- Malo Corsino
- BBC News
Prince Harry has claimed that his brother, Prince William, physically assaulted him, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, which says it has seen a copy of the duke’s forthcoming memoirs, titled Spare.
The newspaper reported that the book talks about the dispute between the two brothers over Megan, Prince Harry’s wife.
The Guardian newspaper quoted Prince Harry as saying: “(William) grabbed my collar, tore off my necklace, and threw me to the ground.”
BBC News has not seen a copy of the book.
The notes will not be published until next Tuesday, but the Guardian said it had obtained a copy amid what it described as “tight security ahead of the launch”.
Buckingham Palace did not respond to a BBC request for comment.
And the book says – according to the Guardian newspaper – that the dispute broke out due to comments made by Prince William to Prince Harry at his home in London in 2019.
The newspaper says that Prince Harry said in the book that his brother was critical of his marriage to Meghan Markle, and that Prince William described her as “difficult”, “brusque” and “rude”.
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The Duke of Sussex was reported to have written that his brother was a “parrot of what the papers say” as the confrontation escalated.
Prince Harry is said to have described what happened next, including an alleged physical altercation.
He added: “He put a glass of water down, called me by another name, and then turned to me. It all happened very, very quickly.”
He said, “He grabbed my collar, tore off my necklace, and threw me on the ground.”
He added, “I fell on the dog’s eating bowl, which cracked under my back, and its pieces hit me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and asked him to get out.”
Martin Bingley, a journalist for the US Guardian website, who wrote the article, said he did not contact Prince William’s communications team to confirm the account of what happened.
The journalist said his article was “a report on the book Harry wrote, which is Harry’s novel.”
Pengelly told the BBC: “We are dealing here with caution in reporting the news, and we did not call what happened a fight because Harry says he did not fight back.”
Prince Harry wrote that his brother urged him to respond but he refused to do so, according to the Guardian, but Prince William later appeared “remorseful and apologetic”.
The pictures indicate that Prince Harry regularly wore a black necklace on occasions, and on his foreign tours with Megan, until September 2019.
The publishers have not confirmed whether the leaked excerpts from the book are authentic. Prince Harry recently spoke about his troubled relationship with his brother.
In the documentary (Harry and Meghan), which is broadcast on Netflix, Prince Harry describes a meeting he attended with his brother and father, the current king.
Prince Harry described the meeting, which took place in early 2020, which was also attended by the late Queen, as “terrifying”.
“It was terrifying for my brother to yell at me and my father to say things that simply weren’t true, and my grandmother would just sit there quietly and take it all in,” he said.
The Guardian newspaper says that Prince Harry explains the details of a meeting that took place with his father, Charles, then Prince of Wales, and Prince William, after the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip, in April 2021.
And Prince Harry wrote, according to the newspaper, that his father stood between him and Prince William, and told them, “Please, boys, do not make my final years miserable.”
“I would like to restore my relationship with my father, and I would like to restore my relationship with my brother,” the prince said in a trailer for an interview to be broadcast on January 8, ahead of the book’s release.
But he told an ITV presenter: “They have never shown any willingness to reconcile,” although it was not clear who Prince Harry was referring to.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment on this.
The book “The Alternative”, written by memoirist J.R. Moringer, for which the prince would be paid millions of dollars, was previously thought to be top secret, with little known about its content.
“This is the story of Prince Harry,” the publisher, Penguin Random House, said in a publicity statement last October.
He added: ‘alternative ‘ With pure honesty, a landmark print full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love in the face of grief.”