JUST IN: PRINCE HARRY’S FORMER JOURNALIST FRIEND BREAKS HER SILENCE AFTER COURTROOM DRAMA! –

I can remember as if it were yesterday, the night I threw on a navy blue H&M dress, grabbed a nerve-settling glass of champagne, and went downstairs to be introduced to Prince Harry for the very first time.
It was a Friday in December 2011, and we’d been invited to a shooting weekend at a 4,000-acre estate in Hampshire that belonged to the wealthy family of a Bristol University graduate I’d befriended in Ibiza that summer. More on him later.

Charlotte Griffiths (Picture by Leon McGowran)

Harry had recently returned from California, where he’d been learning to fly helicopter gunships. I was a 27-year-old trainee journalist working on a gossip column for a very different British institution – The Mail on Sunday.
According to the table plan, the prince and I were to sit next to each other at dinner. And because Harry was doubtless wary about being introduced to an H&M-clad stranger, he decided to kick start our relationship by subjecting me to a little test.
From his pocket, he removed a small white pill. Then he held it up to my face, popped it on to my tongue, and said with a smile: ‘Now I know I can trust you!’
So began a short and utterly surreal friendship with the ebullient young man who was then third in line to the throne.

Harry was, back then, a well-regarded Army officer whose sense of humour and record of public service made him one of the Royal Family’s best PR assets.
Though prone to over-doing it – photos of him falling out of nightclubs had become a staple of the news pages – his natural, happy-go-lucky charisma meant that occasional private indiscretions (aside from ones involving Nazi fancy dress) were, by and large, ignored.
In person, he was quite the live wire: Boisterous, charming, and overflowing with a (sometimes excessive) degree of self-confidence. And when among trusted friends – there were about 16 of us on that shooting weekend – the prince also showed himself to be a compulsive practical joker.

Prince Harry In Afghanistan, 2013

Take that white pill he’d so brazenly stuck in my mouth (which I discreetly removed and folded into a napkin soon afterwards). It was almost certainly paracetamol, rather than something more sinister. But I couldn’t be entirely sure.
Trying to make small talk over the champagne, I therefore found myself pondering two questions. Had a senior royal just attempted to give me a Class-A drug? And, as a result, would I remain in possession of my marbles during what was a pretty swanky do, complete with butlers and outside caterers?
As guests were being summoned to dinner, it seems Harry had sneaked away to prepare his second risque prank.
The grand dining room contained a vast collection of solid silver elephants, hippopotamuses, giraffes and other African game, made by the society jeweller Patrick Mavros, who has a shop on the Fulham Road.
Normally, the animals were laid out in a sort of tableau, along the long antique table. But Harry decided to place them in pairs, with one directly on top of another. A variety of sexual positions were adopted. Some were humping members of a different species altogether.

Prince Harry at the polo in New York in 2009

Harry’s bawdiness set the tone for a weekend in which we shared many laughs, several pranks, and one or two tender moments. My new acquaintance proved himself to be fun, fearless, and a little bit eccentric with that excess of confidence occasionally spilling over into boorishness.
On the Saturday afternoon, for example, Harry accidentally shot and killed a white pheasant. It’s a minor shooting faux pas – white pheasants are used by gamekeepers as ‘marker birds’ – which usually results in a few hundred pounds being donated to charity by the person who’d pulled the trigger. I don’t know whether Harry paid the ‘fine’ or not, but there was much banter about royals not doing anything as tawdry as handling cash.
After dinner, he rudely interrupted a performance by a society magician named Drummond Money-Coutts by starting a noisy conversation with a fellow guest.
Coincidentally, Drummond was also a friend of mine from the University of Leeds, which is probably why that particular indiscretion has stayed with me all these years. Drummond later got his own back, I seem to remember, by locking Harry in a catering freezer as part of a conjuring trick.
Later that night, the prince and I chatted about nightclubs, and the difficulties of dovetailing his apparent love of all-night parties with a career in the military.

