The Duke of Sussex placed a small white pill on a journalist’s tongue during a dinner party in December 2011, it has emerged, as the full extent of his previously denied friendship with a Mail on Sunday reporter was laid bare in court documents. Charlotte Griffiths, then a 27-year-old trainee reporter at the Mail on Sunday, recounted how the Duke “decided to kickstart our relationship by subjecting me to a little test” at a shooting weekend on a 4,000-acre estate in Hampshire. “From his pocket, he removed a small white pill. Then he held it up to my face, popped it on to my tongue, and said with a smile: ‘Now I know I can trust you!’” She discreetly removed it and folded it into a napkin, describing it as “almost certainly paracetamol, rather than something more sinister. But I couldn’t be entirely sure.”
The anecdote emerged days after Prince Harry lost his £50m privacy claim against Associated Newspapers Limited, publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, in what Valentine Low, former royal correspondent for The Times from 2008 to 2023, described as “immensely damaging”. The Duke had told the High Court in January that he had only met Griffiths once at a party and “cut off contact” the next day as soon as he realised she was a journalist. But a stream of Facebook messages between the pair – disclosed to the court earlier this year as part of his privacy claim – suggested a far closer relationship, including jokes about him drinking her under the table and “movie snuggles”.
“Prince Harry lost £50m privacy claim; new claims emerge he put a white pill in a journalist's mouth at a 2011 dinner.”
Griffiths, now 42 and editor at large of the Mail on Sunday, wrote a tell-all of their “short and utterly surreal friendship” after Tuesday’s defeat. She described the Duke as “a compulsive practical joker” who also told her he took creatine for a “burst of energy” because he was subject to random drug tests while in the Army. The revelations raise fresh questions about the Duke’s credibility, just days after a legal blow that Low called a devastating setback for his campaign against the press.