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Prince Harry and Meghan’s “Worldwide Privacy Tour” is on a collision course with real world consequences in two courtrooms this week.
Having achieved the rare feat of being reviled on both sides of the Atlantic, the Montecito moaners now face spiraling legal bills and a court challenge to Harry’s US immigration visa.
On Tuesday, in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom, the Heritage Foundation is making a bid to unseal Harry’s immigration records, to see if he lied about his past drug use, or otherwise was given preferential treatment when granted a visa.
This latest trouble for the Duke of Sussex comes because he ’fessed up to using marijuana, magic mushrooms and cocaine in his tell-all memoir “Spare.”
That can be grounds to reject a visa application.
The same day, in London, Harry will be cross-examined in his lawsuit against Britain’s Mirror Group Newspapers, which he claims invaded his privacy illegally when he was a carousing youth.
He says the media attention made him paranoid and ruined his relationship with former flame Chelsy Davy.
But the public sympathy he once counted on in his complaints about tabloids and the paparazzi has all but evaporated after he spent the last three years invading the privacy of his own poor family.
He invited cameras into his home for a Netflix reality series, aired every piece of dirty laundry he could remember in his book, sat by on camera as his wife disrespected his grandmother, the queen, with an elaborate mock curtsy and generally did his best to destroy the British monarchy, all while cashing in on his royal connections.
Netflix
Oblivious to the hypocrisy, Harry has declared his “life’s work” is reforming the media, even though his father told him it was a “suicide mission.”
But his multiple lawsuits could end up costing him $20 million, more than the cost of his Montecito, Calif., mansion, Newsweek reported, without ever achieving the change he fancies he can force.
“I think Harry has taken it upon himself to sponsor the London legal village, and as a lawyer I welcome that,” quipped UK-based attorney Mark Stephens. “Whether it’s prudent is another matter.”
Harry justifies this fool’s errand by claiming that the media is “inciting hatred on myself and on my wife and on my children.”
He should look in the mirror.
World is a stage
After using the Oprah interview to attack the royal family as heartless and racist, a charge they have since slid away from, Harry and Meghan’s popularity nose-dived in the UK.
The attitude on this side of the pond was more blasé because nobody cares about the monarchy, and nobody cares about another B-list actress with delusions of grandeur.
But then came the “South Park” parody of a “dumb prince and his stupid wife” in the viral “Worldwide Privacy Tour” episode, in which Canadian prince and princess characters jet around the world in a publicity blitz to stop people talking about them.
Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The show was a devastating blow to their carefully cultivated image as victims.
Harry’s recollections in “Spare” of unfair treatment by his family when he was growing up also fell flat when he cited such outrages as a bedroom smaller than his older brother’s.
The final nail in the coffin of the couple’s reputation was their tale of a “near catastrophic” car-chase through Manhattan last month that nobody believed, considering the state of traffic in this town, and that the cops said was wildly overblown.
The Sussexes finally got the message and last week let it be known that they were going to “stop making royal-bashing Netflix shows and tell-all books after huge backlash,” as The Sun put it.
Too late for silence
But it was too little, too late.
Friends of the late queen vented about the “cruelty” the narcissistic couple had inflicted on the queen in her last years on earth.
The Sussexes’ stream of vitriol began with the Oprah interview when the queen’s beloved husband was dying in the hospital.
“The idea that they are now going to take a vow of silence after all the damage they have done,” a friend of the monarch told the Daily Beast, “even if it was true, which I very much doubt, will do nothing to assuage the anger and disgust some of her friends feel about what they did to the Queen in her final years.”
Harry and Meghan now live in isolation in a gated enclave of ageing billionaires, estranged from his family, and hers, through their own selfishness.
Their collapsing fairytale is a Greek tragedy that everyone could see coming.
Let’s hope for the sake of their own children that they have the insight to accept the price of hubris and learn enough humility to apologize to their families for the pain they have caused.