Prince Harry at a nightclub in 2011

Harry, who chronicled his youthful enthusiasm for recreational drugs in his autobiography Spare, told me, with uncharacteristic seriousness, that he was unable to indulge in narcotics these days, due to the risk of random Army drug tests.
While others might take cocaine at the clubs, bars and parties he went to, he told me he now took something called creatine.
It’s a perfectly legal food supplement which is normally mixed with water and drunk by bodybuilders looking for that extra something. When inhaled in powder form, Harry explained, the stuff provides a burst of energy that keeps one dancing till dawn. (I have no idea if he’s correct, so please don’t try this at home.)
These days creatine has gone mainstream. Lots of women I know, myself included, drink the Holland and Barrett version to improve cognitive function now that our 40s have kicked in. How times have changed.

Shortly after we’d been introduced, someone in the shooting party decided that my nickname (thanks to my initials, everyone called me ‘CG’) needed to be improved. It was therefore announced that I would henceforth be known as ‘CG-string’.
Harry seemed to love my new moniker. I didn’t know him well enough to come up with a suitably cutting nickname, so I rather lamely settled on ‘Mr Mischief’. It seemed to fit. He was undeniably mischievous, and back then it was easy to see it as part of his charm.
At one stage, I also tried calling him Harold. It was the nickname of my stepbrother Harry at the time, so it popped into my head. He was quick to point out, however, that ‘Harold’ was already a nickname reserved by his brother.
Over dinner, when discussing his recent stint in the US, I recall asking what he thought about American girls. Interestingly, given the course his life would take, he vigorously defended American women, telling me he believed that while American girls can be ‘glossy’, they are much more ‘cerebral’ than people give them credit for.

Prince Harry parties in Vegas, 2012

That recent trip to the States had, it emerged, involved a few days in Las Vegas. At various points during the meal, ribald anecdotes from ‘Sin City’ would start to come out via various male guests, prompting Harry to put his finger to his lips.
As royal-watchers will know, Harry and his mates took a second trip to Vegas a year later, when photos emerged of the prince standing stark naked next to the billiard table in a luxury hotel. My impression is that earlier 2011 visit had been similarly bawdy, if not debauched.
Harry’s reputation as a party animal had, as it happens, been recently written about by my colleague (and then boss), The Mail on Sunday’s diary editor Katie Nicholl.

Prince Harry parties in Vegas, 2012

Her biography of the prince had just been released. Its pre-publication fact-checking process had involved a furious behind-the-scenes dispute with Palace officials who’d vigorously denied a passage suggesting that the teenaged Harry had swallowed a goldfish at his former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke’s wedding in the late 1990s. Reluctantly, this allegation had been expunged from the book.
I make no claim as to whether the goldfish ‘incident’ was or wasn’t true. It could very well be one of those apocryphal rumours that almost every modern celebrity must endure. But the prince and his chums clearly thought the whole thing was hilarious. The dining room in our country house contained a large aquarium. As we walked past it, a friend joked: ‘I hope you’re not going to swallow another goldfish, Harry!’
The weekend passed in a blur. On Saturday, the male guests shot hundreds of pheasants, each using a pair of identical shotguns, and a full-time loader, to ensure they could fire enough cartridges to produce a sufficiently gargantuan bag.
After coming back from shooting on Saturday, we enjoyed a second black tie dinner party, before drinking late into the night. Most of us went to sleep just before dawn.
By Sunday morning, everyone was feeling very delicate, so we lounged around feeling sorry for ourselves and looking for various missing items strewn about the house.
Harry had lost a brogue, and for some reason I was convinced it was all my fault because I’d slipped on some random shoes the night before to nip outside for a cigarette.
After lunch, we all retired to a cinema room and as it was getting dark by then we all watched a couple of films.
One was an action movie that culminated in Islamic fundamentalists attempting to shoot up the White House – a scene that Harry was particularly affected by. ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ he proclaimed loudly to the room, rolling his eyes.
To be fair, his remarks were doubtless influenced by the tour he’d bravely undertaken in Afghanistan, not to mention the Army colleagues who’d lost their lives there. Back then I didn’t know what Allahu Akhbar meant, but I remember feeling that the gesture was somehow off-colour.
At some point, while we were all watching it, Harry shuffled over to my beanbag, got under the blanket I was sitting under, and put his arm around me. There was nothing particularly romantic about the sweet gesture.
Although I wasn’t physically attracted to him, I felt slightly uncomfortable. I was dating someone else at the time and, besides, he’d kissed another girl the night before, a girl who had turned up for the weekend on the arm of one of his friends. By breakfast, it all seemed to have become part of the previous night’s entertainment, and everyone simply laughed it off.

