Omid Scobie writes about the Prince of Wales' alleged affair with Rose Hanbury.
An alleged affair between Prince William and a former bestie of wife Kate Middleton, is picking up steam once again after royal expert Omid Scobie brought up the subject in his new book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy's Fight for Survival.
But it's exactly that, alleged. And Scobie's not buying that anything ever actually went down between William and Rose Hanbury, though he can understand why the rumor spread like wildfire when it first surfaced.
"Unfortunately, if a rumor's left to kind of do its own thing it can run 20 laps around the world before you even think about what, how you want to kind of address it," the royal expert and author tells ET's Kevin Frazier in an exclusive interview. "They never addressed it, so those rumors will never go away even though there's no truth to suggest that they are true."
The mere mention of the rumor became a sensitive subject for the royal expert.
"I was very careful in the book to really focus on this, as the allegations against William, Kate's and their fallout with Rose Hanbury," he said. "For legal reasons there are so many things that one can't go into but I thought it was really important, even if a rumor is a rumor. And I really don't see proof that there is more to this than just a tittle-tattle, you know."
Allegations of an affair between the future King of England and Rose -- one of Kate's closest friends -- first surfaced in April 2019, after a U.K. tabloid first sparked the rumor. It was around that time during an outing when Kate was also seen seemingly giving William's PDA the cold shoulder, which only added fuel to the fire. Not helping matters, Rose attended King Charles' coronation earlier this year in May, though there were no photos of her with Kate, who married William in an extravagant wedding in April 2011.
But while Scobie says he sees no truth to the rumor, he concludes the palace addressed it indirectly -- by offering Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as sacrificial lambs amid their fallout with the palace.
"I thought it was really interesting to analyze how the palace dealt with that," the author says in reference to U.K. journalists digging around for any shred of evidence that might suggest the extramarital affair was true. "The worst case scenarios that they feared would happen, you know, just those rumors themselves were going to have enough impact, negatively, on William's reputation. We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis ... that's something that's incredibly damaging, I think, for William. It probably looks even worse, actually, that there was a kind of willingness to throw Harry under the bus simply to make these things disappear."
Endgame is available now in bookstores.
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