Prince Harry recalls the moment he found out Chelsy Davy was being followed
"She was freaking out"
Prince Harry and Chelsy Davy dated on and off from 2004 to 2010, with the former couple claiming that the media attention and lack of privacy were the reasons behind their split.
This week, their relationship resurfaced amid Prince Harry's High Court phone-hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers, with the Royal alleging that both his and Davy's phones were hacked repeatedly during their relationship.
This is not the first time Prince Harry has spoken out about the invasion of privacy experienced by his former girlfriend, recalling their difficulty dating under the eyes of the press in his recent memoir Spare.
Prince Harry's relationship with the Zimbabwean heiress was kept extremely private at the time, with the former couple determined to stay out of the spotlight. But as Spare reports, that was made impossible by photographers, and their relationship suffered because of it.
In one passage in Spare, Harry recalls discovering that the press were following Chelsy, even discovering a tracker under her car.
"Chels told me that paps had been following her to and from lectures - she asked me to do something about it," he recalled. "I told her I'd try. I told her how sorry I was."
He continued: "When she was back in Cape Town she phoned me and said people were tailing her everywhere and it was driving her crazy. She couldn't imagine how they knew where she was and where she'd be. She was freaking out. I talked it over with Marko, who advised me to ask Chels's brother to check the underside of the car. Sure enough: tracking device.
"Chels said again that she just wasn't sure if she was up for this. A lifetime of being stalked? What could I say? I'd miss her, so much. But I completely understood her desire for freedom. If I had a choice, I wouldn't want this life either."
“It was so full-on: crazy and scary and uncomfortable," Chelsy recalled of the time in a 2016 interview with The Times. “I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t cope. I was young, I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible.”
We will continue to update this story.