Then, as I drove my VW Golf home that evening, the Facebook Messenger app on my mobile phone pinged with a friend request from a certain ‘Spike Wells’.
An accompanying message read:

“It’s H… in case u were confused by name and picture!! X”

At this point, you are probably wondering why a young royal, known to hate the British Press, ended up letting his guard down so spectacularly with a Fleet Street journalist.
Firstly, you need to understand that the events I am describing took place a very long time ago. The Harry I met in 2011 was very different from the embittered figure we know today, who moans incessantly about his family’s privacy being invaded while making millions invading his family’s privacy.
He was certainly less pompous and self-entitled in those days. I remember feeling quite sorry for him, at one stage, when he said he felt lonely on Sunday nights when everyone else was coupled up at home eating a Chinese takeaway.
Secondly, it needs to be stressed that I was regarded by our various mutual acquaintances as someone who could be relied upon to keep secrets.
My day job was by then well-known. Indeed, my first bylined article in The Mail on Sunday had been published in 2009. From then on, however, I had strictly observed one rule: Never, ever break confidences, however juicy, that are shared with you by friends from your private life.
There was the odd exception. Sometimes, a society chum might discretely ask me to put a particular story or anecdote into print; more often than not, it would end up in the diary column where I then worked.

Charlotte Griffiths

The point, however, was that such tales were generally positive and designed to make my friends look good. They were also told with their consent.
In fact, I would never have dreamed of revealing the 15-year-old tale you are reading now (and I must confess that even now I have chosen to leave some of Harry’s fruitier indiscretions out) were it not for his ill-fated decision to thrust it, and inadvertently me, into the public domain by suing the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.
His court case was based on the premise that a selection of published stories about him could only have been obtained by unlawful means.
Under oath, the prince vehemently denied that anyone close to him would ever pass information to the Press. None of them would ever be so silly as to socialise with a grubby journalist, he seemed to be saying.
When the Mail’s barrister pointed out to Harry that he’d once had a friendship with me, he responded dismissively, effectively branding me a sort of fantasist and liar.
‘I met her once at a weekend,’ he told the court. ‘And then the next day, after I’d left, after the weekend had finished, I found out who she was.’ He claimed to have then ‘cut contact’.
The problem, for Harry, is that this is simply not true. We’d in fact met on more than one occasion. And I remained close to a few of his chums for many years.
What’s more, I had proof. Under a process called disclosure, in which it is mandatory for both sides in a legal action to release any relevant information to the court, I’d had to allow my social media accounts and mobile phone records going back years to be forensically examined by our lawyers.
They unearthed, among other things, a series of private and somewhat embarrassing Facebook messages that Harry and I exchanged in the weeks after our 2011 weekend in Hampshire, and records of phone calls and text messages in June 2012 (more of which later). These were then revealed as evidence in open court.
All of which made headlines around the world, thanks largely to an exchange in which Harry and I had chatted about the ‘naughtiness’ we’d enjoyed together. There was also a cringe-making paragraph in which ‘cuddles’ were mentioned.
While these references were entirely innocent (as I shall explain later) the publication of our correspondence triggered a tsunami of interest, turning me briefly into a global news story and sparking an avalanche of commentary on social media. Some of it was highly entertaining, other bits were nasty and abusive.
The real story behind the private messages, which became public because of Harry’s litigation, is both simultaneously less prurient, and much more interesting. Which is why I now feel justified in setting the record straight about the prince and me.

TIMELINE OF EVENTS

April 2015
Former Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris, then associate director of the Press reform group Hacked Off, emails disgraced F1 boss Max Mosley asking for funds to pursue investigations against the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.

2015-2016
Mosley, Hugh Grant and Harris provide loans and payments to convicted phone hacker Graham Johnson to dig dirt on the paper. Mosley also promises to put pressure on hacker Glenn Mulcaire, who had denied working for Mail newspapers, by threatening to stop paying him.

December 2016
Graham Johnson and Dr Harris prepare a memo titled ‘Operation Bluebird’, intended for another financial backer, Geoff Stunt, father of socialite James Stunt, who boasts that he is the godson of gangland Mr Big Terry Adams.

The memo outlines a co-ordinated plan to target Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), claiming Johnson has used funding to pay ‘ten whistleblowers and researchers’ and for the ‘acquisition of evidence (documents and testimony)’. The document names high-profile figures, including Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant, who are expected to bring claims.

