‘The Other Side of the Story’

Prince Harry discussed his new memoir, “Spare,” on “The Late Show” on Tuesday, with Stephen Colbert offering Harry a cocktail at the start.

“I hear you like tequila,” Colbert said, pouring each of them a glass.

Keeping a comfortable and friendly rapport, Prince Harry answered Colbert’s probing but respectful questions about his life and family.

“This feels a little bit like group therapy,” Harry said at one point with a laugh.

Colbert asked Harry about early leaks of the memoir that were published in the British tabloids. The prince cautioned people to be wary of the stories, stressing the importance of context.

“Context is everything, and unfortunately, due to those leaks, the British press, which are central to so much of my story in my 38 years up until this point, and after spending two years focused on context, what I am going to share, how I am going to share it and being able to piece it all together, they intentionally chose to strip away all the context and take out individual segments of my life, my story and every experience that I’ve had and turn it into a salacious headline.” — PRINCE HARRY

“This is the other side of the story. There’s a lot in here that perhaps makes people feel uncomfortable and scared.” — PRINCE HARRY

“Look, I’m not going to lie — the last few days have been hurtful and challenging and not being able to do anything about those leaks that you refer to. Perhaps — well, not perhaps, without doubt — the most dangerous lie that they have told is that I somehow boasted about the number of people that I killed in Afghanistan.” — PRINCE HARRY

“My words are not dangerous, but the spin of my words are very dangerous.” — PRINCE HARRY

Prince Harry also spoke about leaving the royal family and Britain with his wife, Meghan Markle, and his assumption that they would be left alone.

“That was a real eye-opener for me. I never thought that they would be away from it completely, but I did think that we would get some form of peace. But that is when I realized that actually our mere existence outside of that institutional control was more of a threat. And you know, there’s a similar thing that happened to my mom as well. And, look, they always knew that my wife was going to leave because of the way they were abusing her, but I think the most embarrassing thing was that I decided to leave with her.” — PRINCE HARRY

“I have never seen the level of abuse and harassment that I witnessed over my wife. Other members of the family, they have experienced different forms of that, but to see it happen the way it happened, I was naïve going into it and I didn’t realize that the British press would be so bigoted. But even if I had, I wouldn’t have accepted or understood that they could get away with it. But here we are, and I’ve created — or we have created — a fantastic life here in California.” — PRINCE HARRY

Colbert asked Harry what his mother, Princess Diana, would have thought about the current family dynamic, especially between Harry and his brother, Prince William.

“It is impossible to say where we would be now, where those relationships would be now, but there is no way that the distance between my brother and I would be the same.” — PRINCE HARRY

“I’ve really felt the presence of my mom, especially the last couple of years. I detail in the book my brother and I talking at her grave and how he felt as though she had been with him for a long period of time and helped set him up with life and that he felt she was moving over to me. And I have felt her more in the last two years than I have the last 30.” — PRINCE HARRY

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