The much-talked-about security of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan is desperately needed, now that it has become clear that the police have had to intervene nine times since they moved to California in July 2020.
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“We had to leave Canada because the press had leaked our location, the borders were closing due to the coronavirus and I was about to lose my security,” Prince Harry said in the much-discussed interview with Oprah. The couple moved to the Montecito neighborhood, near Santa Barbara, California, in July 2020.
From public documents provided by the news agency PA Media it appears that the sheriff has already been summoned to the domain of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex nine times. In July, the month of the move, the officers were called up four times. This concerns telephone calls or an activation of the alarm, often in the early hours. On Christmas Eve, agents were called up because a man had entered the premises at 4.13 pm unsolicited. The day after Christmas, a 37-year-old Ohio man was arrested after entering the premises, but was later released. The most recent call was at 2:21 a.m. on February 16, when the alarm went off. Prince Harry and Meghan and the police do not comment on the incidents.
Security costs
The security details of the couple have long been fodder for the media. When Harry and Meghan announced that they wanted to stand on their own two feet, also financially, they still counted on the protection of the royal family. “I was born a prince and inherited the security risk, I never thought they would stop protecting me,” said Prince Harry. “That came as a shock.” Meghan said she was writing letters to the royal family, begging her to continue to protect her husband. Harry would receive persistent death threats for his title as a prince.
As members of the royal family, the couple were protected around the clock by six Metropolitan Police bodyguards who were employed full-time. That bill was then estimated by British media at 600,000 British pounds per year (more than 700,000 euros).
Prince Harry announced that he has not been receiving any money from the palace since the beginning of 2020. The couple therefore had to pay for the costs of his security, after the then President Donald Trump had also made it clear that he would not intervene financially.
In the meantime, the couple has found themselves financially on their feet, through million-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify, among others. Harry said in the interview with Oprah that those deals “were certainly not part of the plan,” but that he “had to pay the security costs for his family. Security for Archie, the couple’s two-year-old son, was never planned, according to Meghan. The couple had an estimated fortune of 30 million British pounds (more than 35 million euros) before the exit from the royal family, which mainly stemmed from the legacies of Harry’s mother and great-grandmother.
Watch the trailer for Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan here:
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