February 2018
The Daily Mail reveals the existence of leaflets which Max Mosley had denied knowledge of in his pivotal 2008 privacy trial about his support for his father Sir Oswald’s post-war fascist party, including the distribution of racist leaflets. Mosley orders Johnson to ‘beef up the propaganda and… launch claims against ANL’.

11 July 2019
Dr Evan Harris emails former Lib Dem MP Sir Simon Hughes outlining what Associated Newspapers would later call the ‘limitation camouflage scheme’. Dr Harris writes that, to deter the Mail from arguing that claimants are too late to bring their claims (limitation), the law firm think it is best for stories to be published on a website controlled by Johnson, which can be referred to as the basis for claims being raised.

August 2019
Prince Harry meets celebrity barrister David Sherborne at Sir Elton John’s villa in the south of France. Sherborne advises Harry to hire his own lawyer.

March 2021
Solicitor Anjlee Sangani and Graham Johnson meet private investigator Gavin Burrows, who allegedly confesses to landline tapping, voicemail interception, and targeting Ms Hurley, Prince Harry and others on behalf of ANL.

August 2021
Mr Burrows receives substantial financial inducements. He signs a ‘Life Rights Agreement’ for a book with a £25,000 advance and a ‘General Services Agreement’, dated August 2, for a £5,000 monthly retainer. A witness statement is drafted for Mr Burrows, containing explosive confessions of illegal acts commissioned by the Mail.

January 2022
Prince Harry emails Baroness (Doreen) Lawrence directly. He informs her that his lawyer, David Sherborne, has come across material suggesting her bank accounts and telephone were monitored during the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation, and that the information was sold to the Press. At Harry’s suggestion, Baroness Lawrence meets Sherborne and Sangani at the five-star Corinthia Hotel.

March–July 2022
The relationship between Gavin Burrows and Graham Johnson collapses over money and book rights. In March 2022, an altercation occurs when Burrows turns up at Johnson’s house, resulting in a bitter dispute. This culminates in Burrows issuing a formal breach of contract claim against Johnson.

October 2022
The group privacy claims against Associated Newspapers are officially launched in a blaze of publicity by Prince Harry, Baroness Lawrence, Sir Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost and Sir Simon Hughes. Associated Newspapers immediately and vehemently denies the allegations, releasing statements that describe the claims as ‘preposterous’ and ‘completely groundless’.

March 9, 2023
Gavin Burrows approaches Associated claiming that evidence/research in many claims has been made up, and provides a witness statement to Associated Newspapers denying he ever worked for Mail newspapers.

September 2025
Burrows provides a further sensational witness statement and insists that he never carried out any unlawful work for the Mail titles and claims the original statement was a fiction created by the claimants’ team.

December 11, 2025
Private investigator Jonathan Rees, a former prime suspect in the unsolved Daniel Morgan axe murder, tells Channel 4 Dispatches that Johnson offered him £2,500 a month for life to make a statement implicating the Mail.

January 2026
Prince Harry appears in the witness box. Early in the trial, he gives oral evidence. He faces gruelling cross-examination from ANL’s counsel, Antony White KC.

The trial sees explosive clashes between the claimants’ barrister, David Sherborne, and former Mail editors and journalists. When Sherborne aggressively accuses Paul Henderson, former Mail on Sunday investigations editor, of paying Burrows for unlawful information, Henderson furiously fires back from the witness box: ‘Absolutely not. It’s another lie… These are extreme and grotesque claims that never, ever happened.’

Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre also provides a staunch defence of the paper’s journalism, defending its ethical standards and rejecting the claims as appalling.

March 23, 2026
Gavin Burrows takes the stand. Deemed a ‘hostile witness’ by the claimants, he repeatedly denies working for ANL and accuses Graham Johnson of being a ‘conman’ who ‘stitched’ him up to create false evidence.

Late March 2026
The trial ends.

July 7, 2026
Mr Justice Nicklin hands down his judgment.

