Ghostwriter Says He and Prince Harry Had a 2AM Zoom Fight

As Prince Harry and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer collaborated on the former’s memoir over the course of two years, the two naturally grew close, texting constantly and addressing one another as “dude.” But it wasn’t always smooth sailing, as Moehringer wrote in a new essay for The New Yorker.

Last summer, Moehringer and the prince were squaring off over book edits in a late-night Zoom session, and came to a passage that detailed a brutal military exercise he’d undergone while training in England. Harry had been “captured by pretend terrorists” in order to assess his capacity to endure torture, Moehringer recounts, when one of his kidnappers hurled “a vile dig” at him about the late Princess Diana.

Harry wanted to end the scene with a witty retort he’d given, while Moehringer insisted that that would “dilute” the scene’s primary theme—that of the endless recurrence of the “central tragedy” of the Duke of Sussex’s life. The pair went back and forth over whether to include or cut the quip, and Moehringer could feel his temper flaring.

Read more at The Daily Beast.