30 March 2025, 10:36
Sophie Chandauka and Harry.
Picture:
Getty
A charity fundraising event location fell through because Prince Harry was filming a Netflix show and wanted to bring a camera crew along, the chairwoman of the charity has said.
Harry and Dr Sophie Chandauka, the head of the Sentebale charity he co-founded in 2006, have been locked in a war of words over the past week.
Harry, his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and charity trustees stepped down from the charity over concerns about the way the charity was being run.
The initial dispute is said to have arisen around a decision to focus fundraising in Africa.
On Saturday Dr Chandauka accused Harry of “bullying”, and made more bombshell claims on Sunday morning – claiming that Harry’s filming commitments had scuppered a charity event location.
She also said that Sentebale lost sponsors when Harry and Meghan left the UK, but she wasn’t allowed to bring it up.
Dr Chandauka claimed that Harry tried to kick her out of the charity and that he hired board members without asking her first.
Harry and Dr Chandauka (right).
Picture:
Getty
Of the fundraising polo event in Miami in April last year, Sophie Chandauka told Sky News: “We had a very generous family that was happy for us to use their polo grounds at a material discount and then, about a month before the event was about to take place, Prince Harry called the team and said ‘I’m doing a Netflix show, and I would love to bring a camera crew so that I can include some footage in this show’, and so the team called me and tell me, ‘oh, Prince Harry’s made this request, so we’re doing the things’.
“I said ‘you can’t be doing the things without seeking consent from the property owners, the sponsors, all the guests’.
“Nobody signed up into being on a Netflix show and so we have this discussion about the need to talk to everybody, we come up with draft agreements and, of course, the venue owner says this is now a commercial undertaking, so here are my terms.
“We couldn’t afford it so now we lost the venue, so we went to another venue, and we were lucky enough that through Prince Harry’s connections, actually, and a friend of his, there was another family that was prepared to host.
“The show went on but there was a lot of disruption, a lot of people were unhappy because we worked on this for months and on actual day, we had Prince Harry, which is always wonderful.”
Sophie Chandauka.
Picture:
Alamy
Dr Chandauka also claimed that Harry asked her to defend his wife Meghan after negative media coverage.
She said: “The duchess decided to attend, but she told us she wasn’t attending, and she brought a friend, a very famous friend, so you can imagine all of the activity that goes with these additional amazing people.
“We’re excited about it, we would have been really excited that we know ahead of time, but we didn’t, and so the choreography went badly on stage because we had too many people on stage.
“The international press captured this, and there was a lot of talk about the duchess and the choreography on stage and whether she should have been there and her treatment of me.
“Prince Harry asked me to issue some sort of a statement in support of the duchess and I said I wouldn’t, not because I didn’t care about the duchess, but because I knew what would happen if I did so, number one, and number two, because we cannot be an extension of the Sussexes.”
The Duke of Sussex (2nd right) with Argentine professional polo player Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Figueras (left), Sentebale Chair Sophie Chandauka (2nd left), and Sentebale CEO Richard Miller (right).
Picture:
Alamy
Announcing their resignation from the charity, Harry and Seeiso wrote that the relationship between the board and the chair “broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation”.
Dr Chandauka said that the princes were guilty of “harassment and bullying at scale.”
Dr Chandauka previously said Harry’s “toxic” brand was “the number one risk” for the organisation. She claimed that Prince Harry wanted “to force a failure” at the charity “and then come to the rescue”.
A source close to the former trustees of the Sentebale charity have described Dr Chandauka’s claims of being bullied and harassed, or that she was briefed against by Prince Harry as ‘completely baseless’.