The Kensington Palace aide who first put bullying allegations against on record was asked about the scandal during a TV interview.

Jason Knauf was press secretary to Meghan, , and Princess Kate in 2018 as relations within the royal family were disintegrating.

In October of that year, he sent an email to Prince William’s private secretary stating: “I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year.”

Now he has given a sit-down interview to 60 Minutes Australia—an exceptionally rare move for a royal staffer, who still works for William on his Earthshot Prize.

Knauf was asked on camera about the backlash against him after his email got leaked to the media: “It’s tough but it’s probably quite good. Someone who is helping other people how to deal with the public eye… you probably have to take your own medicine sometimes.

“You can’t choose just to take the fun stuff in any job and that applies to the prince and princess [of Wales] as well as everyone working for them. I wouldn’t change anything.”

Why It Matters

Knauf not only accused Meghan of bullying but also supplied her private text messages and emails to the Court of Appeal in London as part of a lawsuit she filed against The Mail on Sunday over a private letter she sent her father.

The trove of documents showed she had instructed him to brief the authors of a bombshell biography, Finding Freedom, which she had, through her lawyers, denied cooperating with.

Meghan apologized to the court and said she had forgotten she had instructed Knauf, while the aide became entrenched as a Sussex enemy in the minds of Harry and Meghan’s fans.

The fact he commented at all on the scandal is exceptionally rare for someone who continues to work for William via the Earthshot Prize, though he quit the palace around the same time as his bullying allegations were made.

What To Know

While Knauf did answer a number of questions on an explosive subject, he also clearly chose his words carefully and made sure to include some positive comments about the Sussexes: “I’d worked really closely with the two of them and we had lots of great times.

“Working on their wedding was an amazing, magical experience and I wish them absolutely all the best with their lovely family.”

He was also asked about the collapse of Harry’s relationship with Prince William: “We have ups and downs in family. Even when you really love someone, you can have times when you don’t want to spend that much time with them.

“It’s very difficult to have this stuff play out in the public eye. But he’s [William’s] chosen to keep his thoughts on it private and I think all of us who know him really have to respect that we should do the same. But I will say of course it’s been hard and sa,d especially for all of us who know both of them.”

What People Are Saying

60 Minutes Australia also asked whether Prince William eventually becoming king might rekindle the brothers’ relationship: “I can’t speculate on the future. They achieved a lot together and none of that can ever be taken away.

“This may be an extraordinary family that everyone gets to talk about and write about and be interviewed and all of that stuff but at the end of the day, it’s a family.”

Prince Harry described Meghan’s reaction to the leak of the bullying allegations in his 2021 mental health documentary The Me You Can’t See: “Before the Oprah interview had aired, because of [the media’s] headlines, and that combined effort of the firm and the media to smear her, I was woken up in the middle of the night to her crying in her pillow because she doesn’t want to wake me up because I’m already carrying too much.

“That’s heartbreaking. I held her, we talked, she cried, and she cried, and she cried.”

In his book, Harry acknowledged a “poisoned” atmosphere in the shared private office at Kensington Palace in 2018.

“Nerves were shattering, people were sniping. In such a climate there was no such thing as constructive criticism. All feedback was seen as an affront, an insult. More than once a staff member slumped across their desk and wept.

“For all this, every bit of it, Willy blamed one person. Meg. He told me so several times, and he got cross when I told him he was out of line.

“He was just repeating the press narrative, spouting fake stories he’d read or been told. The great irony, I told him, was that the real villains were the people he’d imported into the office, people from government, who didn’t seem impervious to this kind of strife—but addicted to it.

“They had a knack for backstabbing, a talent for intrigue, and they were constantly setting our two groups of staff against each other.”

Williams Brown is chief royal correspondent for Regalrumination.com, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly , at and read his stories on Regalrumination.com’s .

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