Click to reveal more

Friday night was party night, and after a long week working for The Mail on Sunday, I had on June 8, 2012, gone for drinks with friends.
We ended up at the Hurlingham Club in Fulham where, some time after midnight, I’d received a message from the chum who had hosted that raucous shooting weekend six months earlier. I am not revealing his identity in this article because to do so would betray his loyalty. Suffice to say that he was a good friend back then of Prince Harry, who has always remained impeccably loyal.
On the night in question, he was organising an impromptu gathering at his Chelsea home and wanted me to come.
In the Facebook banter that Harry and I had exchanged, following our meeting, the prince had given me his phone number. Which was just as well, because when I arrived at the house-party, shortly before 3am on June 9, I needed to use it: My host had by then sent a second message instructing me to call H, who could let me in.
Harry had his own set of keys to the huge Chelsea property and often stayed there (rather than at the Palace) during time off from the Army. He greeted me at the door with an enthusiastic hug and led me downstairs.
In the basement, where there was a sound-proof recording studio, I found 20-odd young people boozing, dancing, and generally misbehaving. Before throwing myself on to the dancefloor, I had a brief chat with Harry, catching up on what we’d both been up to in the six months since we’d last spoken.
The party continued until dawn, when I bade farewell to the last men standing and took a taxi home to bed. Just after 10am, when I woke, I sent the prince a text message.
I must have changed phones dozens of times since then so the messages are lost now and I can’t now remember what exactly we discussed.
But Trooping the Colour was imminent, and Harry had mentioned at the party that he was required to attend a related event early that morning. So I think I was asking whether he’d made it. I recall finding it hilarious that he was undertaking formal engagements following an almost entirely sleepless night.
Little did I know that 14 years later, these small, harmless exchanges would be raked over in coverage of the court case.

So how did a 27-year-old trainee journalist, who could barely afford an H&M dress and was living in a shared flat at the wrong end of the King’s Road, find herself involved with the third in line to the throne?
Like much in life, it was an accident, for my background is neither blue-blooded nor particularly privileged.
My father, Nigel Griffiths, worked as assistant editor on the Evening Standard, then the Mail’s sister newspaper. My mother, Fiona, was a secretary. We lived in a vibrant, if decidedly unglamorous, corner of Shepherd’s Bush. I attended a private girls’ school next door to Kensington Palace, so members of the Royal Family were hardly an unfamiliar sight.
During my teens, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s son Euan (whom I had met via mutual friends) had briefly been a good friend.
Late one night, Cherie Blair had discovered us curled up on the sofa at No 10, watching a movie. Dressed in a nightie, she’d robustly informed me that teenage girlfriends were unwelcome in her Catholic household and booted me out into the kitchen and told me to order a taxi home.
It was the small hours of the morning and when I rang the minicab office and told them where I needed to be collected from, they thought it was a prank and refused to send a car.I had no cash, and no means of getting home. After some pleading, Downing Street police officers agreed to flag down a cab and ask it to take me to my home in Shepherd’s Bush. I had to promise the driver that I would wake my parents to pay my fare.
My father, Nigel, was both quite amused by the whole thing and also mildly outraged at Cherie’s failure to give me a tenner for a trip home. But, despite being an Evening Standard executive, he rightly concluded that turning Mrs Blair’s regrettable treatment of a vulnerable teenage girl into a news story would almost certainly cross a line which, even then, I was not prepared to cross.
At Leeds University, where I went to study politics, my life was a social whirl. I worked hard, partied even harder, and made wonderful, lifelong friends. Most of my chums were lovely, everyday people but a few had what might be called glamorous connections.
A boy in my friend circle went out with a girl who shared a student home in Leeds with a Zimbabwean law student named Chelsy Davy.

Prince Harry and Chelsy Davy, 2006

Chelsy was, of course, the girlfriend of Prince Harry, who would often visit her in Leeds, popping up at some wild house parties or occasionally venturing out to the city’s lively bars and nightclubs.
Harry’s privacy, at such gatherings, was always respected. There would be occasional gossip about his decadent behaviour among the undergraduates, but the details rarely if ever found their way into the media. The university’s student newspaper, on which I worked (and eventually edited) would never have dreamt of betraying the couple’s secrets.
By the late 2000s, when I had graduated and begun working at The Mail on Sunday, dad had retired and was living in Ibiza. So I began spending long family weekends and holidays on the Spanish party island.
It was on one such trip, in 2011, that I was introduced to a charming film producer a couple of years my senior who’d been to Ampleforth and knew Prince Harry.
We’d met at a party and, by a twist of fate, found ourselves sitting in adjacent seats. While somewhat bleary-eyed, on an easyJet flight back to London, we chatted, realised that we had friends in common, swapped phone numbers, and became chums.
My new friend had an intriguing background. His late father was a former soldier who had made a fortune as a military adviser-cum-fixer to a Middle Eastern monarch he’d met at Sandhurst.
When the father died in 2007, he’d left a fortune estimated at £200million. The chap I’d met in Ibiza was, in other words, one of Britain’s wealthiest young men. A wonderful chap, who wore his privilege lightly, he was therefore able to host some spectacular parties. And that is how I found myself being invited down to Hampshire for that fateful shooting weekend.

