand upon their global philanthropic endeavours as a family. So there is like a really kind of boring, mundane, subtle switch here, which is from being, I think, a 501c to a 501c3. So that's the kind of jargon aspect of it, but it's still a public charity. But the key thing is that now it's going to be predominantly an organization that funds other charities, other organizations. So they are focusing less on delivering programs and focusing more on being the money behind programs that other organizations are delivering.

12:50So I think their hope is that this allows them to allows the money that they raise to be more directly channeled to helping communities and helping people who need help without them having to kind of get bogged down in the logistically and administratively difficult task of like building the infrastructure to deliver projects. So what does it mean? I mean, look, for me, I think giving money to charity is fantastic. I think that people will, I've spoken about this numerous times in this podcast before, I think people do and will continue to expect them to get their hands dirty, you know, getting down to ground level and actually rolling their sleeves up and helping people themselves in the way that the royals traditionally do.

13:38But that doesn't actually necessarily require them to deliver the programme. So I have no problem with them making this pivot. But in fact, actually, that's kind of the royal worldview, is that you just kind of get parachuted in to help organizations that already exist in most cases, aside from Prince William has the Earthshot Prize, and he's now trying to build houses with Homewoods, and Kate has her early years centre, and Charles has the King's Trust and the King's Foundation. Outside of those, what is it, five projects, the overwhelming majority of royal work is about coming and helping a charity that already exists with a program that it was already running.

14:20So I don't think that's necessarily a bad pivot, but I do just want them to focus on actually being there on the ground, visibly helping people, because if they're going to rebuild their reputations in America after some really damaging reputational injuries, I think you really have to show people. You can't just tell people that you're helping. they have to be able to see it with their own eyes people believe what they can see and what they can hear and they don't really believe what people tell them we're going through a period of greater cynicism I think than at any other time in my life in my 40 years on planet earth so yeah you really need to show people what you're doing and the struggle they're going to have is like getting on the ground with charities but also getting those jobs into the media so that's what their focus should be like how you you know they just need to do it week in week out they need to do way more than they've been doing which is not to say they've been doing nothing um they have in fact been uh helping on a number of causes including you know harry has done a lot of stuff for veterans not just for invictus but for other projects too but they just need to do it much more regularly um and try to get audience for it and you know megan's instagram account could be a great way to do that.

15:42Harry could get back on social media. That would help him to kind of get that awareness of what he's getting up to. And, you know, I think that could make a difference for them in 2026, but they are going to have to think about how they really land the philanthropic work they're doing with people and get cut through in an era of huge competition for attention. Huge. So it's going to be a challenge for them. But that is the change they're making. Right, on that note, I'm going to take a quick break. But before I do, just a reminder to rate and review The Royal Report on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your favourite shows.

16:20And in fact, if you are watching the YouTube show, please do like and subscribe. And when I'm back, Prince Andrew, former Prince Andrew, is, of course, in the Epstein files. There is a new photo of him, which undermines his past testimony about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

16:41Welcome back to the show. Now, one of the biggest overall losers of 2025, probably on planet Earth, is the man we used to call Prince Andrew. We now call him Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, as he was stripped of his Prince title by King Charles back in October. Now, I plan to do this segment before the recent release of the Epstein files and already it's become out of date. So there's new further information undermining Andrew's account of his relationship with Epstein, which he gave to the BBC back in 2019. And that really has been one of the biggest stories in royal reporting this year. You know, as we as we approach 2026 and we prepare to say goodbye to 2025, it is unequivocal that Andrew has crashed harder than anybody else in the past 12 months.

17:31and largely, you know, it's because he has been undone based on his own statements that he made in an interview that he chose to do, that nobody made him do. I mean, they might have tried to persuade him, the BBC, but they did not make him. Nobody made him do the interview and nobody made him say the things he said. But the more files have come out of America detailing his, you know, black and white emails, photos, all of this kind of stuff, his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the more it has blown Andrew's credibility to pieces. So I want to start with the new stuff, but I'll talk a little bit about the kind of year as a whole too, because it's been seismic and tragic at points, because obviously the woman who accused Andrew, Virginia Jeffery, died in April of what her family described as a suicide.

18:22So before I describe the new material, you know, just a very quick praisey. Virginia accused Andrew of where she said she was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell Jeffrey Epstein and Ginnon Maxwell to London, New York and the US Virgin Islands where she was made to have sex with Andrew she feared death if she refused and she accused him of rape in a civil lawsuit that she filed in New York she filed that in 2021 and he settled out of court in 2022 for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be in the millions while denying liability, and he has always denied her allegations. So with that out of the way, the new material, the main bits of it, is this photograph of Andrew lying across the laps of five women whose faces have been redacted, you know, black squares placed over their faces so that we can't see who they are.

