Prince Harry lost a venue hired for his African charity Sentebale because he wanted to bring a Netflix camera crew along with him, the chairperson of the charity has claimed. 

In an interview with the UK’s Sky News Sunday morning, Dr Sophie Chandauka  said an opportunity for Sentebale to do a charity Polo Challenge in Miami was ruined when Harry made the request to bring his Netflix camera crew along.

Chandauka said: 

“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,’” she said. 

“And so the team called me and told 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 to being on a Netflix show.’” 

She added: “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.”

Harry was able to come up with another venue for the event in April 2024, after which there was much scrutiny of Meghan Markle’s presence and the choreography on stage, with Markle requesting Chandauka move to the other side of her, away from Harry, for photographs. 

Chandauka told Sky News about the replacement event: 

“We’re excited about it. We would have been really excited had we known ahead of time, but we didn’t,’ Dr Chandauka said. 

“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.”

Harry and his co-founder quit the charity last week, issuing a statement slamming the operations of Chandauka and her colleagues. The chairperson remains in position, and she slammed this statement Sunday morning calling it:

“A damaging piece of news to the outside world without informing me or my country directors’ was an ‘attack’ and ‘an example of harassment and bullying at scale.”

The Daily Mail newspaper reached out to Prince Harry’s team for comment, and quoted their response describing Dr Chandauka’s claims that she was bullied and harassed, briefed against by Prince Harry, or that the Sussex machine was “unleashed on her” as “completely baseless.”