Charlotte Griffiths

In the witness box, the prince continually claimed: ‘My social circles were not leaky.’ The problem was that this was demonstrably wrong.
The court heard how my first boss, Katie Nicholl, had over the years attended a number of events at which he and his various friends been present, from polo events organised by Cartier to showbusiness parties at Boujis, then a fashionable Kensington nightclub. From time to time, they’d not just spoken to the prince’s chums, but also chatted with Harry personally.
I believe to this day that Harry misunderstands how stories leak out. It’s simple really: One friend will tell a juicy morsel of gossip to five trusted friends, then they in turn will tell five more people and before you know it word has spread.
Mostly it’s harmless. Some people, many in fact, leak on purpose. Because I understand this process, I tend in my personal life to be more cautious than most when I hear something confidential. People naturally assume the journalist in the room will be the leak, so it can have the opposite effect.

Cressida Bonas

To illustrate this point, my witness statement for the trial told how our mutual friend had actually invited me to a second shooting weekend, the following year.
Harry was unable to attend this one, due to Army commitments, but his new girlfriend, an aspiring actress named Cressida Bonas, had been invited. So were Prince William and his wife, Catherine, whom he’d married the previous year.
When we sat down to dinner on the Friday night of that house party, in December 2012, it emerged that William had come alone. He explained that Catherine was suffering from severe morning sickness. The fact she was pregnant with their first child was, at the time, unknown, and would have been a major front page news story.
But like everyone else at the gathering, I kept the information to myself, allowing the Palace to make a formal announcement three days later.

Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas at ‘We Day UK’, 2014

The weekend was memorable for a second reason: Catherine’s absence meant Cressida was required to sit next to William at lunch. Inevitably she felt that she was being assessed as a potential addition to The Firm, so found the experience extremely ­awkward. Not least because, despite being Prince Harry’s semi-official consort, she, at the time, remained very much in love with her then ex-boyfriend Harry Wentworth-Stanley.
In the months and years to come, I would become quite friendly with Cressida, who is a fun and generous woman.
Pressure from Prince Harry’s friends, who were understandably keen for him to find a happily-ever-­after, meant she kept their relationship going for longer than it might have, but she eventually extricated herself from the whole thing, and in 2020 married Wentworth-Stanley.
By then, my career had taken off. In fact, I was delighted to break the news of the couple’s engagement (with their consent!) to readers of my weekly Mail on Sunday column.

Under cross-examination, Harry seemed to deal with all these awkward facts by suggesting I was some sort of imposter.
So it was that earlier this year I was forced to endure a torrid session in the witness box with Harry’s dreadful barrister David Sherborne claiming I was some sort of fantasist who had been ‘deliberately overplaying’ my friendship with Harry.
This, he repeatedly implied, was to conceal the fact that I had been using illegal practices to obtain stories. Furthermore, he said, I had completely ‘invented’ the anecdote in my witness statement about Prince William and his wife’s morning sickness.
If the latter was true, it would follow that I was guilty of perjury, for which the maximum sentence is seven years imprisonment. To be falsely accused of such a serious crime, in a very public arena, was deeply upsetting and I remain appalled to this day that the prince chose to participate in this grotesque charade.
In fact, I neither embellished nor downplayed what had happened. My job was simply to set out the facts, as required by both his lawyers and mine.
What is even more galling, given Sherborne’s line of attack, is that in the months leading up to my court appearance, Harry’s circle had been very ‘leaky’ indeed.
I can now reveal that, during the summer of 2025, a close adviser to Harry and Meghan had contacted me out of the blue and invited me to lunch at the Ivy restaurant in London.
As a result of information given to me at that lunch meeting, I placed a series of stories in The Mail on Sunday that portrayed the couple in a positive light. This included a front-page article, which ran in July, suggesting that Harry and Meghan were attempting to rebuild their relationship with King Charles. It revolved around the fact that Liam Maguire and Meredith Maines, Harry and Meghan’s US PR chiefs, were to hold clear-the-air talks with the monarch’s aide Tobyn Andreae in London.

