Palace slams paparazzi for harassment of Prince George
The Royals are taking a stand against paparazzi again.
In a letter Friday, Jason Knauf, Kensington Palace's communications secretary, urged media organizations not to run unauthorized photos of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, arguing that paparazzi are using increasingly dangerous methods to get their shots. The letter listed a number of alarming tactics that paparazzi have used recently including: hiding in car trunks, hiding in sand dunes, and using other children to draw Prince George into view on playgrounds and more.
The letter says these tactics present a risk in a "heightened security environment," and that a line has been crossed.
"The worry is that it will not always be possible to quickly distinguish between someone taking photos and someone intending to do more immediate harm," Knauf said.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have always held tight control over photos of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, only releasing certain images for certain occasions — a policy that also has the effect of raising the value of paparazzi images, since there are few photos of the royal children to begin with.
The letter from Knauf appealed to organizations to simply stop buying the photos so there would be less incentive to take them. "Every parent would understand their deep unease at only learning they had been followed and watched days later when photographs emerged," it said.
The letter also noted that many consumers who read and look for photos of the royals don't realize where they come from, and they wanted to encourage a debate on child protection issues.
"The Duke and Duchess are determined to keep the issues around a small number of paparazzi photographers distinct and separate from the positive work of most newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, and web publishers around the world," the letter said.
It's not the first time Prince William and Duchess Kate have appealed to the paparazzi to lay off the royal children. Back in October, the couple threatened to take legal action against photographer Niraj Tanna, whom they accused of harassing and stalking their son and his nanny as they played in London's Battersea Park.
William is known to bitterly resent the paparazzi, whom he blames for relentless stalking of his mother, Princess Diana, before she died in 1997. He also took legal action when a French photographer snapped topless pictures of his wife from a public road while they were on a holiday at a cousin's villa in the south of France in 2012.
Will and his brother, Prince Harry, were protected from intrusive media coverage by a gentlemen's agreement between the palace and the British press until they turned 18, an agreement that largely held even among the boisterous British tabloids. (While Britain does not have an explicit First Amendment, it has a long and strong history of press freedom.) A similar agreement has been in place to cover the next generation of royal kids, which the Cambridges acknowledged in Friday's palace statement.
They "expressed their gratitude to British media organizations for their policy of not publishing unauthorized photos of their children," the statement said. "This stance, guided not just by their wishes as parents, but by the standards and codes of the industry as it relates to all children, is to be applauded. They are pleased also that almost all reputable publications throughout the Commonwealth – in particular Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – and in other major media markets like the United States have adopted a similar position."
But not all, at least not in America, where the First Amendment guarantees that the press has the right to publish such pictures no matter how much it annoys the royals. And the Internet is a whole other realm: Online celebrity sites, for example, have paid little attention to palace entreaties in the past.
Pop Sugar, for instance, recently published two sets of paparazzi photos that the Cambridges objected to, both involving Kate's mother Carole Middleton playing with grandson George last week at a beach, and last month at a petting zoo near her home outside London.
Pop Sugar did not return an email seeking comment on whether it will change its publishing policy regarding royal children.
Still, most major American celebrity publications have been and will continue to comply. Last year, People, at the behest of anti-paparazzi campaigner Kristen Bell, said it would not publish pictures of celebs' kids without their parents' permission.
"People has the same policy with the children of the royals as with children of celebrities; we don’t support paparazzi who target kids," added deputy editor Dan Wakeford on Friday.