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Two white-supremacist podcasters said Prince Harry should be “judicially killed for treason” for marrying Meghan Markle and called their son, 3-year-old Archie, “an abomination that should be put down,” a British court has heard.
The court proceedings, reported by the British newspaper the Sun, show the shocking and extreme level of racist invective targeted at the couple.
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Prince Harry said earlier this year it was “not safe” for him or his family to visit the U.K. without dedicated police protection, and is suing the British government over modifications to his and his family’s security rules since they quit as working royal family members.
Meghan, 41, has previously called her experience of being abused online “almost unsurvivable,” and in 2020 she told a podcast entitled Teenager Therapy: “I’m told that in 2019, I was the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female.”
While much of the abuse the Sussex family has received has been anonymous, British prosecutors alleged that Christopher Gibbons, 38, and his fellow podcast host Tyrone Patten-Walsh, 34, openly made the threatening and abusive comments on their podcast, entitled Black Wolf Radio, claiming freedom of speech.
The pair, who deny encouraging acts of extreme right-wing terrorism, allegedly used a series of 23 podcasts to praise the 2019 New Zealand mass shooting that left 51 people dead at two mosques during Friday prayers. They also referred to the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomb attack, in which 22 people attending an Ariana Grande concert were killed, as “sluts.” Patten-Walsh allegedly said, “They start screaming and that’s the bit that really pleases me because I hate those people.”
Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC told Kingston Crown Court, “They thought that if they used the format of a radio show, as good as in plain sight, they could pass off their venture as the legitimate exercise of their freedom of speech. In fact what they were doing was using language designed to encourage others to commit acts of extreme right-wing terrorism against the sections of society that these defendants hated.”
Meghan and Harry alleged in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that racism within the royal family was part of what drove them to quit their jobs as working royals. Meghan said that her husband was questioned about the likely skin color of her then-unborn son when she was pregnant and that “concerns” were raised about the issue.
The couple also complained of racist abuse when they first revealed they were dating, with Harry writing a letter decrying “the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.”
One British writer, Rachel Johnson, sister of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, wrote in the Mail on Sunday when the relationship was first reported that if the couple had children, “the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.”
Johnson subsequently apologized for making the remark.
