Cheating scandal: Kensington Palace was concerned the idea of William hurting Kate would destroy his…
In 2019, Prince William was accused of cheating on Kate Middleton during her pregnancy with their youngest child, Prince Louis. Although the gossip surrounding the Prince and Princess of Wales was never proven, Omid Scobie revisited the scandal in his new book, Endgame.
Unfortunately, if a rumor’s left to kind of do its own thing it can run 20 laps around the world before you even think about what [and] how you want to kind of address it,” the royal expert said in an interview.
Tabloids in the U.S. and U.K. published headlines alluding to William having an extramarital relationship with longtime friend and Marchioness of Cholmondeley Rose Hanbury, but the future king didn’t publicly acknowledge it.
“They never addressed it, so those rumors will never go away even though there’s no truth to suggest that they are true,” Scobie stated.
While writing Endgame, Scobie was mindful of the lack of evidence surrounding the running narrative.
“I was very careful in the book to really focus on this, as the allegations against William, Kate’s and their fallout with Rose Hanbury,” he explained. “For legal reasons, there are so many things that one can’t go into but I thought it was really important, even if a rumor is a rumor.”
“And I really don’t see proof that there is more to this than just a tittle-tattle, you know,” he noted.”I thought it was really interesting to analyze how the palace dealt with that.”
According to Scobie, Kensington Palace was concerned that the idea of William hurting Kate would destroy his public image.
“The worst case scenarios that they feared would happen, you know, just those rumors themselves were going to have enough impact, negatively, on William’s reputation,” he continued.
Scobie later inculpated The Firm of leaking stories about Prince Harry to reduce the bad press around William’s marriage.
“We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis … that’s something that’s incredibly damaging, I think, for William,” he shared. “It probably looks even worse, actually, that there was a kind of willingness to throw Harry under the bus simply to make these things disappear.”
Despite the Wales’ silence, attorneys with London law firm Harbottle & Lewis made it clear that the ongoing claims were unethical and could create legal problems for papers.
“In addition to being false and highly damaging, the publication of false speculation in respect of our clients’ private life also constitutes a breach of his privacy pursuant to Article 8 of the European Convention to Human Rights,” the lawyers said in a statement at the time.
