Mystery surrounds Manhattan car chase
Apicture paints a thousand words, and yet all we have to describe most of what Prince Harry and Meghan called a “near catastrophic car chase” in New York this week are words.
It is ironic, of course, because the very people the Duke and Duchess of Sussex blamed for the “relentless pursuit” were about a dozen paparazzi determined to photograph them.
Harry, in his memoir Spare, suggested he was unfazed to see himself pictured in the press.
“What I really couldn’t bear was the sound of the photo being taken,” he wrote.
“That click, that terrible noise, from over my shoulder or behind my back or within my peripheral vision, had always triggered me, had always made my heart race … And then, even a little worse, a little more traumatising, came that blinding flash.”
That trauma has scarred his life since the morning of August 31, 1997, when his father Charles appeared in his Balmoral bedroom.
“Darling boy, mummy’s been in a car crash,” the future king told the 12-year-old. “I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”
For years, Harry did not believe Princess Diana was dead, even trying to reopen the investigation into the paparazzi chase in Paris that led to the catastrophic crash.
Writing in Spare, Harry recounted how he became a tabloid target himself, especially as his ways of dealing with grief – drinking, drugs, partying – were so out of step with his royal role.
Then along came Meghan, the bi-racial American actor and the love of his life. Their relationship brought such intense media scrutiny that they left for California in 2020.
“My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t white,” Harry told Oprah Winfrey two years ago.
“Now look at what’s happened. You want to talk about history repeating itself, they’re not going to stop until (Meghan) dies.”
The couple felt safer in the US, they said, away from the hordes of British cameras. After the events of Tuesday in Manhattan, that may no longer be the case.
Upon leaving the Women of Vision Awards, Harry, Meghan and her mother Doria Ragland were pursued through the streets by a “ring of highly aggressive paparazzi”.
“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers,” a Sussex spokesman said.
Their security guard Chris Sanchez told CNN how photographers on cars, scooters and bicycles were “jumping curbs and red lights” in a chase that “could have been fatal”.
After an hour, Harry and Meghan sought shelter at a police station, before hailing Sukhcharn Singh’s taxi to reach a friend’s house on the Upper East Side undetected.
Singh said they were followed by two vehicles before six photographers came “out of nowhere” and “just went crazy with the camera”.
In one interview, he said the claim of a “near catastrophic chase” was “exaggerated”, while in another, he said: “I don’t know what they went through last night, right, because I only had interaction with them for 15 minutes.”
New York Police Department spokesman Julian Phillips said there were “numerous photographers that made their transport challenging”, but that Harry and Meghan arrived home safely and there were “no reported collisions, summonses, injuries or arrests”.
“I would find it hard to believe that there was a twohour high speed chase,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams chimed in, although he acknowledged that even a brief pursuit on Manhattan’s busy streets would be “extremely dangerous”.
As for the photographers, the agency that hired four of them accused the driver of one of the SUVS escorting the royals of “driving in a manner that could be perceived as reckless”. A paparazzi driver, speaking anonymously to Good Morning Britain, also blamed Harry and Meghan’s driver for “making it a catastrophic experience”.
“If they were going 80 mph, I would probably have been going 20 mph behind them and hoping to keep sight of them,” he said.
Aside from his questionable maths – he would quickly have lost the royals had they been travelling at 128km/h while he followed at 32km/h – the driver’s statement pointed to the great mystery of the night.
What happened in the hour before Harry and Meghan climbed into Singh’s taxi?
According to reports, they tried to lose the paparazzi on FDR Drive, a thoroughfare along the East River. The 40mph speed limit is often disregarded by motorists, and in a city filled with celebrities in black SUVS, a fast-moving convoy would not have seemed out of the ordinary.
To reach FDR Drive, they would have had to wind through gridlocked side streets, and yet no vision has been seen of vehicles mounting footpaths in an Italian Jobstyle chase. Indeed, the only paparazzi shots to emerge are of the Sussexes in Singh’s taxi. Surely there are more, offering evidence either way. There is also footage Harry filmed on his phone.
Now that would speak volumes.