Tina Brown recently appeared on Katie Couric’s YouTube show for some kind of “year in review” type conversation. I didn’t watch it, but you can see it here. I’d just as soon forget everything that happened in the garbage year of 2025. Obviously, Tina Brown is still obsessed with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and she writes about them regularly on her Fresh Hell Substack. Brown has been trying to convince everyone, including herself, that Meghan and Harry are doing poorly in California and what Harry needs most of all is to leave his wife and return to the UK for doormat duties. Well, Brown and Couric’s conversation eventually veered into discussing the Sussexes, and Brown revealed a never-before-heard anecdote about Jane Goodall. Goodall was friendly with the Sussexes and Goodall was one of the first people to meet Archie when he was a baby. Of course Brown asked Goodall (who passed away earlier this year) about Harry and Archie.
Prince Harry told primatologist Jane Goodall that his son Prince Archie was “my little African child” after he was born, according to the former magazine editor Tina Brown.
Brown told Katie Couric’s YouTube show she went for lunch with Goodall before the scientist’s death in October and the subject of Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal exit came up. Goodall was a friend of the couple and was already known to have visited them after Archie’s birth but Brown’s account of what was discussed had not been made public previously.
“Jane Goodall before she died, I had a lunch with her,” Brown told Couric, “and she said that she went to see… she was one of the only people outside the family that went to see Archie when he was born. And Harry said, ‘This is my little African child.’ It’s going to be my child who essentially… you know… wild child, essentially… they were going to have this time together living a life off the grid as it were. She said she was absolutely stunned when he chose the life that he did.”
A representative of the Duke of Sussex declined to comment. It is not possible to verify Brown’s account with Goodall because she has passed away.
Brown told the anecdote as part of a wider argument that the royals had long been aware of the possibility Harry might want to leave royal life, but had not expected him to pursue a celebrity lifestyle in America.
“I’m told that the Queen always thought that Harry would go off and want to be out of the royal family,” Brown said. “But they all thought that he would do something like… they all expected him to kind of go to Africa and become a person who focused on conservation of animals in Africa and live a kind of off-the-grid life, is what they all thought. Nobody expected him to go to Montecito and live the opposite of the off-the-grid life, which is the kind of celebrity life. And I don’t think that Harry thought he was going to do that either.”
Do we think that Harry told Jane Goodall that Archie is his “African” child? No. Do we think that Jane Goodall used those words in conversation with Tina Brown? Also no. I think Tina Brown is twisting something Jane Goodall probably said innocently, possibly about Harry wanting to bring his wife and child to Botswana or something along those lines. Brown’s “retelling” of a conversation which likely never happened is also really uncomfortable – the association with Africa and “wild child” and “off the grid.” The British press simply cannot stop being weird about Meghan’s race for two g–damn minutes, right?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Backgrid, Meghan’s IG and SussexRoyal IG.