Secret meeting between Head of Comms for the King, Tobyn Andreae and Meredith Maines, Head of Comms for The Sussexes, 2025

I was duly tipped off about the meeting, which was held at the Royal Over-Seas League near Clarence House. The attendees settled themselves on a balcony plainly visible from the public park below. The Mail on Sunday arranged for a photographer to capture the cosy but very embarrassing scene.

In a development which speaks volumes for their integrity, ‘sources close to the Sussexes’ then briefed the Daily Telegraph that they were ‘very frustrated’ that the pictures of the Royal Over-Seas League gathering had ended up in The Mail on Sunday – suggesting, quite falsely, that the Palace was responsible for a grotesque betrayal of trust.

Now, just six months later, the prince was impugning my integrity, while swearing that his people never leaked and that stories that ended up in my newspaper must have been obtained illegally.

Prince Harry’s efforts to discredit me had another unintended consequence: My enforced sharing of those ten Facebook messages we’d exchanged over that seven-week period after the shooting weekend in 2011 when we’d first met.
In court, the prince had said under oath that he’d met me just once. He added that he’d then cut me off when he’d learned of what I did for a living.
Harry’s Facebook messages, sent from an account he’d maintained under the username ‘Spike Wells’, indicated otherwise.
We’d actually corresponded from December 4 until January 22, 2012. And it was me, rather than Harry, who brought our Facebook conversation to an end: I’d failed to respond to a message in which he suggested he’d be coming to London the next month:

“I’ve been seriously busy since I last saw u but plan on getting back in the mix for Feb! U best be around.”

Or, to use social media parlance describing someone who fails to respond to a message, it was me who had ‘ghosted’ the prince.
But all these revelations came at a cost: Publication of the messages turned me into a global internet news story.
Today, I am a happily married 42-year-old mother of three with a wonderful husband. My years of partying until dawn are long gone and I have no particular desire to relive them.
But suddenly those messages, in which I had spoken about the ‘fun weekend of naughtiness’ and Harry had recalled our ‘movie snuggles’, were interpreted as evidence of some sort of romantic liaison.
In fact, we’d merely shared a blanket during a film screening in a sitting room with other people present on a Sunday afternoon. The ‘naughtiness’ referred to excessive alcohol consumption.
A reference by Harry to a ‘Cinderella’s shoe’ in a separate message inspired further misleading headlines suggesting we had been intimate. In fact, the shoe was one of those brogues which had disappeared after I borrowed them in order to head outside for a cigarette. The truth was, in other words, rather less exciting than headlines suggested.
As a journalist, I should stress that I have absolutely no problem with being written about. People who hold others to account for a living shouldn’t complain when they are scrutinised.
That said, I was saddened, if not entirely surprised, that in the sewers of social media, where women are routinely abused and objectified, I was bombarded with tens of thousands of messages, dubbing me a ‘harlot’ and a ‘slut’ and worse. At one point Lady Colin Campbell, the sensationalist royal commentator, saw fit to call me a ‘drunkard’. The hatred and bile was sickening.
And the prince? The truth is, I rather liked what I briefly knew of the old Harry. He could be mischievous, irreverent and occasionally exasperating, but he was also funny company.
The man he has become is someone I barely recognise and someone for whom I have lost all respect.
After all, it was Harry’s PR machine which during the court case attempted to paint him as the victim of a predatory siren.
At one point, Maguire provided hostile reporters with a deeply misogynistic briefing that I deliberately went to the house party to seduce Prince Harry in a ‘honeytrap’ operation.
Such claims were all nonsense (what sort of ‘honeytrap’ stays silent for 15 years?) As are suggestions that Harry and I were ever intimately involved.
In truth, I would have taken details of our relationship to my grave, had I not been dragged to court to be casually smeared by a royal whose arrogance and sense of entitlement has now rotted whatever moral compass he once possessed.
This is the same Harry who stands on stages pontificating about the evils of social media while fronting gooey campaigns about online bullying. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Before he dragged me into court, I’d almost forgotten about our brief friendship. Now I rather wish I could erase it altogether.