Prince Harry accused of ‘bullying and harassment at scale’ by head of Sentebale charity he founded

The head of a charity co-founded by Prince Harry has accused the British royal of “bullying and harassment at scale”, after he quit the organisation earlier this week.

Dr Sophie Chandauka said Harry’s “unleashing of the Sussex machine” has broken the relationship between the prince and the 540 people who work for the Sentebale charity, the youth-focused organisation founded by the Duke of Sussex and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho in 2006.

“The only reason I’m here… is because at some point on Tuesday, Prince Harry authorised the release of a damaging piece of news to the outside world without informing me or my country directors, or my executive director,” Dr Chandauka said on Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips.

“And can you imagine what that attack has done for me, on me and the 540 individuals in the Sentebale organisations and their family?

“That is an example of harassment and bullying at scale.”

Harry and Seeiso resigned as patrons of Sentebale earlier this week in support of the charity’s trustees, who left the organisation following a dispute with Dr Chandauka.

In a statement, they said they left because the relationship between the trustees and Dr Chandauka “broke down beyond repair”.

But in Dr Chandauka’s sharp rebuke to the former patrons, she derided the “unleashing of the Sussex machine”, which she described as the “PR machine that supports Prince Harry’s efforts”, against the charity and its employees.

When contacted by The Independent, Prince Harry’s representatives declined to formally comment on Dr Chandauka’s claims. A source close to the former trustees of the Sentebale charity told Sky News that Dr Chandauka’s claims were “completely baseless”.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Dr Chandauka also criticised Harry for having a “toxic” brand, describing it as the “number one risk” the charity faced.

She accused the princes of wanting to “force a failure and then come to the rescue”, and added: “The team is resolved that Sentebele will live on, with or without you.”

Harry and Seeiso co-founded Sentebale in memory of their mothers. Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 and Seeiso’s mother, former queen of Lesotho, died in 2003.

Sentebale works in the southern African nations of Lesotho and Botswana and was started to help young people affected by Aids after Harry spent part of a gap year in 2004 working at an orphanage in Lesotho for children whose parents died of the disease.

Dr Chandauka, a Zimbabwe-born and London-trained lawyer who served on the charity’s board of trustees between 2008 and 2014, was appointed chair in 2023.

Over the past year, she said, her relationship with Sentebale’s trustees and patrons has deteriorated as she moved to shift decision-making within the charity towards its leaders in southern Africa.

The organisation’s form was “no longer appropriate in 2023 in a post-Black Lives Matter world”, she said, because funders were “asking for locally-led initiatives”.

The UK-based board began to feel “a loss of power and control and influence … oh my goodness, the Africans are taking over”, Dr Chandauka added.

In a statement earlier this week which appeared to be targeted at the patrons, Dr Chandauka said: “There are people in this world who behave as though they are above the law and mistreat people, and then play the victim card and use the very press they disdain to harm people who have the courage to challenge their conduct.

“Beneath all the victim narrative and fiction that has been syndicated to the press is the story of a woman who dared to blow the whistle about issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir – and the cover-up that ensued.”