Clearing the air. While Prince Harry once denied media reports that he had been experimenting with cocaine, he has since admitted to trying the drug.
“Of course … I had been doing cocaine around this time,” the Duke of Sussex, 38, wrote in an excerpt from his Spare memoir, due for release on Tuesday, January 10. “At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I’d been offered a line, and I’d done a few more since.”
Harry was previously accused of using cocaine during his wild Las Vegas party in August 2012. Despite reports indicating that the duke had tried the drug, both Harry and the royal family declined to comment.
“It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal,” Harry wrote in Spare.
The BetterUp CIO — who married Meghan Markle in May 2018, with whom he shares two children — has previously been candid about using recreational drugs and alcohol to cope with the death of mother Princess Diana, who tragically died at age 36 in a 1997 Parisian car crash. (Harry was 12 at the time of her passing.)
“I was in the fight or flight mode. Panic attacks, severe anxiety. … 28 to probably 32 was a nightmare time in my life,” Harry previously revealed in a May 2021 episode of Apple TV+’s The Me You Can’t See, noting he would “freak out” whenever he saw a camera or went out in public.
He continued at the time: “I was willing to drink, was willing to take drugs, as well as trying to do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling. But I slowly became aware that … I wasn’t drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night. And I would find myself drinking, not because I was enjoying it, but because I was trying to mask something.”
In addition to opening up about his past struggles in Spare, the Invictus Games cofounder detailed his past romantic trysts before falling in love with the 41-year-old Suits alum. Harry even referred to losing his virginity as an “inglorious episode with an older woman.”
“She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me to grace,” the military veteran — who shares son Archie, 3, and daughter Lilibet, 18 months, with Meghan — remembered about his first sexual encounter in his debut memoir. “Among the many things about it that were wrong. It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.”
Harry declined to name the horse enthusiast whom he spent the night with in Spare.
If you or anyone you know is facing substance abuse issues, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 for free and confidential information 24/7.
Spare will be released on Tuesday, January 10.
