Woke royal Harry, Duke of Sussex, has put his U.S. visa “at risk” by admitting to drug abuse both in his home country and California, according to an immigration expert.
Prince Harry, the fifth in line to the British throne now most famous as the simpering spouse of American actress Meghan Markle — properly Meghan, Duchess of Sussex as a result of the courtesy title granted to her by the late Queen whose life’s work was trashed in the couple’s recent Netflix series — has admitted to abusing illegal drugs from the age of 17 in his ghostwritten memoir Spare.
These admissions included tales of not just doing lines of cocaine at the elite Eton College boarding school and smoking cannabis both there and, as a much older and supposedly responsible adult, at the royal residence of Kensington Palace, but hallucinating on magic mushrooms at a party in California hosted by Courtney Cox in 2016.
“Beside the toilet was a round silver bin, the kind with a foot pedal to open the lid. I stared at the bin. It stared back. Then it became . . . a head. I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth. A huge open grin. I laughed, turned away, took a p***,” Harry recalled, in the classless fashion typical of the memoir.
“Now the loo [toilet] became a head too. The bowl was its gaping maw, the hinges of the seat were its piercing silver eyes. It said, ‘Aaah’,” he added.
The prince may not have just further damaged his reputation with the embarrassing revelations, however, with an immigration expert suggesting he may have also put his U.S. visa — and, by extension, his new celebrity lifestyle in Montecito, California — in jeopardy.
“He would have been asked [about drug abuse when applying for his visa],” said Professor Alberto Benítez, who heads George Washington University’s Immigration Clinic, in comments to The Telegraph.
“If he was truthful in his answers, he should have been denied,” the professor claimed.
If the prince was not truthful, he went on, “[o]ne of the repercussions, whatever visa he has, is that it would be revoked, or he’ll be subject to being revoked because he lied in the application process.”
According to The Sunday Times, American regulations stipulate that “current and/or past actions, such as drug or criminal activities . . . may make the applicant ineligible for a visa” — although the U.S. State Department told the British newspaper of record that “[a]ll visa applications are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.”
Moreover, another immigration lawyer consulted by The Telegraph, Chrissie Fernandez, said that while “if Prince Harry ever possessed any illicit substances, even if he was not arrested, he would have been required to disclose that,” it was “unlikely that his case would be reopened if immigration authorities were to hear that he previously, years ago, used drugs”.