19:14And in the background behind the sofa is Gennon Maxwell. Now, the other really important detail in the photograph is actually the fireplace behind Andrew. And the reason is because that is recognizably a fireplace from Sandringham. There are old images on Getty of, you know, the Queen sitting by that fireplace with Charles reading to reading the newspaper with Andrew alongside him or sat with Edwards. There's a few different photographs of it. But it is very clearly recognizable. It's quite, you know, an old ornate fireplace with these two pillars, you know, pairs of pillars on either side. And they're very easily identifiable.

19:50So what that means is we believe the media is reporting that it is the famous visit by Ginnon Maxwell to Sandringham in which the story was always Andrew threw a birthday party. I think it was 39th birthday party for Ginnon Maxwell, except that he denied that in his BBC interview. Emily Maitlis, the BBC journalist who interviewed Andrew, said he was your guest as well. Well, in 2000, Epstein was a guest at Windsor Castle and at Sandringham. He was brought right into the heart of the royal family at your invitation. Andrew said, but certainly at my invitation, not at the royal family's invitation.

20:29But remember that it was his girlfriend that was the key element in this. He was there, as it were, plus one to some extent in that aspect. And Emily Maitler said, am I right in thinking you threw a birthday party for Epstein's girlfriend, Gillian Maxwell, at Sandringham? and Andrew said no it was a shooting weekend Emily Maitlis said a shooting weekend and Andrew said just a straightforward a straightforward shooting weekend but during these times said Emily Maitlis that he was a guest at Windsor Castle at Sandringham the shooting weekend we know that he was and had been procuring young girls for sex trafficking and Andrew said we now know that at the time there was no indication to me or anybody else that that was what he was doing And certainly when I saw him either in the United States, oh, no, he goes on, he denies it all, basically.

21:21And he said there was absolutely no indication of Epstein's crimes. So why is all of this significant? Well, obviously, it doesn't look like a straightforward shooting weekend because Andrew is laying across the laps of five women. And that is not the kind of thing that I think usually happens at a straightforward shooting weekend. Forgive me. Maybe if I was a member of the aristocracy, I might feel differently. But it's certainly not what one imagines when one is told that an event was a straightforward shooting weekend. Of course, you know, there are other viewpoints in this. And the Telegraph spoke to a friend of Andrew's who said, we don't see what the problem is.

22:00It's just hijinks at a party. He's fully clothed. So I think that that is a slightly, I don't know who that's from. You know, it says a friend, it's anonymous. But that is, I think, a somewhat ill-judged remark. Mark, if they want to note and explain and emphasize the fact that Andrew's fully clothed and so are all the women, that's fine. But to say we don't see what the problem is, I think, is not the right tone, given that, you know, I think Andrew, when he originally kind of lent into this idea that, oh, he wasn't really that friends of Epstein, he was more friends of Maxwell. It seemed like a good idea at the time, because at that time, 2019, Ghislaine Maxwell hadn't been prosecuted yet.

22:38In fact, I don't think she'd even been arrested yet at that point. She hadn't. that all kicked off from about 2020, I believe. So now, Ghislaine Maxwell was serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. So this idea that, oh, it's all just fine, when it's, you know, it's Ghislaine Maxwell is a woman who now has a criminal conviction for trafficking women for sex, and she's standing behind him while Andrew's laying across the laps of all these women. Now, obviously, we don't know anything about them. We don't know whether, all we know is that their faces have been redacted. are they Epstein victims?

23:11We don't know. But we do understand that Epstein was on this particular expedition. And we've also, you know, there are other photos of them going shooting in Royal Estates. So it's the key thing for Andrew was always his credibility. It was a he said, she said situation. And, you know, credibility is hugely, hugely important. And there's just now so many bits of Andrew's story that have been blown to pieces. And that a lot of that process has happened this year. And so, you know, from and it's happened in the autumn. So Virginia took her life or at least so her family say back in April of this year, which was an incredibly tragic event.

23:58And it followed an internal disintegration of her family set up with her husband. and she appeared to lose custody of her children. And that was, I'm sure, incredibly, incredibly distressing for her and no doubt factors in what happened. But then come the autumn, Virginia's biography was released and it's called Nobody's Girl, worth a read if you're looking for something to start the new year with. Very harrowing, of course, but worth a read. And it reiterated a lot of an account that we already knew, but with her whole life story all in one place in a format where people can just go out and buy it and read the whole book.

