Did you know Prince Harry's mother died in a car accident when he was young?

Were you aware of that? It’s an obscure little corner of history that Prince Harry’s mother, a woman known as Princess Diana, died in a car accident in 1997, when he was 12. This would explain to any confused layman why everyone keeps bringing it up again and again and again whenever society’s collective treatment of the Duke of Sussex is at issue, or he faces any adversity. Which is always.

 

Here's a primer for those who are not scholars of esoteric ‘90s trivia. Princess Diana died in a car accident in Paris in 1997. Her car had been pursued by the paparazzi and crashed at a high speed into a pillar in a tunnel, killing the Princess of Wales and her partner. The driver of Diana’s car was very drunk and high, and nobody was wearing a seatbelt, but the public could not romanticize these accident factors as hysterically as they could romanticize “the paparazzi hounded her and killed her,” so the paparazzi angle is what we as a society decided to focus on. It’s much more emotionally satisfying to have a decades-long cri de coeur over “the goddess of the hunt becoming the hunted” than to get into the less glamorous details of a fatal DUI.

 

So you can see why everyone was freaked out at the paparazzi’s high-speed, French Connection–esque chase of Harry and Meghan in New York City a few weeks ago. I shudder picturing the hours the couple spent evading the horde of reporters who relentlessly pursued them at speedometer-pinning speeds through the wide-open Autobahns of Manhattan.

 

Nobody got killed or hurt, but they sure could have! This is what Harry’s team pointed out, and what I think whenever I pass a car accident: That could have been me if the situation had been completely different, and that’s functionally the same as me having been in that accident. And sure, the vicious car chase resulted in only some harrowing inconvenience for Harry and Meghan—they actually had to change cars and take a scenic route back to where they were staying—but when you put all this into context of his mother’s seldom-discussed fatal car accident, it makes sense. Aside from the incidental fact that nobody died, the two car chases are eerily similar. This is why the media must take every opportunity to remind us all how a woman none of us knew died in a car accident 26 years ago. The sun shall never set on “Candle in the Wind 1997.”

 

This is also why Prince Harry has no choice but to work out all his long-suppressed grief and issues in an unending series of documentaries, interviews, musicals, and public appearances, and why we all must bear constant witness to that, because something something paparazzi something Diana something something our collective responsibility at her death. There’s simply no way to do all this out of the public eye.

 

In conclusion, leave Harry and Meghan alone! All they want is to live their lives in peace while simultaneously running around waving frantically and saying “Look at me!” while also working out their issues in the healthiest way possible—by earning a nine-figure paycheck.