The taxi driver who drove Prince Harry, his wife, Meghan Markle, and her mother, Doria Ragland, in New York City spoke out about the “car chase” they went through with paparazzi.
“I don’t think I would call it a chase,” Sukhcharn Singh told The Washington Post on Wednesday, May 17. “I never felt like I was in danger. It wasn’t like a car chase in a movie. They were quiet and seemed scared but it’s New York — it’s safe.”
He then explained that the photographers “kept following us and were coming next to the car,” adding, “They took pictures as we stopped and were filming us.”
Hours beforehand, a spokesperson for Harry, 38, wrote a statement that he and wife Meghan, 41, were involved in an automobile incident.
“Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi,” the spokesperson explained. “This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers.”
The rep then added, “While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone’s safety. Dissemination of these images, given the ways in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all involved.”
While Harry and Meghan’s car chase did not result in an accident or crash, the incident comes more than two decades after his late mother, Princess Diana, was killed in a fatal car accident in August 1997 after being chased by photographers, who rode motorcycles and other vehicles. Diana, her partner at the time Dodi Fayed and her driver, Henri Paul, were all killed after the car struck a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.
The Spare author recently sat down with journalist Anderson Cooper, and he opened up about his mother’s tragic death in their interview. Harry was just 12 years old when Diana passed away.
During his January 8 interview on 60 Minutes, the London native recalled asking to see the photos from the police report to come to terms with his mother’s untimely death.
“The pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window, and the reflection on the window was them,” he noted, adding that he did not look at the more graphic images from the tragedy. “All I saw was the back of my mum’s head — slumped on the back seat.”
Harry elaborated that he had trouble understanding that his mother was not alive, explaining that he “just refused to accept that she was gone” and had “huge amounts of hope” that the late princess had secretly lived.
The Archewell cofounder then revealed that he started to accept Diana’s death when he was 23 years old, as he took a trip to Paris and asked his driver to visit the same tunnel where the accident occurred. He also requested his driver to speed up to the same rate that Diana’s driver was going on the night of the crash.
“I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar killing almost everybody in that car,” Harry said. “I need to take this journey. I need to ride the same route.”
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