Prince Harry and Meghan Markle set to make first visit to New York City since ‘near catastrophic’ car chase

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be making their first trip to New York City since their “near catastrophic” two-hour car chase involving paparazzi last May.

Prince Harry, 39, and Meghan Markle, 42, are set to visit Manhattan on Tuesday 10 October for their Archewell Foundation’s first in-person event to mark World Mental Health Day. The couple will host “The Archewell Foundation Parents’ Summit: Mental Wellness in a Digital Age” to provide a platform for parents navigating mental health challenges in the digital age, according to People.

The event will allow families to speak about building a safer online world for children and teens, and will “feature parents who have experienced tragic loss connected to their child’s social media,” the outlet reported. Attendees will also engage in conversations about creating positive change and uplifting “our collective mental well-being”.

Harry and Meghan will participate in the summit alongside Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, in a conversation moderated by Carson Daly about the importance of mental health awareness.

The summit comes nearly five months after Harry and Meghan were followed by paparazzi after attending an awards ceremony with the duchess’s mother, Doria Ragland, in New York City. Meghan had been in the city at the time to accept the Ms Foundation Women of Vision Award with Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown.

The incident involved half a dozen cars with blacked-out windows following the couple, as they drove to a private residence. However, they decided against returning there as they did not wish to compromise their host’s safety.

At the time, reports suggested the three sought refuge in two police stations after the event finished at 10pm, before finally returning to a friend’s home. According to The Telegraph, they left one police station in a taxi to try and throw the paparazzi off, but they were photographed leaving. Harry and Meghan then went to another police station before arriving at their final destination at 12.30am.

“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two [police] officers,” a spokesperson for the royal couple said. “While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone’s safety. Dissemination of these images, given the ways in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all involved.”

Chris Sanchez, a member of the Sussexes security team, told CNN that he “had never” come close to the chaos he experienced that night. “What we were dealing with was very chaotic. There were about a dozen vehicles: cars, scooters and bicycles,” Sanchez said. “The public [was] in jeopardy at several points. It could have been fatal. They were jumping curbs and red lights. At one point they blocked the limousine and started taking pictures until we were able to get out.”

However, both authorities and New York City officials have given different accounts of events that night. The New York Police Department, which assisted the couple’s private security, said the journey had been “challenging” but “there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries or arrests”.

New York City mayor Eric Adams said the photographers had been “reckless” but he found it “hard to believe” there could have been a high-speed chase for two hours, not least because of the notorious traffic. Meanwhile, paparazzi involved in an alleged car chase blamed the incident on the couple’s “reckless” driver.

The car chase incident unsurprisingly prompted many comparisons to Prince Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a high-speed chase in 1997 after trying to flee paparazzi through a tunnel in Paris. Following the event, Harry’s past comments about “history repeating itself” when it came to his relationship with Meghan resurfaced.

He first compared the media’s treatment of his mother to his wife during the couple’s bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021. “My biggest fear was history repeating itself,” he said during the sit-down interview, which aired on CBS.

In May that year, he again compared his mother being “chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t white” to his relationship with Meghan during the five-episode docuseries The Me You Can’t See, which was released on Apple TV+.

“History was repeating itself,” he said. “My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t white. And now look at what’s happened. You wanna talk about history repeating itself, they’re not gonna stop until [Meghan] dies.”

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped down from their roles as senior working royals in 2020 and relocated to Montecito, California, where they’re currently raising their two children: Prince Archie, four, and Princess Lilibet Diana, two.