24:41And so what that did was it lent a real kind of emotional weight to her allegations because it gives people an opportunity to hear her not only talking about Andrew and everything that happened with him, but placing her experiences that she says she had with Andrew, which he denies, in the context of her whole life story. And her whole life story is just so incredibly harrowing, starting with her being abused, she says, by a friend of her family and by her father, which he denies. So that was massive. But then the other big story of 2025 in terms of, you know, Andrew's further fall from grace, because bear in mind, he'd already retired as a working royal, you know, back in 2019.

25:26and then he kind of weirdly retired again at the point that he settled the lawsuit and was also stripped of his honorary titles and patronages. But he retained his Prince title and his Duke of York title and his role in the Order of the Garter and all of these other kind of honorary things that he had. And so he went into 2025 a Prince and he's going out a pauper, basically. And so emails were a massive part of this and released by the Democrats on the Oversight Committee. And it includes, I think, one of the biggest was the public's knowledge and awareness and understanding of the Epstein scandal, insofar as it relates to Andrew, started in kind of 2010 into 2011.

26:11So the key moment was when Andrew, in New York, walked through Central Park with Epstein and was photographed with Epstein. at a point when Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution back in 2008. But it was a heavily criticised plea deal because in as much as it secured a conviction of Epstein, it also hid the scale of his abuse and allowed Epstein to peddle this absurd idea that, oh, it was nothing. It was just one girl who claimed that she was of age and she showed me fake ID, et cetera, et cetera, all the lies that he told his rich and powerful friends in order to try and ingratiate himself with them again.

26:52So by 2010 December, Andrew went for a walk through Central Park with Epstein and he was photographed by the PAPS and those pictures were then published in the British Press in 2011, causing a massive scandal about the fact that he was friends with a convicted paedophile. But we now know via these emails that were released by the House Oversight Committee that Andrew emailed Epstein around that time to say, first of all, you know, before the story had ever been published, he emailed actually a press secretary, a deputy press secretary, rather, at Buckingham Palace to say that he had asked an on-duty police protection officer to dig up dirt on Virginia Jeffrey, which, you know, has caused a huge controversy in Britain.

27:38The police have decided not to investigate. I talked about this extensively on last week's show, So I'm not going to go over it in too much detail again, except to say that, you know, many people have expressed concerns about that. But also after publication of Virginia Jeffries first major newspaper interview, which she did with the Mail on Sunday, in which she told some aspects of her life story, you know, including being homeless for a period of time and having to have sex for food. um andrew sent an email to epstein in which um he said basically you know don't worry about me i'm more worried about how this is affecting you um we'll just need to rise above it and we'll play some more soon um so and it's you know signed off using uh doy duke of york so it was really really toxic and it blew apart an aspect another aspect of this interview that he gave to emily make this in 2019.

28:33This time, he said that that trip to New York, where he stayed overnight with Epstein and walked with him through Central Park, was the last contact that he'd had with Epstein. And that after that, he went out to New York with the purpose of breaking up the friendship, and that he didn't have any contact with him afterwards. And so now we have these emails, or the proof, that actually, in fact, he did have contact with Epstein after that point. And not only that, but it was friendly contact. And interestingly, absolutely no reference from either of them to this suggestion that their friendship had been formally ended or broken up just months earlier.

29:12And in fact, other emails that came out this year include Sarah Ferguson emailed him in the January to kind of grovel with thanks for Epstein lending us some money. So that was about six weeks after Andrew had allegedly broken up the friendship. So it's been completely excoriating for Andrew. and I've mentioned obviously at the end of October Charles stripped him of his prince title being given the heave-ho from the Order of the Garter but also he's been told he has to move out of his mansion Royal Lodge and this has caused a huge political scandal in Britain so what emerged, which actually we already knew but it was kind of buried in documents from the early 2000s was that Andrew paid a peck of peppercorn rent at his 30-room mansion Royal Lodge in Windsor and he was supposed to look after the house and kind of pay for the maintenance of it but had not really been doing so and he's been told he has to leave now so he's been, they've negotiated him kind of surrendering his lease for Royal Lodge and he's going to go and live in a smaller place presumably in Sandringham in Norfolk the king's private estate there the very estate where he invited Gennon Maxwell to this shooting weekend and you know it's a huge fall from grace for him and he was already he'd fallen so far already but of course what the victims really wanted was for him to see the inside of a courtroom and to be prosecuted and so that means that no matter how far he falls no matter how far he has fallen in the eyes of the British public he has still swerved and escaped justice and the more that his own account has been blown to pieces in different respects the more frustrating it feels that he was never put in a courtroom and made to kind of defend himself as a defendant.